How good is the reputation of your practice? How do you compare to your nearby competitors? As a dentist, you can do everything right and still have a struggling practice. It can be difficult to recover from poor reputation management.
Let’s take a snapshot of where your dental practice stands right now. Whenever a dentist comes to me for help with their online reputation, I start by doing the same thing their potential patients will do — search you on Google.
Assessing Your Online Reputation – Where you are now?
Search for your practice by name (include the location) and see what comes up. Also do this using vital keywords such as “pediatric dentist Spokane” to get an idea of where your your online reputation currently sits.
As many as 81% of people will do a search like this before visiting a local business. That is especially true for service industries (like dentists). What will their initial impression be of your practice? Do you stand out?
It’s not always good to stand out
Potential patients will be looking for a variety of things when they are attempting to find out more about your practice:
- Online reviews; both the quantity and the rating
- Testimonials
- Relevant news mentions; both good and bad
- Social media activity
- Mentions on sites like RipOffReport.com
- Complaints with the BBB
Those are the questions your community will be asking about you. The questions you should be asking yourself are:
- Does my practice have a 5-star reputation?
- Am I sharing the spotlight with competitors?
- Is my practice well received on every major platform, i.e. Google, Facebook, Yelp, and HealthGrades?
How do I begin improving my online reputation?
Let’s assume you do in fact deserve a 5-star reputation, and you don’t have one yet because it hasn’t been the focus of your efforts. Research — and experience with hundreds of thousands of reviews — has taught me that people are far more likely to leave positive ratings than negative.
If you are dazzling your patients and still aren’t getting the reviews you expect, you might need to do one thing… Ask.
The standard operating procedure of your practice should include asking for ratings and feedback from your patients. It is important, however, that you do so in the right way.
Compensating patrons for their reviews is unethical, and it usually violates the terms of service for review sites such as Yelp. If they uncover a business rewarding customers for good reviews, they may not just hide the review but, also punish your site by flagging it.
You also don’t want to be sticking a laptop or a tablet in front of a patient as they are trying to walk out the door. Not only is that likely to make them uncomfortable (and feel coerced into leaving positive feedback), but most review sites can tell where a review was left, such as from your lobby.
So, how do you ask for reviews?
Nicely.
Seriously. It works!. “Hey Mrs. Jones, it would mean a lot to me if you could leave us some honest feedback online about your experience here.”
Now that wasn’t hard, was it?
Whatever the current status of your reputation, it’s not too late to radically improve how you’re seen online. ~ Brodie Tyler