How should a cosmetic dermatology clinic fill in its Google Business Profile services?

Which fields on a skin clinic's profile are actually advertising?

Effectively all of them, which is the starting position rather than the conclusion.

Google's own framing is broad. It states that all content added to a Business Profile must abide by its prohibited and restricted content policies, and names reviews, photos, videos and posts among the formats covered. Add the fields a clinic fills in directly, the business name, the categories, the services list, the description, the attributes and the booking links, and there is very little on a profile that is not a published claim of some kind.

For a cosmetic dermatology clinic that matters more than for most businesses, because the profile sits inside the advertising rules rather than beside them. We set out why on Google Business Profile for dermatology clinics, including the Australian position that expressly brings directory listings within the definition of advertising.

What that page does not do, and what follows here, is go through the fields one at a time and say what each can safely carry.

Why does the Services field cause most of the trouble for a skin clinic?

Because it invites you to name the treatment, and for this specialty the treatment name is the problem.

Mechanically it is straightforward. Services can be grouped into categories and given descriptions and prices, and where the service a clinic wants is not on Google's list it can add a custom service. That last option is where cosmetic clinics end up, since the branded and generic treatment names they use day to day are rarely in a dropdown.

Google does police this, after a fashion. It says custom services that violate policy will be automatically rejected, and advises against including profanity, gibberish, personal information, prices or phone numbers in custom service names.

Read that list carefully, because of what is not on it. Google's automated check is enforcing Google's policies. It is not checking whether the service name you typed is a prescription-only medicine being advertised to the public, or a claim your regulator requires you to qualify. Those are two different filters and only one of them is looking for your problem. A custom service that sails through Google can still be an unlawful advertisement, and the acceptance is not evidence of anything.

What can a cosmetic service on the profile actually be called?

Something that describes what the patient comes for and what happens, rather than what is in the syringe.

The detailed position on naming prescription treatments, which differs markedly between the UK, New Zealand, Australia and Dubai, is set out in whether a clinic can advertise Botox to the public. It is not repeated here because the answer is genuinely market-specific and getting it from a summary is how clinics get into trouble.

What is worth stating at the profile level is the shape of the fix. A service entry built around the consultation, the assessment and the area treated carries no product name and describes something true. A service entry built around a brand name is a product advertisement in a field that is indexed, cached and screenshotted.

There is a second benefit that clinics underrate. Consultation-shaped service entries survive a change in what you stock, a change in the rules, and a change in which practitioner is prescribing. Product-shaped ones have to be rewritten every time any of those moves.

What should a cosmetic clinic put in the 750-character description?

The part of the profile most likely to be read in full by a human being, and the longest uninterrupted piece of advertising copy a clinic controls there.

750 characters is roughly a short paragraph. Spent on adjectives it does nothing. Spent on the things a cosmetic patient is actually deciding between, it does more than any other field on the profile.

The useful content is the same material that works everywhere else for this specialty: who performs the treatments and what they are registered as, whether an initial consultation is charged, what happens at it, and whether the clinic handles medical dermatology as well as cosmetic. Which of the two halves the profile is built around is a structural decision covered in whether a dermatology clinic should separate its cosmetic and medical pages.

Keep product names out of it for the same reason they stay out of the services list. A description is advertising in the plainest sense, and it is the field a regulator would read first.

What about photos on a cosmetic clinic profile?

Treated by Google as content subject to its policies, and treated by your regulator as advertising material with conditions attached.

Google names photos and videos among the formats its prohibited and restricted content policies cover, so there is a baseline filter. The stricter constraints come from elsewhere, and for before-and-after images in cosmetic work they are detailed enough that we gave them their own treatment in the pillar rather than summarising them here.

The practical guidance for a profile is narrower than for a website. Photographs of the premises, the treatment room, the equipment and the team are unambiguous, useful to somebody deciding whether to walk through the door, and carry none of the conditions that clinical result images do. They are also the photographs patients actually look for on a profile.

One thing to check that is easy to miss. Patients can add photographs to your profile, and those images sit under your business name whether or not you would have chosen them.

Who else can add content to your dermatology profile?

Enough people that the profile is only partly yours, which is the uncomfortable structural fact about this surface.

Reviews, questions and user-submitted photographs all attach to the listing. Anyone can ask a question on a profile and anyone can answer it, including people with no connection to the clinic and no idea what is lawful to say about a prescription treatment.

That creates a specific exposure for cosmetic dermatology. A member of the public answering a question about which product you use has published a product claim under your business name. Your own reply, on the other hand, is unambiguously your advertising, and should be written to the same standard as the website.

Monitor the question section the way you monitor reviews. Answer the useful questions yourself, promptly and in compliant language, because an unanswered question is an invitation for somebody else to answer it for you. How the review side of this works, and what the regulators require, is in the pillar and on the combo page rather than here.

What does a compliant cosmetic dermatology profile look like, field by field?

What should a cosmetic dermatology clinic check on its profile today?

Go field by field rather than glancing at the listing as a whole, because the problems hide in the fields nobody revisits after setup.

• Read every custom service you have added and ask whether the name is a product. Google accepting it is not the test.
• Check the description for product names and for claims you would not put on a website.
• Check the primary category completes the sentence this business is a, which we worked through for a neighbouring profession in which Google Business Profile category is correct for a dental practice.
• Open the questions section and read every answer, including ones you did not write.
• Review user-submitted photographs for anything that functions as a clinical result image.
• Confirm the practitioners named anywhere on the profile match the registers they appear on, which we covered in what Perplexity cites about a skin clinic.
• Set a recurring date to repeat this, since profiles accumulate content from other people between checks.