Why Your Dental Practice's Online Reputation Matters and What Can Do to Improve It

Many businesses don’t regularly follow their online reputation. Even fewer do anything to proactively actively manage it. Most new patients hear about you from a personal recommendation or via a web search.  Having a bad online reputation is like having a billboard right outside your office that reads “Lousy care, and terrible customer service provided here”. As more and more patients get online to find their next dentist, online reputation management becomes increasingly important. Do you know what your patients see when they look up your practice? Are poor reviews costing you money? More importantly, what can you do about it?

Here are more blogs on how to managing your dental practice's online presence:

• 7 Key Strategies To Delivering a Patient-First Online Experience
• Create Brand Loyalty for Your Dental Practice with Video
• How To Create a First Impression Online That Leads to Patient Conversion ?

What can you do yourself:

In an excellent article on Forbes, Don Sorensen offers some sage tips to consider.

• Own your search results page. When you search yourself ideally you should own the top few spots for that search. Or even better, you should own the top 10 results. You should be the obvious choice when someone is looking for your dental specialty or your services in your location.
• Claim your Brand on all social media channels. Even if you don’t actively manage these multiple sites. You should have a presence with your practice's name on all the major social media sites. This can be as simple as offering a link to your company's Facebook page. Don’t allow someone else to own your name on social media. Register and represent your practice in the best way possible.
• Blog if possible. This is a great way to add real content to your site and also help your search engine results. If patients find it useful, this will also help with retention. That being said, telling someone to floss only goes so far. Try to add content your patients need. Maybe list new services your practice offers or list recent CE you’ve attended or certifications you have achieved. If you are considering a change in services or hours, this is a great way to get feedback and engage you patient base. Advertise your blog in your office and across your social media sites. Encourage patients to add comments if they like what they see.

If you decide you want to hire a company to do it for you, ask for past experience and results. Ideally the company can show you before and after examples to give you an idea of what to expect.

Who can help:

Some companies help promote positive reviews. tab32 cloud dental practice management software has tools to help with this. With tab32 you can automatically send out patient surveys to solicit feedback before it hits the social media sites. We also have websites which make it easy to populate your message across multiple sites such as Facebook, Google, Yelp or Twitter. With these tools it’s super easy to ensure you get a consistent brand message out to all your patients and help push your website to the top of the search results.

What to do if you have problem:

If nothing else you need to at least be aware of your reputation and you should have a plan to monitor this regularly. Setting up a google alert for your practice name or your provider names can help alert you should you start to be mentioned in any new social media sites. Find the negative feedback and proactively address any concerns through the communication medium on each website, just as you would handle a complaint over the phone or in a traditional letter. Address every complaint as soon as you can and then try to continue the discussion off the site. By resolving these issues via your website, blog, email, or phone, you can help make things right without publicly airing more complaints in the process. Lastly, make things right. An unhappy consumer who is made happy can be your best advocate. If you or your office fell short, admit it, apologize, then fix it! This process will help make your patients happy and will be a great process improvement tool to use going forward.

We hope you learned a lot about management your online reputation from these tips. Also, check out other tools tab32 has to offer. Click here to book a demo!