How You Can Encourage Reviews for your Dental Clinic
The idea of business reviews is by far one of the most understated, undervalued and overlooked marketing tools that every dentist should be using to their advantage.
With the help of reviews, you’ll have the ability to attract far more customers into your practice, which is only going to boost your annual profits and grow your clinic. In recent years over 62% of patients have looked up information about a health condition. In the event your patients are one of these searchers, you want them to see positive reviews and real life experiences.
This guide will help you to learn how you can encourage reviews of your dental practice to improve awareness of your dental practice.
The Importance of Dental Office Reviews
One of the most important benefits of dental practice reviews is they help to act as a third-party verification of the positive parts of your company. Sure, you can write a bunch of jargon on your website about how you’re the best, but you customers will understand that those words are coming from you. Whereas with reviews, and more importantly from third party review portals, customers that have used your services will write them independently and they are far more trusted. Approximately 84% of people trust online reviews as if they were personal recommendations.
Customer reviews are also important in terms of your Google ranking. When determining where websites are to be listed on SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages), Google looks for quality factors. The more reviews you have, the higher quality your website may be, and therefore the higher you’ll be ranked on Google. When it comes to local search, reviews help to make up at least 10% of your overall ranking. Google’s local business result shows the clinic’s reviews, and will rank a clinic with great reviews over one with none/poor reviews. Also, the more reviews you have the denser your traffic will be which will only solidify your spot on the top of Google’s result set.
Where Do My Business Reviews Appear?
When customers leave reviews about your practice they may show up in a variety of areas, these being the main three:
Social Media
With social media, our personal advice is that Dental Clinics should be focusing on Facebook if they intend to use social media, because customers have the opportunity to leave reviews about your products and/or services. Approximately 2.01 billion consumers use Facebook on a regular basis, so you can expect these reviews will help you to gain more traction with your target audience. Also, 44% of surveyed patients stated that social media affected what dentist they choose.
Google My Business
As an interesting part of using Google for marketing, Google My Business now allows companies to not only collect reviews from customers, but also answer frequently asked questions from customers as well. With this Google product, any time someone looks up your dental practice by name there will be a widget at the top of the search engine that shows your rating, reviews, address, phone number, photos of your dental office, and more. 54% of people visit the company’s website after reading testimonials and 44% of patients schedule an appointment with their dentist after reading their reviews, so having Google My Business is essential.
Potential patients will come across your dental practice on Google Local when they search for keywords such as, “Dentists in my area,” or “Dentists in the UK.” Google shows the top 3 Dental clinics in a map view at the top of the search engine page similar to how they would appear for Google My Business. The information they’ll have access to includes, your star rating (58% of consumers state that star ratings are important), reviews, contact information, etc, all the information from your Google My business.
What Online Sources Can I Use to Collect Dental Office Reviews?
When it comes to curating all of your reviews to either post on your website or to use for other marketing tasks, you’re going to need to know where you can collect them from.
TrustPilot: As a review website, TrustPilot essentially reviews health practitioners, online businesses, and more. Your patients can leave comments and ratings for any dentists and doctors they’ve visited in the past. An interesting feature of TrustPilot is your practice can get promoted for free, but if you want to acquire additional promotion through the site that’s a possibility as well.
WhatClinic: When patients are looking for clear and transparent information about healthcare practices in their area, they rely on WhatClinic. There are over 120,000 clinics listed on the site and 16 million people that use it every year, which makes it quite reputable. The more reviews your clinic has, the better, as 88% of surveyed consumers form opinions about a clinic when they can read over 10 reviews.
Google Business Reviews: Google Business reviews are curated with the help of customers that have visited your practice in the past. All they need to do is create a Google account, look up your practice, and leave a few words. Once submitted, the reviews will then be readable by others. Though this may include negative reviews as well, they’re just as important as good reviews. Did you know that 30% of consumers assume reviews about a business are fake if there aren’t any negative ones? Google Reviews also allows you to respond to reviews, thanking the positive or resolving a negative one.
Yelp: Yelp is a basic search engine for medical offices and businesses alike; it’s essentially a more in-depth White Pages. Yelp is the most popular review-dedicated website in the world. Potential patients can search for your dental practice, get information about it such as contact information and photos, but they can also read through customer reviews. On Yelp you will receive a star rating and a written review, similar to Google.
Where Should Reviews Be Placed on My Website?
I get asked this question a lot, it’s important to remember that your reviews should always be visible on your website as they are essential for building trust with patients. 74% of consumers suggest that positive reviews make them trust a business much more and 62% of patients use online reviews as one of the first steps to finding a new dentist. Think of it this way, if you’re looking into a new dental practice would you trust marketing materials on their website more than unbiased reviews from past patients? It can be a phenomenal idea to place customer reviews in an area that is always visible, throughout the written content on your pages, and to even have a dedicated landing page for reviews.
Getting focused reviews adds even more to your website, for example displaying the root canal related reviews on the root canal page. When the viewer sees this, they can see previous patients experience, and build a level of trust towards your dental clinic.
How to Get Customer Reviews
Below are some great ideas you can use to your advantage when gathering customer reviews for your professional use. About 7 out of 10 customers will be likely to leave a review if they’re asked!
Visible Signage in Your Office: Take a few moments to design a sign that politely asks clients to leave a written review if they’re satisfied with their treatments today. At the end of every week, collect all of the reviews, type them out, and post them to your website.
Patient Review Page on Your Website: About 63% of surveyed patients are more likely to make a purchase from a dentist if they have reviews. And there’s no better way to attract reviews than to open a review page on your site. You won’t have to worry about inputting the reviews yourself and they’ll be readily available for potential patients to look at.
Competitions and Giveaways: Everyone loves the idea of getting free things! Why not offer an entry into a giveaway or competition every time someone leaves a review? Your patients will be far more likely to take the time to review your practice if there’s something in it for them.
Opt for 30+ Second Video Reviews: To make sure you’re getting the highest quality reviews possible, make sure you opt for video reviews in comparison to written reviews. Videos give people a face they can trust and rely on, helping to build even more trust with your practice.
Client reviews are essential to the success of your dental practice. Knowing how to curate them, put them in the perfect places on your site, and using them to your advantage will significantly increase your brand awareness. Not to mention that visible reviews can create an average of an 18% boost in profits.
Need help setting up a review page on your website, or improving your online reputation, then contact us today!