Ask a practice where patients find them and they will talk about their website. Look at the numbers and a large share never reach the website at all. They see the Google listing, read the hours, look at the reviews, tap directions, and arrive.
That listing is often created once, verified, and never touched again.
Categories, primary and secondary
The primary category does more to determine what searches you appear for than any other single setting. A general hospital listed under the generic "Hospital" category competes with every hospital. The same hospital listed with a precise primary category and relevant secondary categories appears for the specific things it actually does.
Choose the most specific primary category that is genuinely accurate, then add secondaries for other real services. Do not add categories for services you do not offer.
Services and products
Most listings leave these blank. They are free text where you can enumerate what you treat, each with a short description. It is the closest thing a Google listing has to a services page, and it feeds directly into what you can be matched against.
Attributes
These are the checkboxes that answer practical questions: wheelchair accessible entrance, parking on site, appointment required, gender of clinicians available, languages spoken, accepted payment types. Patients filter on some of these. Leaving them blank means being filtered out.
Photographs, and keeping them current
Listings with real, recent photographs are engaged with more than those without. The useful set is small: the building from the road as a patient approaches it, the entrance, reception, a waiting area, and the equipment patients ask about. Photographs of the exterior matter more than practices expect, because a patient trying to find you is matching what they see to what they saw online.
The description
Short, factual, and written for a patient. What you do, who you serve, where you are. This field is not a ranking lever, but it is read by people deciding whether to tap through.
Questions and answers
Anyone can post a question on your listing, and anyone can answer it, including people who do not work for you. Unmonitored, this becomes a source of wrong information about your own practice. You can and should post the common questions yourself and answer them, which both helps patients and keeps the section from filling with guesswork.
Special hours
Public holidays, and any day you are closed or working reduced hours, can be set in advance. Almost no practice uses this, and it is the difference between a patient making a wasted journey and not.
The habit that matters
Set a recurring reminder to review the listing every few months: hours correct, photographs not years old, questions answered, reviews responded to, services still accurate. It takes fifteen minutes and it is the highest-value fifteen minutes available to a local practice online.