Practo Profile for Doctors: What It Gets You, What It Costs, and When Your Own Website Wins

Search your own name. If you practise in an Indian city, there is a good chance the first result is not your website. It is your Practo profile — a page you did not write, on a domain you do not own, carrying a booking button that belongs to someone else.

That is not a scandal. It is how directories work, and it is why the honest question about Practo is not "should I be on it" but "what job is it doing, and what am I giving up to have it do that job".

01What the free profile actually gets you

A claimed Practo profile is a doctor page with your qualifications, registration details, clinic address and timings, consultation fee, photographs, and the reviews patients leave on the platform. Patients can request an appointment from it.

Two things make it worth claiming even if you never spend a rupee there.

The first is that the page will exist whether you claim it or not. Directories build profiles from public registration data, and an unclaimed profile is an unmanaged one — wrong timings, an old clinic address, a fee you stopped charging in 2021, and no way for you to respond to a review.

The second is that Practo's pages rank in Google. A patient searching "gastroenterologist in Indiranagar" frequently lands on a directory page before they land on any clinic site, and your entry on that page is competing with every other doctor on it. If the entry is thin, you lose that comparison before anyone reaches your website.

Claim it, correct it, and keep the details identical to the ones on your own site and your Google Business Profile. Inconsistent name, address and phone data across directories is one of the quiet reasons local rankings stall — the same problem we cover in local SEO for doctors.

02Where Practo's traffic actually comes from

This matters more than most doctors realise, because it determines what you are really buying.

Very few patients wake up and open Practo the way they open a food delivery app. Most arrive from Google, searching a specialty and a locality, and land on a Practo listing page. The platform's strength is that it has spent a decade building the kind of domain authority a single clinic site cannot build in a year.

So a paid placement on Practo is, functionally, a way of renting a position in Google's results that you cannot currently earn yourself. That is a legitimate thing to buy. It is a very different thing from building an asset.

The second source is the platform's own online consultation business, which is a separate audience with separate behaviour — people who want an answer tonight rather than an appointment next week. If you do not offer teleconsultation, that traffic is not yours to win, and you should not let a sales pitch price it into your quote.

03Write the profile for a patient who is comparing three doctors

The default profile is a form, and most doctors fill it in like a form. The patient is not reading a form. They are on a listing page with four other names on it, all with similar degrees, and they are looking for a reason to pick one.

Give them one. Not a superlative — those are both against the conduct code and, in a page full of them, invisible. Give them specifics: the sub-specialty you actually spend your week on, the conditions you see most, the languages you consult in, whether you run a separate follow-up slot, and what happens at a first visit.

Photographs do a disproportionate amount of work here, and most profiles use a passport photo against a grey wall. A picture of the actual consulting room and the actual reception tells a patient more about whether they want to sit in it than any line of the bio.

Then keep it current. A profile last edited three years ago quietly says something about the practice.

04The paid products, and the honest answer on fees

Practo sells several things to doctors beyond the free listing: a subscription that raises your placement within the platform's own search results and carries a badge, a practice management and records product, and visibility or advertising placements.

What it does not do is publish a price list for any of them. Fees are quoted by a salesperson, and they vary by city, specialty and how competitive the slot is. Anyone who tells you a single national number for "Practo fees" is guessing.

That means the diligence is on you. Before you sign anything, get four answers in writing:

1. 1What exactly is the placement — where does my listing appear, and against which searches?
2. 2What is the contract term, and what happens to my position on the day I stop paying?
3. 3Is there a lead volume commitment, and how is a "lead" defined? A profile view is not a lead.
4. 4Can I get the enquiry data — name, number, what they asked for — exported into my own CRM?

That last one is the important one, and it is where the rented-versus-owned distinction becomes concrete.

05The part nobody reads until they want to leave

Reviews on Practo stay on Practo. If you accumulate a few hundred patient stories over five years and then decide the spend is not working, none of that reputation moves with you. The same is true of your position: it resets when the subscription ends.

Your Google Business Profile behaves differently. The reviews are attached to a listing you control, the listing is free, and the ranking is earned rather than rented. That is why the sensible pattern is not "Practo or website" but "Practo funds the short term, the profile and the site build the long term" — and why the Google Business Profile guide is the first thing we point a new clinic at.

06What Indian advertising rules mean for a directory listing

A listing is not automatically an advertisement, but the line moves once you pay for placement or start writing promotional copy into it.

Registered medical practitioners in India are governed by the Medical Council of India's Code of Ethics Regulations, 2002, which is still the operative conduct code — the Medical Council of India itself was replaced by the National Medical Commission in 2020, and the NMC's 2023 professional conduct regulations were withdrawn and remain on hold. The 2002 code permits factual disclosure of a practitioner's name, qualifications, specialty, address and timings. It does not permit soliciting patients, self-laudatory claims, or advertising that implies superiority over other doctors.

In practice, that rules out a few things doctors routinely ask for: "best" and "number one" phrasing in a listing bio, guaranteed outcomes, and comparative claims. It does not rule out being listed, being findable, or paying a platform for visibility, which is why almost every senior consultant in the country has a profile.

If you want the full position on what you can and cannot write, we set it out in what Indian doctors are actually allowed to say online.

07When Practo is the right call

There are situations where the platform earns its money.

A new practice with no search history, no reviews and no domain age. You need patients this quarter, and organic visibility does not arrive on that timetable.

A specialty where directories dominate the results for your city — dentistry, dermatology, gynaecology and paediatrics in most metros. If the first screen is all directory pages, being absent from them means being absent.

A consultant building a second location in a city where nobody knows the name. Borrowed authority is genuinely useful when you have none of your own.

08When your own site wins

The platform is weakest exactly where the money is.

It cannot hold a procedure page. A patient deciding between a laparoscopic and an open repair, or comparing implant costs, needs several thousand words, a surgeon explaining the trade-offs, and a page that answers the cost question honestly. A directory profile has a bio field.

It cannot hold a cost page, and cost is the query that converts.

It cannot follow up. When a patient enquires through your own site, the number lands in your CRM and you can send a WhatsApp message three days later. When it lands in a platform inbox, your access to that patient is whatever the platform allows.

And it cannot compound. Every procedure page you publish keeps working after you stop paying for it.

09Make them work together

The practical arrangement, for a practice that wants both:

Keep the Practo profile accurate and fully filled out, whether or not you subscribe. Treat it as a controlled surface, not a campaign.

Make sure it never outranks you for your own name. If a search for "Dr [your name] [city]" returns a directory page above your site, your own doctor page is too thin. Give each consultant a real page — credentials, sub-specialty interests, a short video, the conditions they treat, and a booking path.

Ask every new patient where they heard about you, and record the answer in the same place you record the appointment. Platform-reported numbers count enquiries. Your register counts patients. Only one of those pays salaries.

Use a distinct phone number for the platform listing if the platform allows it. Without that, you are attributing revenue by memory.

10What to do first

1. 1Claim and correct the profile. Timings, fee, address, registration, photographs.
2. 2Match the details exactly to your Google Business Profile and your website footer.
3. 3Build one proper page per consultant on your own site, so you win your own name.
4. 4Ask for the four contract answers above before any paid upgrade.
5. 5Start recording the enquiry source at the front desk this week, not after the next renewal.

Most practices do this in the opposite order — they buy the placement first and find out what it was worth eighteen months later, by which time the renewal has already happened twice.

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If you want to see where your own name, your consultants' names and your main procedure terms currently rank against the directories in your city, get a free audit and we will send you the findings regardless of whether you work with us. If you would rather talk through whether a platform spend is earning its place in your budget, book a strategy call.