Why Online Reviews and Reputation Management Are Important to Internet Dental Marketing

Consumers are obsessed with online reviews. Not only do they like to leave them, but they also love to read them when considering who they would like to invest their money into or see for their dental care needs. Actually, 69.9% of people surveyed by GatherUp report a positive online reputation is very or extremely important to them. Only 6% of consumers don’t trust customer reviews at all. “Getting positive patient reviews on Google and Yelp is the fastest way to get new patients into your dental practice.”

It’s safe to say that online reviews are important to any dentist. Getting more good patient reviews is at the front of any online dental marketing plan. When you have a lot of them and nearly all of them are positive, people will most likely turn to you for their dental needs.

Is it that simple, though? Not exactly.

Reputation management has a lot to do with building a position reputation online. And there is more to building a practice reputation than getting reviews.

What Is Reputation Management

Reputation management is the act of managing your reviews online. This means a few different things:

• Each review should be responded to quickly and positively. Even if the review is a bad one, the response to it should be positive. Encouraging the person to contact you to discuss a resolution is the best way to go. Always remember, the answer you give the negative review isn’t as much for the reviewer but for everyone who is reading it. Remain professional and people will see that you’re not as bad as the person wanted you to seem.
• Reputation management also means encouraging people to leave reviews. You should ask every patient to leave a review for you on Google, Yelp, or another website that you prefer. This will help you build your reputation online.
• Identifying and asking for negative reviews to be removed is also part of reputation management. Fraudulent or inaccurate reviews happen, sometimes. Someone may make a mistake and leave you a review instead of another dentist, or it may be a random review from someone who was just fooling around. Catching those and asking the platform to delete them is important to your reputation online. If you didn’t manage it, you wouldn’t catch these, which would negatively affect your dental practice online.

Why It’s Important

Consumers will believe other consumers before they believe you. This means you can promote your practice flawlessly, but if you don’t have a good online reputation with positive online reviews, you will not be as successful.

Work on encouraging people to leave reviews and pay attention to the ones that come in through Google My Business, Bing, Yelp and other review platforms. All of the work you do with these platforms will be worth it because not only does it increase your presence online, but it also shows locals that you’re a dentist that many people love to see for their dental needs.