Introduction
Online reputation management is a key area of focus if you want to drive business growth, improve the visibility of your practice, and also build trust and credibility. As a dentist, maintaining your online reputation is as important as providing exceptional patient care, as the former will help you generate more leads, acquire new patients, and improve ROI. What’s interesting to note is that online reputation is important not only for dentists but dental practices as well.
If you run a dental practice and wish to get a competitive edge over other practices and boost your online presence, you need to pay attention to your online reputation and work actively towards improving it. In this blog, we’ll throw light on:
- The importance of online reputation management for dentists and dental practices
- How to boost the online reputation of your practice
- How reputation management software can help you improve your reputation online
- How Emitrr’s advanced capabilities can help you reach your goals as a dentist or dental practitioner
Are you ready to take a plunge into the world of online reputation management for dentists? Let’s get straight into it!
Importance Of Online Reputation Management For Dentists
Online reviews are a great source of information for patients who are looking for a dentist near them as they help them understand:
- How you solve your patients’ issues
- How you treat your patients
- What’s the quality of experience you offer to the patients
Here are some key reasons why you should monitor and maintain your online reputation:
Build trust
Around 80% of patients read online reviews of dentists before making a choice. Through online reviews, patients assess the quality of services you offer and if they’re satisfied, they book an appointment with you. If they don’t find the reviews to be genuine or positive, they would pick some other dentist over you, who has better reviews. Having a positive online reputation is paramount as it helps you build trust with your patients. When your patients demonstrate their experience in the form of positive reviews, it helps potential patients develop a level of trust to visit you and avail dental services from you.
Increase new patient appointments
New people who want to book appointments with a provider or practice will mostly look for reviews before they make a decision. Let’s say a dentist has 10, 5 star reviews and another dentist has 100, 4 star reviews. Which dentist would you pick? The dentist with more reviews, right? That’s because more number of positive reviews will improve chances of better visibility online and will hence increase new patient appointments.
Build lasting relationships
You need online reputation management to be able to build lasting relationships with your patients. A positive online presence acts as an advocate for the kind of patient experience you offer. How you build lasting relationships is when you respond to patient reviews. Your response is crucial as it shows your patients that you value their feedback or criticism, which further boosts patient loyalty.
Importance Of Dentist Practice Reputation Management
Not only is it important for dentists to maintain their online reputation, but is equally important for dental practices as well. Here are some key reasons why online reputation management is crucial for your dental practice:
Boost revenue
Patients look for and trust practices that have a lot of reviews on relevant review platforms. The more reviews you have, the more likely you are to attract more patients. More patients would mean more appointments booked, and hence increased revenue.
Compete with larger practices
Improving your online presence is paramount if you wish to get a competitive edge over other dental practices in your vicinity. Since you can only cater to a particular area or certain locations, you need to ensure that patients in those areas visit your practice and not the larger practices. In order to direct the flow of patients to your practices, you need to offer exceptional dental care, and demonstrate how good you are by asking your patients to leave reviews for you. When potential patients read those reviews, they would want to visit you for a change. And you never know, they might turn into loyal patients!
Improve patient base
If you wast to increase your patient base from 100 to 500 to 1000 and more, you need to pay attention to your online presence. You need to be active with regards to maintaining your online reputation. From having reviews on all practice related review sites to constantly responding to both positive and negative reviews, you need to show that you’re a practice thay cares and strives to improve patient experience and satisfaction. This will help you build patient trust and further improve your patient base.
Build a positive brand image
Positive feedback from patients will boost your SERP rankings on Google. This means that when someone searches ‘Dental practice near me’ and if you match their location, then your practice’s website will definitely be one of the top search results. To maintain this momentum, you need to keep engaging your patients through reviews. This will help you build a prositive brand image.
How To Boost Online Reputation For Dentists?
Looking forward to some tips and tricks to improve your reputation as a dentist or your dental practice? Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered.
Automate review requests
If you want to effectively boost the online reputation of your practice or yourself, you need to ensure that you ask your patients for reviews. Whenever you treat a patient, make sure yo politely ask them to leave a review. You can also automate the process of sending review requests to patients on their preferred channels like email or text. For automating review requests, you can sign up with an online reputation management software.
Allow patients to leave feedback
In order to boost your online reputation, you must allow your patients to leave feedback for you. Any positive feedback will highlight your strengths, and any negative feedback will reflect upon the areas of improvement. Getting more feedback from patients will boost your online presence and will also make the patients feel heard and valued.
Offer multiple review sites for patients to leave their feedback
Merely getting patients reviews on Google isn’t enough. There are many more review sites these days that are highly sought after by patients. Make sure to cover all possible review channels to get patient feedback. These are some key channels you must ask your patients to leave reviews on:
Dentist-specific review sites
- WebMD
- Healthgrades
Dental practice specific review sites
- Yelp
Leverage the power of patient satisfaction surveys
Utilize patient satisfaction surveys to get unbiased feedback from your patients. HCAHPS is a great example here and your focus should be to improve your HCAHPS scores. A good score would mean improved reputation of your practice.
Ensure Patient Confidentiality while responding to reviews
Whenever you respond to patient reviews, make sure to not include any sensitive PHI in your responses. Keep your response personalized yet in compliance with HIPAA guidelines. Any violation of the same can lead to hefty fines for you.
Respond to reviews through tasks/tickets
If you have a large volume of incoming reviews on a daily basis, managing those reviews can be quite challenging. This means that you might skip responding to a few reviews. To avoid this, you can have reputation management software that encompasses capabilities like tasks and ticketing. You can assign reviews to certain team members or raise tickets to make sure that urgent reviews are tended to immediately. This can save you all the hassle of managing reviews manually.
How To Handle Online Reviews: Key Strategies To Follow
Now that you have some strategies up your sleeve to manage your online reputation, it is now time to understand how you can handle positive and negative reviews.
How to handle positive reviews
- Make sure to acknowledge the review. A simple response like “Hey {patient name}, thanks a lot for your feedback!” is enough. It is important because people not only look at reviews but also check whether businesses have responded to their reviews. So make sure you respond to all reviews.
- Express your gratitude to the patient because they’ve made the effort to write something nice about you or your services.
- Whenever you respond to reviews, keep HIPAA-compliance in mind and don’t include any personal information of the patient in the review.
- If some patient has shared a review that includes a staff member, then make sure to share it with them.
How to handle negative reviews
- Apologize to the patient for the inconvenience. Make sure to acknowledge the review and express that you regret they had an unsatisfactory experience.
- Don’t leave the review unattended, as it will only indicate that you don’t care about negative reviews. Be receptive to negative feedback as well.
- Offer the patient additional assistance and offer to resolve the issue offline. Once you resolve the issue, you can ask them to change their review.
- Do not be impatient or rude with the patient if they leave a negative review. Understand what part of their experience was unsatisfactory and offer a suitable solution.
Why Is Responding to Reviews Important For Google?
Review responses play a huge role in improving your online visibility as Google favours dentists and dental practices that interact with their patients and actively respond to reviews. A dentist who has 400 online reviews but hasn’t responded to even 50% of those reviews will have a lower ranking in SERPs as compared to a dentist with the same number of reviews but more review responses. If you have a lot of incoming reviews and can’t seem to deal with those, here is a solution for you:
AI Templates
You can set up and customize some AI-powered review response templates that will make the process of responding to reviews quite seamless. The moment you set this up, you will no longer have to worry about missing out on reviews left by your patients. All reviews will be attended to.
Online Reputation Management For Dentists: Common Pitfalls To Avoid
To ensure effective online reputation management for dentists, here are some key mistakes to avoid:
Overlooking Small Review Sites
Do not take smaller and less review sites lightly as many potential customers might be considering those review sites to look for dentist reviews. Make sure to have yourself listed on all relevant review sites and ask your patients to leave reviews on as many sites as possible. Overlooking smaller review sites might rip you off the opportunity of onboarding new patients that visit those sites for reviews.
Engaging in Arguments Online with Patients
If a patient leaves a negative review for you or your practice, never act rudely online. Any argument or negative step taken by you can stain your online reputation severely. Always make sure to resolve the issue patiently. Even if the patient is angry or frustrated, apologize to them for the inconvenience and do all you can to resolve the issue as soon as possible.
Ignoring the Power of Local SEO for Dental Practices
In order to set yourself apart from other dentists and to succeed online, you need local SEO. By implementing local SEO strategies, you can rank higher in SERPs and generate more foot traffic, which will further boost your sales and revenue.
Neglecting Updates on Medical Certifications or Achievements
Always make sure to add your medical credentials to your listing on review sites as those credentials essentially make you who you are. Also, keep updating your listing time and again if you gain any more certifications or achieve any awards. Such updates can help you differentiate yourself from your competitors and can get you more leads.
Underestimating the Importance of Personalized Responses
Responding to reviews is definitely a great practice to follow, but personalized responses have a great impact than generic responses.
Here is an example of a generic response:
‘Hey, thanks a lot for your review!’
Here’s an example of a personalized response:
‘Hey Jane, thanks a lot for leaving a review for us! We’re glad we could help you with your issue and would love to assist you further. Take care!’
If you look at both the responses, you’ll see a clear difference. Always make sure to personalize your responses. If you want to spend less time on the same, then you must invest in a reputation management platform that helps you send automated yet personalized responses.
How a Reputation Management System Can Help Boost Online Reputation for Dentists?
An online reputation management system is a great way for you streamline the process of collecting, responding, and managing reviews. With the help of such software, you can improve your online reputation across multiple platforms, resolve negative feedback, create brand awareness, manage crisis and improve doctor-patient relationships. Here’s what you can do with the help of an online reputation management to boost your reputation:
Automate the entire process of collecting and responding to reviews
With the help of an online reputation management system, you can automate the process of generating reviews and responding to reviews. For generating reviews, you can send automated SMS review requests to your patients. SMS has a high open and response rate, which makes it more likely for your patients to respond to reviews.
Integrate with PMS to send automated review requests to patients who check out
You can integrate your PMS with your online reputation management software and send automated review requests to patients who check out of your system. This will save you the hassle of looking for patients who are checking out manually and sending individual reviews.
Bring all reviews from different platforms
You do not need to switch between different review sites to manage reviews. You can bring all reviews under one single dashboard and respond monitor those reviews effectively.
Collect reviews smartly from the same patient on different platforms
If a patient has already left a review on Google and they avail a service from you again, you can still request them to leave a review for you. Instead of Google, you can direct them to a different review site like WebMD, Healthgrades, Yelp, Facebook, and more. This will help you increase the number of reviews across various review channels.
Monitor reviews effectively
You can use your reputation management software to track your reputation goals across various locations and channels. You can track detailed reputation metrics by filtering reviews by location or rating, and get a detailed breakdown of the reviews requested.
Use Review Request Templates
If you don’t want to write reviews from scratch, you choose from a variety of review request templates. Using SMS templates can help you save a lot of time and effort and add a professional touch to your messages.
How to Improve Online Reputation Using Emitrr?
Emitrr is a popular online reputation management platform that offers a range of capabilities to help you seamlessly generate reviews, respond to reviews, and monitor reviews. Here’s how you can do all of it:
Generate reviews through Emitrr
If you wish to generate reviews through Emitrr, you can do it in just a few simple steps.
All you need to do is login to your Emitrr dashboard and from there go to New Message. From there, you can either type a message from scratch, or can choose from a range of templates available.
Here’s what a review request would look like. You can add your contacts number or name and can even send the same review request to multiple people at once. Either you can send the review request immediately or can schedule it for later.
Respond to reviews through Emitrr
There are two ways you can respond to reviews via Emitrr:
Send individual replies
Simply go to Reputation > Reviews. There you’ll see all your reviews from across different channels.
In the above image, you can see the reply button. All you need to do is click on it and add your response. You can even edit or delete your response and share it on Facebook as well.
If you are too busy to respond to the review, you can simply create a task like this and ask someone from your team to respond to it.
Automate review responses
You can also choose to automate review responses by clicking on Settings > Reputation Management > Review Settings
Once you click on it, you’ll be presented with the option to set replies to reviews for different channels as shown in the above image. Click on save and voila!
Track reputation metrics through Emitrr
If you want to check detailed metrics such as number of reviews received in total and from different channels, you can do that easily.
Simply click on Reputation > Reviews
You’ll be presented with a total number of reviews, including reviews from individual channels.
You can filter the reviews by location, review source, and rating for a more detailed analysis.
This is how Emitrr can make the entire process of collecting and managing feedback an absolute breeze!
Why Emitrr Is The Best Reputation Management Software For Your Dental Practice?
Emitrr has emerged as one of the leaders in the realm of reputation management, catering to all healthcare as well as non-healthcare businesses alike, while ensuring to offer tailored solutions to each business owner.
Emitrr is the best reputation management software for dentists because it encompasses all the essential features you need to manage your online reputation, provides stellar support, and does all of it without burning a hole in your pocket! Here are some key reasons why you as a dentist or a dental practice owner should trust Emitrr for all your review and reputation management needs:
- Easy review generation: You can easily drive reviews for both the dentist and the dental practice. You can also use available review SMS templates to send requests instantly
- Integration with PMS: Emitrr integrates with 500+ PMS, and you can integrate the software to automate review requests as soon as patients check out of your PMS.
- SMS Automation: Emitrr allows you to send automated review requests via SMS, and even identify patients who have already left a review on one site, and divert them to another review site to build reviews.
- Unified Communication: With Emitrr, you can set up review alerts from different platforms and get reviews from across all channels under one dashboard.
- Streamlined process to respond to reviews: With Emitrr, you can set up an automated review response system and also respond to reviews individually.
- Easy review monitoring: Emitrr allows you to monitor reviews and filter them based on location, review source, and rating.
Case Study: Check out how a medical practice increased their reviews by 15X with Emitrr’s reviews and reputation management functionality
Mary Tilak and Associates, a primary care services facility operating in two locations found it quite difficult to attract more patients and generate more revenue. Their practice’s ratings were quite low and they had no metrics to track what they were doing right and where they were lacking. Since the practice was missing almost 40% of its daily calls, the patients left negative reviews, which led to low ratings. The star ratings for both locations were less than 3, and the overall reviews were below 20, and these metrics did not contribute towards building the online presence, thereby resulting in low patient acquisition.
To resolve the issue, the practice set up a few manual as well as automated review campaigns to generate reviews and within two months, they were able to grow their reviews by 15X, which also countered the negative reviews they had received in the past.
Check out the detailed story here.
Frequently Asked Questions
Online reputation management for dentists is the process of encouraging positive reviews, responding proactively to negative reviews, and actively monitoring reviews to manage a positive online presence.
Dentists need online reputation management to build stronger relationships with their patients, attract new patients, and establish themselves as trusted providers in the healthcare sphere.
If you want to get more reviews for your dental practice, make sure to ask patients for reviews as soon as they check out. You can send automated SMS review requests to them to ensure quicker responses.
While responding to online reviews, it is important to understand why the patient had a negative experience. First apologize to the patient, then try to take it offline and resolve the issue as soon as possible.
Yes, dental directory listings can help improve your online presence significantly and boost growth. Make sure you list yourself or your practice in popular dental directories so that people can spot you when they search ‘Dentist near me’.
Conclusion
Online reputation management for dentists is not a one time thing, but is an ongoing effort. It is important to maintain a positive image online and to drive patient engagement. Are you ready to take a step forward and boost your online reputation? Book a demo here and see how Emitrr can fit your use case!
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