Why Are Reviews Important for SEO?
Many dentists today are worried about how their practice is perceived online, and rightfully so. Negative online reviews can harm your reputation, and your bottom line. Don’t let a few unhappy patients distort the positive online reputation you’ve worked so hard to achieve. Our proactive online review generation and reputation management service can help ensure your practice is perceived positively online.
Plus, Google’s search engine algorithm prioritizes websites with positive reviews across a variety of platforms, placing dental practice websites with more reviews higher in the search results.
- 90% of consumers read online reviews before visiting or contacting a dentist.
- 84% of consumers say they trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.
- 74% of consumers say that positive reviews make them trust a local dentist more.
Review management for dentists is extremely important and influential in how people perceive your dental practice. Our seamless dental practice review management, generation and monitoring process helps you increase revenue, improve rankings, and showcase your happy patients. To find out how we can help enhance your dental practice’s online visibility, reputation and growth, contact us today.
Pricing: Our SEO clients receive our review management for dentists services at no additional cost. If you would like help with review management, our standalone services start at only $99 per month.
GET OUR FREE DENTAL MARKETING GUIDEDo Reviews Really Make A Difference?
Reviews are an often underestimated and undervalued element of the marketing process. There is a common misconception that reviews are analogous to comments on social media posts of YouTube videos, but in fact, obtaining reviews from customers and featuring these reviews on your business’s website can be a boon to your dental practices’ ability to expand its client base. The more reviews that a website has, the more exposure it will have; Google’s search engine uses algorithms that prioritize websites with positive reviews across a variety of platforms, putting these websites higher among search results due to the sites’ greater reputations. People browsing the Web for local services will then be likelier to click on the link to your business’s website, generating further interest in your products and services and creating more revenue. From a handful of online reviews—most of them positive, of course—your business can vastly grow in prominence among Google search users, and this additional exposure will drive more customers to utilize your business’s services.
What Are First-Party Reviews?
Your dental practice can garner new online reviews through our cyclical process of review management for dentists. When customers learn of your services through a Google search, many of them will visit your place of business and transact. You can ask these customers to leave reviews about your business on your dental practices’ website, and you may make these requests in person, on receipts, through a mobile app, via text messages, or by e-mail. Once you have received these reviews, you can publish them on your website. Google and other search engines will pick up on these reviews and may display them among search results, thereby driving even more customers to your dental practice, and so on.
What Are Third-Party Reviews?
Though it is important for customers to provide reviews for publication on your dental practices’ website, there are benefits to gathering reviews from third-party websites such as Google itself, Facebook, Yelp, Foursquare, Yahoo!, and many others. To gain the trust of potential customers and clients, there are two rules to respect: you must have reviews present on multiple sources, and the average ratings must be consistent. It would look suspicious to a potential customer if only your dental practices’ website featured reviews, or if the average rating on your website were 4.8 out of five stars but hovering around 2.5 stars everywhere else. About 30% of people who search for businesses online assume that a business’s reviews are fake if there are none that are negative, and a whopping 95% believe that total absence of negative reviews means that there is censorship in play, so an uneven distribution of ratings can make or break a dental practices’ online reputation. To make sure that these reviews are balanced, Accelerate Dental Marketing uses a proprietary review generation algorithm to distribute the reviews to the websites where recent reviews are needed. Because four in nine customers place their trust in online reviews written within the past 30 days, the timeliness of reviews is especially critical.
When a customer receives a request for a review via text or e-mail, the customer will click on a link that will redirect to a review page. Once the review is submitted, the review will automatically be posted to whichever third-party website has the greatest need for a recent review. The website with the “greatest need” is usually the one that has not received a review as recently as other sites have. Alternatively, if you see that a third-party website has begun to feature a recent negative review of your business, you can contact Accelerate Dental Marketing and request that the next several positive reviews from customers be posted on that website. This does not eliminate the negative review or its effect on your dental practices’ star rating, but it does make the review less immediately visible. Because about 40% of potential customers will decide whether to do business with your dental practice after reading a mere three reviews, a negative review among the top three for your dental practice is clearly disadvantageous.
What Are The Benefits of Online Reviews?
Reviews on your own site, known as first-party reviews, can be published immediately or delayed pending further review. Of course, the inclusion of recent reviews on your dental practices’ website is important, but there is a benefit to quarantining negative reviews: you will have the opportunity to respond to the reviewers before the review goes live. No one likes to receive a negative review, but providing a thoughtful response to each of these reviews will both soften the negative perspective of the reviewers and build trust among future clients. In addition, in six months or fewer after beginning to respond to reviews, two-thirds of businesses achieve a half-star increase in ratings. A little bit of communication can clearly go a long way.
When enough reviews are published on your own website, your star rating can appear among Google search results.
Review management for dentists, whether you are gathering first-party or third-party reviews, are important most of all because they function as an inexpensive alternative to paid advertisements. Word of mouth is powerful, and because nine in ten consumers pay particular attention to online reviews when they make decisions about buying products or paying for services, enough good word about your business can allow your website to rocket to the top of Google search results, appearing almost neck-in-neck with advertisements. With a balanced distribution of reviews, both positive and negative, from real customers across a range of platforms, your business will begin to attract a wider audience and gain a firm foothold in your local marketplace. Contact us today to learn more about review management for dentists.
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