Get More Online Reviews for Your Dental Practice

Online reviews are a potent tool for any business marketing, and doubly so for dental practices. Dentistry is about client relationships, and client relationships are about trust and trustworthiness. Most new potential patients will find you via an online search, which will inevitably include your online reviews. Online reviews, in turn, project trustworthiness, reliability, and authority. As potential patients search for a dentist practice that suits their particular needs, they’ll be looking to the experiences of other, similar patients as guides. The mass consensus built by online reviews becomes a definitive authority of its own in the minds of many, and successful digital marketing must reflect this.

So how do you get more online reviews for your dental practice? While there are a number of factors in play while building a collection of positive reviews, there are a few reliable strategies for making the most of the online reviews for your dental practice.

Let’s start with an obvious, yet surprisingly underutilized approach: asking patients for reviews. Sometimes it can be that simple; just send a follow-up text or email, or simply ask for a review at the end of appointments. While not every patient will follow up with a review, enough will that you may be surprised at the difference. An extension of this strategy comes in asking specific patients for reviews by reaching out personally and asking. It helps to target long-standing patients, or patients for whom you’ve done work that really showcases your specialty and quality of care. As always, it’s about the personal touch, and just a little bit of attention can yield big results.

It should go without saying that if you want good reviews, you have to be easy to review. Make sure your patients can find your review pages quickly and easily, and in turn, they’ll be far more likely to review your practice.  This involves a few things: maintaining active and well-managed accounts on the appropriate review sites, making sure that your review site accounts are tastefully accessible via your website and social media, and carefully managing all aspects of your online review presence. It takes some work, but the effort and resources expended will pay you back in reviews and new patients.

As an extension of good review site management, make sure you approach reviews with transparency and honesty. This works on both ends–you should be honest in explaining to existing patients how reviews help your practice, and why their review, in particular, is important. On the other side of it, you should be honest and transparent in how you handle and respond to reviews both good and bad. Should you receive a less-than-stellar review, you should respond openly, honestly, professionally, and with a cool head. Patient reviews are just another form of patient relations and need to be managed as such.

All of that may seem daunting, which is why retaining professional help may be a wise step for your practice. Letting experienced professionals who understand the ins and outs of dental reviews, the ways to make the most of your review presence, and how to build your reviews into an overall approach to digital marketing may be the best use of your time and money. The science and business of dentistry are demanding enough, so letting someone else manage your marketing in all forms can reduce your workload and maximize your productivity. DentaMarketing’s team of professionals combines a state of industry approach with a personal touch in crafting the marketing solutions that help your practice thrive. Get in touch today, and we’ll take your digital presence–including your online reviews–to the next level.