Google Business Profile Advanced Strategy: Supercharge Your Google Maps Presence with User-Generated Content | Ep. 135

Most clinic owners think optimizing their Google Maps presence ends after setting up their Google Business Profile, adding hours, and uploading a few photos. But if you stop there, you’re missing one of the biggest ranking opportunities on Google Maps.

In this episode of The Clinic Marketing Podcast, you’ll learn advanced tactics to boost your visibility and credibility through user-generated content—reviews, photos, Q&A, and posts from your patients.

Discover how to:

• Turn your Google reviews into an ongoing growth engine
• Use the Q&A section to build trust and improve SEO
• Encourage authentic, high-quality patient photos that attract new visitors
• Leverage user-generated Google Posts to increase engagement and local visibility

You’ll also get a framework for building a sustainable system that keeps your profile active and your clinic at the top of local search results.

If you want to dominate Google Maps and stand out from competitors, this episode will show you exactly how to get your audience involved in the process.

Episode Webpage, blog, & show notes: https://propelyourcompany.com/google-maps-user-generated-content/

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Chapters

• 0:00 Why UGC Matters for Maps;
• 3:35 Who This Strategy Is For;
• 5:32 Build a Review Engine;
• 9:15 Smarter Replies With AI;
• 11:51 QR Codes and Follow-Ups;
• 13:41 Make Q&A a Growth Asset;

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 1:10

Most clinic owners think optimizing their Google Maps presence stops after claiming their Google Business Profile listing, adding a little bit of information, and then walking away. But the truth is, there is a major power play that I'm going to share with you today, and it's all about how to leverage user-generated content to increase your Google Maps ranking and make you stand out from your competition. In this episode of the Clinic Marketing Podcast, we'll dive into advanced tactics that go beyond the basics, helping you turn your patients into active contributors who boost your visibility, credibility, and engagement on Google Maps. You'll learn how to leverage reviews, photos, and questions from real patients, plus how to build a system that encourages ongoing participation without feeling forced or awkward. Well, hello and welcome to this episode. I'm your host, Darcy Sullivan from Propel Marketing and Design. Listen, if you are just getting started with your Google Maps listing, this episode might not be for you. You might want to check out some of our beginner episodes when it comes to Google Business Profile Listings, which are what control your Google Maps listing. Because today I am sharing with you some strategies that not many people are using, which is why you've tuned in, I hope, because you want to stand out from the crowd. So today we are talking all about how you can use user-generated content. That's content from your audience. Things like reviews, which everybody is familiar with, reviews, but what they're not familiar with are using user-generated photos, questions, and posts to boost engagement in your rankings in Google Maps. Google sees activity as credibility. The more engagement your profile has, the more signals Google gets that your business is active and trustworthy. User actions like posting photos, leaving reviews, asking questions are fresh content for Google. And it's not just about keywords, it's about authenticity and recency. Recency meaning it's new. You're active on there. It's not like the last engagement was five to eight months ago. These signals, when positioned correctly, help improve your map pack rankings, visibility, and AI-generated answers, click-through rates from maps to your website, and more. So let's talk about how to get into this and what actions you should take. So first up is reviews. And I don't think it's a surprise to anybody that Google reviews matter. That's a kind of a no-brainer, right? But we would like for you to turn your reviews into a continuous growth engine. So if you can, you want to make sure that you're not just asking for reviews, but you're guiding people for reviews and the way that they're leaving their reviews. So you're asking for details like what services did you come in for? How did it help you? Example, instead of leave us a review, you might suggest tell us what changed after your first adjustment or session. See how different that is? Instead of just sending out that generic message, did you have a good experience? If so, please leave a review. Instead, again, try saying something like, tell us what changed for you after your first appointment. Next, you want to make sure that you respond to every review, good or bad. Working keywords naturally. Show future patients that your clinic cares. And I've given this example before, but this is a great use of AI. If you're gonna sit there and say that you have five core services, and you go to ChatGPT or Grok or whatever your AI choice is, and you say, hey AI, provide me 20 responses for people who leave reviews about service A or service B or service C. And then you've got this like massive document, this Google Doc that's just sitting there that any of your team members can copy and paste from so that you're leaving responses that are more detailed and look like your team cares more than just saying, hey, thanks. Thanks for the response. Cheers to your good health. It also helps work in some keywords more naturally, which is always good. You can also feature reviews in posts or social media. You can definitely go to Canva and turn those quotes into graphics. You can create a review follow-up system. A lot of people do this, a lot of clinics do this. If you haven't done this, you might want to consider doing this. Having an automated text or email after their appointment, again, we suggest that the wording being a little bit more directed towards their experience versus just leave us a review. Include a direct link to your Google review. You can use signage for the QR codes. Um, there was an episode which we'll link in the show notes where we talked about making sure that you're not gatekeeping, that you're not just sending people that say that they would leave you a positive review to your Google Business listing. Instead, you're guiding everyone there. So that's one, right? That's reviews. That's that's a little bit more basic, but let's dive into some other stuff. So one of my favorite, I don't want to say favorite, one of the most overlooked sections in the Google Business profile right now is the QA section. And with the QA section, you as a business, when you set it up, you can ask a question and you can answer a question. But this is a great place to encourage patients to ask real questions. Questions like, do you offer same-day appointments? Do you accept my insurance? What's the difference between chiropractic and massage therapy? All of these are gonna vary based on what your clinic offers. But when somebody asks a question, you want to make sure that you quickly review it and respond to it. Google indexes your answers so they can show up in search results. And again, you can go ahead and have those seed kickoff questions that you're asking as the business and answering, but really we're focusing in this episode on talking about user-generated, those the content that comes from your users. So another example of this is user-generated photos. User-generated photos do not go against the limited number of photos that you're allowed to have associated with your Google Business Profile listing. Now, keep in mind, all of this is exactly relevant at the time I'm recording it. Goodness knows Google could make some changes tomorrow, but here are some things to consider. So on the negative side of this, I'm gonna give the example of we were talking to a chiropractor and they had somebody come in and they were working on their overall office. The person redid their floors. The company that redid the floors took tons of pictures and posted it, tagging them, which means that that chiropractic company, those photos showed up directly when you Googled that company. Well, pros and cons. One in this example, it was a con. And you know why? Not that the service was a con, but the situation was negative because of the fact that the photos that the flooring company had taken were horrible of the overall clinic because there were water bottles sitting out, there was dust places. So the the chiropractic clinic contacted them and said, listen, I really appreciate, we really appreciate all the work you did. We're happy to leave a review on your listing, but please take down this photo because it's the first thing that people see when they Google our business, and it's not showcasing how beautiful and improved the full redesign of the interior looks. It's just showcasing the floors with some water bottles and other stuff sitting out. But you can encourage authentic photos to be posted. Maybe you are participating in clinic events. This is a great time to encourage people to post pictures or post before or after shots with their permission, again, depending on what type of clinic you run and asking people to tag your clinic as they upload images. Also, I love this idea, and this is to make it natural. And that is to do a photo wall, like have a branded area set up in your office or when you are participating with community events where it makes it easy for people to take photos that highlight your clinic, whether it's your clinic's logos being highlighted in it or what have not. And it makes them easy for them to post and tag your business, not just on your Google Business profile, but all social media posts. And mention one reason we love this is that users' photos build emotional trust because people trust what they see from other real people posting. So here's another one. This is one that people just didn't know that you can do. But you can actually have somebody outside your organization post a Google Post. Right now, when I'm including this, that can happen. So within Google Business Profile, you have the option to do Google Post. And we have a really great um episode where we dive into the right way to use Google Posts and some strategies behind it. But one that nobody is really using is leveraging the fact that users right now can create posts. So they can share spotlights of what's working for them. They can answer real questions, they can do anything. Now, again, you're kind of giving over control, which we don't all love, but these are advanced strategies, and these are strategies that other clinics aren't using. So I just want to throw them out there to you. So, what do you do with all this? Well, you can build a sustainable user-generated content system. You can create a rhythm. You don't have to make it random. Weekly, respond to the QA's that people have posted. Monthly, maybe make sure that there's a highlighted story or photo. Quarterly, maybe run fun engagement campaigns. You can assign this role to someone on your team, maybe a front desk or an assistant. And then remember to track your metrics. New reviews per month, new photos added, QA activity, map views versus profile actions. So let's recap. Again, these are not your basic strategies for your Google Business Profile. So if you want Google Business Profile basic strategies, please go listen to one of those episodes. We've got those for you. There's also other advanced Google Business Profile strategies that you can find on this podcast. But this one is all about user-generated content. So let's recap. The reviews, those lead to credibility. QA, those lead to trust in SEO. Photos, those lead to authentic. And post, those lead to connection and engagement. If you want to see real growth with your Google Maps listing, you can't just set it and forget it. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Be sure to check out the episode webpage slash blog post associated with this, where you will find tons of other amazing resources to help you improve your Google Business Profile listing.