How do you optimise a Practo profile as a doctor?

Most posts on optimising a Practo profile repeat the same three lines: add a photo, keep your timings updated, ask for feedback. Practo's own help pages say more than that, in specific, checkable detail, right down to a minimum photo resolution and a rule about overlapping clinic hours. Here is what they actually say, read directly off help.practo.com, with the two things generic advice usually gets wrong or skips entirely.

What does Practo actually check before a profile goes live?

A Practo profile is not published the moment you fill a form. Practo runs a verification step first, and understanding that order explains why some fields are strict (they get checked against an outside record) and others are just descriptive.

1. 1

   Step 1: Sign up with your name, email, mobile and establishment name

   An OTP confirms the mobile number before anything else is asked.
2. 2

   Step 2: Submit ID and degree proof

   A government photo ID (passport, Aadhaar, PAN or similar) plus your medical degree, institute and year.
3. 3

   Step 3: Submit medical registration proof

   A scanned copy or clear photo of your medical registration certificate, checked against state and national council records.
4. 4

   Step 4: Practo matches your degree to a specialisation

   Against what Practo calls the Practo Bluebook, a set of rules for which specialisations a given degree can claim.
5. 5

   Step 5: Allow 48 hours

   Practo states it needs 48 hours to verify the details before the clinic profile goes live.

This is also why a psychologist, dietitian or therapist profile looks slightly different at signup: Practo's guidelines exempt certain specialisations from the medical registration requirement, since those professions are not registered the same way a medical degree is. Everyone still goes through ID and qualification proof.

What is the minimum information Practo asks for?

Practo publishes its own list of what it calls the starting point for a profile, before anything is added to strengthen it further.

• Your name, qualification and specialisation
• A phone number
• Clinic name
• Clinic location, exact address and a landmark
• Visit timings, Monday through Sunday
• A clinic contact number for appointment booking
• A professional photograph

Practo's own page is explicit that this is a floor, not a ceiling: it calls this list "a great starting point" and says any addition beyond it makes the profile stronger. That framing matters, because it means a profile that stops at these seven fields is technically live but is missing everything Practo itself flags as worth adding on top.

What are Practo's rules for consultation fee and timings?

Fee and timings are two of the fields Practo checks most literally, and both follow a fixed format rather than free text.

The overlap rule is easy to miss for a doctor who splits the week across two clinics, for example a morning slot at one and an evening slot at another, but lists both as starting at an overlapping hour by mistake when the schedule changes. Since Practo checks this, an overlap is worth catching before it becomes a wrong-hours complaint from a patient who shows up expecting you at the clinic your profile still lists for that slot.

What are Practo's photo and qualification rules?

This is the most specific part of Practo's guidelines, and the part most "add a professional photo" advice skips entirely.

The reason for the photo rule is stated on Practo's own help page: the photo is shown across a doctor's profile so a patient can confirm they are seeing the same doctor they booked, which is why a group shot or an award photo does not serve that purpose and gets rejected rather than published with a warning. The same page also states that a proper photo can influence how many patients go on to enquire, framing the photo as something worth getting right the first time rather than a formality to clear before the profile goes live.

What are Practo's feedback guidelines?

Practo publishes two separate sets of feedback rules, one for the healthcare provider and one for the patient writing it, and both are stricter than most doctors expect.

On the patient side, Practo's guidelines ask for a firsthand, descriptive account of at least 100 words, submitted within a year of the appointment, with no promotional links, no comparisons to other doctors, and no feedback from someone who never actually had the appointment. Every new provider also gets a 24-hour private preview of a feedback entry, to review, reply to, or contest, before it goes live publicly.

The practical read for a clinic: you can enable feedback and ask satisfied patients in general to leave it, and you can and should reply to what gets published. What crosses the line is anything that selects who gets asked, pays for the result, or writes the words yourself.

Can you link your own website from a Practo profile?

A lot of Practo-optimisation advice tells doctors to "add your website link on your Practo profile" as a standard step. Practo's own published pages for creating and editing a profile do not describe a dedicated website field, so this is not something we can confirm as an existing feature, and stating it as fact would be exactly the kind of unverified claim this piece is trying to avoid.

What is fully within your control, regardless of what Practo's form does or doesn't include, is the other direction: linking from your own website to your Practo profile, and keeping your clinic's name, address and phone number identical across both. That consistency is what search engines and AI tools actually read when they decide whether your Practo listing and your website are describing the same clinic, which matters more for being found than a link that may not exist on Practo's side.

This is also the safer way to write about it. A doctor telling patients "see our Practo profile" from their own website is stating something true and checkable. A doctor claiming a website link lives inside their Practo profile, when Practo's own guidelines never describe such a field, is stating something Practo itself has not confirmed.

A completeness checklist before you call the profile done

Combining Practo's minimum fields with the rules above gives a fuller list than "fill in the form and submit."

None of this guarantees a ranking outcome. Practo does not publish how it orders profiles in search, and its own help page states organic results are unbiased with no commercial relationship behind regular listings. What Practo does confirm is verification and accurate fee and timing details; treat the checklist above as getting those right, not as a ranking formula. For how a Practo profile fits next to a Google Business Profile and a WhatsApp number, see Practo, Google profile or WhatsApp AI: which does what and a Practo profile against your own website. For the free Google listing most patients search first, start with our Google Business Profile guide for doctors.