When I was a kid, dentists relied heavily on word of mouth to promote their practice. My own dentist was someone introduced to my parents by a friend from our church.
In the digital age, the referral process is a lot different. Potential patients are going to search for you online and read your reviews to make their decision. What will they find?
How does it feel knowing that 88% of people say online reviews affect their decision making process? How you feel might be a result of the current state of your online reputation.
Reviews actually go a step further than that. They not only affect the decisions of your prospects, but they also help determine whether or not those patients will come to your practice to begin with.
Online reviews can strongly impact local search engine results.
Search Engines and Reviews
Various search engines, such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo, will analyze many different factors of a website to determine which pages are the most relevant and reliable. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of improving your site so services such as Google will rank it higher than your competitors’ sites.
Under the hood, Google cares about things like site content, incoming and outgoing links, citations, and your location. Another element that can make a big impact is your reputation.
How heavily are reviews weighed in search engine algorithms? We can’t know for sure (it’s their little secret), but industry experts are pretty sure they fall into the top five most important factors, after things like keywords, location information, and linking domains.
While we can’t know exactly how much reviews matter to search engines, it’s easy to tell that they do matter…a lot!
In my own study, which was conducted in over 100 cities and analyzed thousands of search results, I was able to put some solid numbers behind that hypothesis. When we compare the first three local search results to the three that follow them, we find some interesting information:
Clearly, there can be no doubt that reviews are an important factor in how search engines like Google rank your site. The research shows that reviews matter even more for dentists. For every one review in the second three pack, dentists in the top three of search rankings had 5.8 reviews.
The importance of reviews is only increasing over time. Earlier this month Google changed the way searchers will see your practice. In addition to their own ratings and reviews, they will also see reviews from critics and third party sites (such as Yelp or Facebook) when they Google your practice.
Factors that determine your overall review quality
Search engines are smart enough to evaluate a plethora of review-related considerations in their algorithms. Below are the most important considerations to Google, or the factors that will most affect your ranking in local search results.
- Number of reviews
The more reviews you have the better. Google won’t even display the rating of a practice until they have at least five reviews, and consumers don’t put a lot of weight into an overall rating until it has at least ten reviews. As we’ve discussed, a high number of reviews (relative to your competition) is strongly correlated with high rankings.
- Overall Rating
Just as the users are concerned with the overall rating of a dental practice, the overall star rating is important to search engines. A couple of less-than-stellar reviews usually won’t hurt you, so long as they are buried in positive feedback.
- Rate of Reviews
Search engines and review sites are getting a lot better at detecting hanky panky, such as fake reviews or those obtained with less ethical means. When detected, those reviews might be buried and the site even punished (by being moved down in search results) for attempting to cheat.
One indication that something might be up is a sudden influx of reviews. If a business went from two reviews on Google over three years to picking up 30 in the course of a month, this sets the alarm bells ringing. You want a steady stream of reviews.
- Authority of reviewers
Sites like Google and Yelp factor in who wrote the reviews. If a review was written by a user that has written dozens of reviews, it is given more weight than a review written by someone who has written only one.
- Third party reviews
While Google holds reviews on their platform in higher esteem, there is no question that they factor in the reviews on third party platforms as well. They care not only about the quantity and quality of reviews on other sites, but also consider the authority of a site. HealthGrades reviews will be given more weight than Rate a Dentist, for example.
Reviews Change the Way the World Sees You
Online reviews not only affect the decision-making process of prospective patients, they also help determine whether your practice will be seen (and considered) to begin with. A perfectly good dentist can be quickly doomed to the second page of search results by not managing their online reputation.
If you’re already doing the right things for your patients, then all you need is a successful game plan to generate more reviews as part of your overall reputation management and SEO strategy.
~Brodie Tyler
Brodie Tyler is the founder of ReviewJump, as well as an experienced speaker and a published author. When he’s not working, he’s probably hanging out with his wife and four kids.
If you have questions about how to improve your online reputation, you can contact Brodie and his team of reputation experts, here, or call them at (800) 613-2335.