Your Practice's Online Reputation
The days when families relied solely on recommendations from friends or neighbors to choose a dentist are long gone. While word of mouth certainly still plays a major role in growing your dental business, online reviews and reputation are playing an ever-larger part in getting new patients to come through your doors and accept treatment with confidence.
The simple reality is that the importance of managing a digital reputation can no longer be ignored. Online reviews can very easily determine whether or not a new patient decides to schedule an appointment, even if they’ve been referred by a friend. In many cases, a dental business without any online reviews will be passed over in favor of the “Alpha” practice that has already built a solid online reputation.
If you’re no dental internet marketing expert, this may seem like a difficult hurdle to overcome. But it doesn’t have to be -- especially when you have OnwardDental on your side. Building a solid online reputation should be a key part of your dental practice’s growth strategy.
How Does OnwardDental Help Build Your Online Reputation?
You’ve already invested in dental SEO services and other digital marketing techniques to help get potential patients started on their buyer’s journey and drive them to call you or visit your website. But getting your dental office to appear near the top of Google search results is only the first step. Patients expect to find reviews -- and they want to use them to find an office with a great reputation.
OnwardDental allows you to take control of your online reputation by implementing a system -- with training for your team -- that helps generate Google and Yelp reviews for your dental business. Our platform is also designed to help you get dynamically marked up testimonials that can be used on your website, creating social proof for when potential patients visit you online.
In addition to helping you get more reviews in the first place, our system takes active steps to help you maintain a positive online reputation by monitoring reviews across a wide variety of platforms. There will always be negative reviews -- but our dental marketing coaching will help you limit their impact by soliciting more positive reviews and responding in a polite way to negative feedback so it doesn’t jeopardize your business.
How Will This Help Grow Your Dental Business?
Online reviews play a major role as patients explore their possible care solutions and settle on a decision. More often than not, dental practices with limited or poor online reviews are quickly removed from the list of possibilities. While a dental business that doesn’t have any reviews won’t necessarily be eliminated during this process, customers want to have extra confidence in their decision both to visit your practice and to accept treatment, and as such, they will be far more likely to select a practice that has several glowing reviews.
Reviews on your Google profile do much more than place stars next to your results listing -- they can also lead to a dramatic boost in your SEO rankings. This is especially prevalent in searches for local businesses, where customer reviews rank as one of the top five factors in determining SEO rankings. By consistently getting quality reviews on Google and other sites, you can improve your ranking and get more clicks to visit your website.
By taking steps to ensure that you have a solid online reputation, our dental coaching will ensure that your digital platform is helping -- and not hurting -- your efforts to grow your dental practice. With a better ROI from your dental internet marketing and an increased patient acquisition rate, you’ll quickly see the value of improving your online reputation.
It doesn’t stop there. If you’re looking to transition your practice or hire a new dental associate, building a great online reputation for your practice will add tremendous value. A great reputation could make all the difference in whether or not you are able to bring in top talent to help your practice grow even more.
