Dental professionals must own a positive online reputation to attract new patients and retain the existing ones. Online reputation management for dentists is the most effective strategy for practitioners to showcase their positive image to their potential patients and create a sense of trust in them. While a handful of positive patient reviews can actually convey the reliability of a dental practice, dental online reputation management (ORM) is more than just review monitoring.
Imagine that a prospective patient searches online for a dentist in your service area and your dental practice shows up in the search results with a list of reviews. In this situation, your online reputation either makes or breaks your opportunity to convert the prospect into a paying patient. Positive reviews can show your practice as a reputable dental care business while negative reviews can lead to you losing a significant number of patients.
Patients run an online search before they schedule a medical appointment. Thus, as a dental care provider, you must manage how the online audience perceives your practice. You can strengthen your practice’s online image through effective strategies and build your patients’ trust. It will help you create a lasting first impression on potential patients. Your online reputation significantly influences whether a patient will visit your dental practice or not.
Here we will talk about some proven strategies to build and maintain a good reputation for your dental practice across digital platforms and the benefits of these strategies. Let’s first understand what ORM for dentists is.
What Is Online Reputation Management for Dentists?
It refers to the practice that requires dental care professionals to build, monitor, and improve the public perception of their practice. It includes everything from patient review management to online patient engagement and impactful management of online mentions to ensure a trustworthy brand image of your dental care practice. Online reputation management for dentists helps practitioners to influence the narrative people have regarding their practice online.
Professionals can tailor their ORM strategies based on their business’s needs and win their patients’ trust. A positive online image can be established through positive online reviews, effective crisis management, useful content creation, promotion of achievements, and more. It can give a competitive edge to a dental practice and strengthen its online presence. A dentist who has a good online image can attract more appointments and encourage them to choose their treatment services.
A professional dental marketing agency can help you build a strong online reputation and create a foundation to handle negative feedback about your services. Dental professionals can hire such an agency to identify areas that need improvement and develop an effective reputation management strategy.
Why Must Dentists Prioritize Online Reputation Management?
Dental care providers who want to get a competitive edge in the healthcare market must build a positive digital image. They can attract new patients and showcase how their dental care services can benefit them. Effective ORM strategies can help dental experts successfully turn clicks into booked appointments.
You can drive your business growth and improve how your practice appears online. Online reputation management is as important as the delivery of exceptional patient care for dental practitioners. Let’s find out how impactful ORM strategies can benefit your dental practice.
1. Increased Patient Trust
It is one of the most beneficial factors about online reputation management for dental professionals. Trust plays a huge role when it comes to the connection establishment between dentists and patients. Many people who suffer from dental issues feel skeptical to visit a dentist due to their fears and doubts.
Patients mostly trust online reviews, testimonials, and the digital image of dentists before they decide to seek their services. When dentists have high ratings and positive patient reviews, it creates a sense of confidence and trust in the patients, and they may choose that dentist for their dental care requirements. Dentists can win patient trust if they promote their patient reviews across different online platforms.
2. Higher Patient Acquisition and Retention
Dentists with a positive online reputation attract more patients and successfully retain their existing ones. Positive online images create a sense of trust in potential patients and assure them that they will make an informed decision if they choose a specific dental care practice.
The practitioners need to respond to the reviews of their existing patients and make them feel valued so that they return to their practice and refer them to others. ORM strategies require you to effectively showcase that you care and ensure a positive patient experience.
3. Enhanced Brand Perception
Positive patient reviews can boost your dental practice’s search engine rankings. For instance, someone searches for ‘best dental practice near me’ and you provide dental care services in their location. Your dental practice will appear in a top position in their online search results if you have a positive online image and own a good number of positive reviews.
These situations play a pivotal role to enhance the patients’ perception of your dental business. It will help you build a positive brand image and keep the patients engaged for a longer period.
4. Effective Crisis Management
It is a significant part of online reputation management for dentists. Dental care professionals must know how to manage crises like online controversies, social media trolls, and constant negative patient feedback. A positive online reputation can help dental professionals effectively handle crises. It is quite common for even the most reputable dental practices to face malpractice allegations and receive negative reviews.
Do you know that ORM serves as a shield in such cases? It reduces the negative effects of these situations and minimizes the damage. It also helps you address such situations and take necessary actions (e.g., correct misinformation available online, maintain transparency, issue official statements, or share positive stories).
How Can You Effectively Manage Your Dental Practice’s Reputation Online?
Online reputation management can offer an extensive range of benefits for dental care professionals. The professionals need to implement certain beneficial strategies to build a positive online image. An online reputation has the power to boost or ruin your dental marketing efforts. But the good news here is that you can manage how your patients will perceive your practice online. Let’s have a look at the top 10 ORM strategies that can positively transform a dental business’s online image.
1. Google Your Dental Practice to See How You Appear Online
It is important to know where you should start and what you need to do to establish a strong reputation online. And to start with, you must Google your dental practice and see how your business appears online. This specific practice helps healthcare providers like dentists to have an idea of how the online audience perceives their business and what they talk about online.
However, you need to search your dental practice in an incognito browser with a cleared cache, as it will show you the most accurate results.
3 Questions to Consider When You Get to See the Search Results
- Whether the search result shows your business at first or the ones with a similar business name to your practice?
- If it shows your practice, then are the results owned properties like your website or social media pages?
- If you get to see the Google reviews of your dental practice, are the first few noticeable reviews positive, negative, or mixed?
Steps You Need to Take based on the Result Variations Are:
- Imagine that your dental care business doesn’t show up in search results for the targeted search terms. Then you need to check if your dental care website is indexed in search. Don’t know how to do this? Search “site:(your dental care website name)” in Google to see whether it is indexed in search or not.
- It is also possible that the search results haven’t shown your business even when your website is indexed. You need to optimize your dental website and online presence with dental SEO best practices to make your business easily findable online.
- Consider that your dental practice has a good foundation online if your website, Google Business Profile, or social media accounts appear in the search results. But you need to identify the other related search terms your prospective patients mostly search for or those that can help your practice rank higher in search results.
All these actionable insights will help you identify the negative press that you need to address. It will also help you define your online reputation management goals and improve your online visibility through effective strategies. Once you know where to start, it will be easier for you to decide where you want to go with your ORM efforts.
2. Register Your Domain Name to Show Your Authority
Have you registered the domain name of your dental practice? If not, you must do this at the earliest as it is extremely crucial to online reputation management for dentists. A study has shown that over 97% of people learn about a local business from the internet. Similarly, patients also expect to find information about your dental practice when they search for it online. Your prospects may overlook your dental business if you still don’t have a website. They may not find your business trustworthy if they find inaccurate information about it through another online source.
8 Steps to Register a Domain for Your Dental Care Practice
- You need to choose a domain registrar for your dental care business. The domain name must be registered with an ICANN-accredited registrar and you can choose from the two thousand like GoDaddy and domain.com.
- Compare the pricing and features of each domain registrar to choose the one that best suits your requirements. You can compare the renewals and transfer options that different registrars offer.
- Your domain name must be easy to remember for the patients and relevant to your dental practice. Choose a domain name that reflects the brand identity of your dental practice.
- For the extensions, you can choose the common and popular ones like .com, .net, .org. Apart from this, you can also explore other options if they are available in your country. Select an extension that aligns with your dental care business location and target audience.
- You can use the registrar’s search tool to check the availability of your domain name. You must ensure that the domain name you choose is not too similar to an existing business as it can create confusion among your current and potential patients.
- Now the time is for billing and payment completion. You need to provide your contact details and billing information to complete the domain registration process. We suggest you carefully review the registration details along with the terms and conditions before you confirm your domain purchase.
- If you choose a domain name that matches your practice, you can witness exceptional click-through rates for your website. Trusted domains can receive higher CTR in search engines compared to domains that people are not familiar with.
- You must create social media profiles and accounts on review platforms for your dental care practice. It will help you secure your username and ensure no other business can have the same. However, you can also purchase a free domain with a web hosting plan.
3. Encourage Positive Patient Reviews and Ensure Timely Responses
According to a study, 47.5 percent of patients trust online reviews as much as they do personal recommendations. You must encourage your happy patients who have sought treatment services from your dental clinic to leave reviews on your website, GBP profile, or social media accounts. You may offer the best dental care services, still you must have a good amount of online reviews to showcase how beneficial your services are.
Online reviews promotion can ensure effective online reputation management for dentists. Encouraging positive reviews can show your existing patients how much you value their opinion. It will also attract new patients and showcase how your previous patients have benefited from your dental expertise. Dentists can request that their existing patients share their treatment experience online. Positive patient reviews can highly influence the medical decisions of new prospects. Every review counts for your dental practice no matter whether they are good or bad.
How to Encourage Patients to Leave Their Reviews?
- You can send emails to your satisfied patients to request their reviews. The review process must not be complicated and requires the patients to follow too many steps. You must acknowledge those patients who have already submitted their reviews through appreciation emails. You can request them to visit your clinic in the future for their dental care requirements.
- Dentists can swiftly respond to both the positive and negative reviews and social media mentions. For example, if a patient has to wait for your reply, they may feel frustrated and it can lead to more misunderstandings. Timely responses to the reviews will make the patients feel valued.
- A simple appreciation mail that mentions ‘Hey, (patient’s name), thanks a ton for your valuable feedback!’ or a reply ‘Hi (patient’s name), thank you for sharing your concern. We truly value your opinion and will try to improve our dental care services.” can do wonders in such cases.
- It is important to express your gratitude to those patients who have made an effort to share their positive experiences with your dental practice. This practice will attract more good reviews from your existing reviews.
- Follow the HIPAA regulation and refrain from sharing any personal information of your patients through your replies.
4. Provide Useful Information to Your Visitors through Different Formats
Apart from your dental care service details, patients also seek educational information related to dental health. A good dental care website must contain all the types of content a visitor may seek. It is crucial for dental care professionals to incorporate educational content on their website and share the same across digital platforms. If you also ignore such information and don’t provide useful content to your visitors, you may lose a significant number of potential patients.
For instance, you can craft blog posts like a ‘diet plan to maintain good dental health and hygiene’, ‘symptoms of gum disease’, ‘home remedies to relieve from toothache’. These types of content can showcase your dental practice as a knowledgeable medical resource and reflect your expertise and reliability. Visitors who seek such information and find the same on your website may feel an interest in your dental care treatment services as well.
Dentists can establish a strong brand voice through such content and increase their search engine rankings through effective SEO optimization. Educational and informative content is also an impactful lead generation strategy for dentists that helps practitioners attract qualified leads. Dentists can also consider engaging videos, infographics, podcasts, and live Q&A sessions to promote their services or educate patients on certain dental care topics. It will be easy for the patients to consume complex dental care topics.
5. Showcase Awards and Achievements on Your Website
Awards and certifications are something that a person promotes to show his/her expertise. People associate with your success more if you show them what you have achieved in your professional career. Dentists also must showcase their awards, achievements, and certifications on their website to promote their dental expertise and experience.
Why Is It Important for Dentists to Show Their Awards and Achievements Online?
- It will portray your dental practice as a reputable and legitimate source which is extremely important in online reputation management for dentists.
- Prospects will view your dental clinic as a safe place where they can visit to treat their dental care issues.
- Awards and certifications from popular platforms are more likely to be trusted by patients. You can consider such platforms to seek dental care certification.
- It will also show that your dental business complies with the terms of service specified by Healthcare regulations.
- Patients will feel more interested in your dental care services as they tend to find such specific details when they visit a dental website.
6. Update Your Business Information on Online Directory Listings
Online medical listings play a major role for dentists. Patients tend to visit popular online listing sites and directories to learn more about a dentist before they seek their services. Dental professionals need to accurately update their contact details in these listings to help the interested prospects easily locate their dental practice. They can also list their business on dental care listings like GeoDentist and Dentists.com.
The name of the dental practice including the accessible phone number and address must be accurately presented in these dental listings. This information must be consistent across different online directories as inconsistent contact details can hamper patients’ trust and lead to confusion.
Updated information across such listings helps dental care professionals rank better for local search queries and drive traffic to their websites. These platforms offer the best opportunity for dentists to show their expertise, share photos of their clinic, and win patients’ trust. They can improve their online reputation and drive noticeable foot traffic to their clinic.
7. Engage More with Patients
Dental professionals can improve their online reputation in various ways and one of the most beneficial ways is through exceptional patient engagement. How can you engage more with new patients and keep the existing ones engaged even when they haven’t sought any treatment services from your dental clinic? It’s a skill to adapt! Dentists must know how to do this effectively to enhance their digital image and attract more clients. If not, let us offer you a clear idea.
How Can Dentists Engage More with Patients?
- You need to respond to all the comments and reviews you receive through social media and review sites. It will showcase to your patients that you truly value their opinions and care about the experience they have with your treatment services.
- Social media is a great platform to engage more with your patients. You must effectively utilize to communicate with them and encourage meaningful interactions in the future. Use comments, direct message facilities, and social media posts to ask interesting questions to your patients and encourage them to share their feedback on your service.
- For example, a patient has asked a query regarding your ‘root canal treatment service’ on a social media post of yours. If he/she find that you have responded to their questions swiftly and resolved their queries, it will create a sense of trust in them and will have a good perception of your practice.
- You can share necessary updates and useful dental care tips to win patients’ trust and loyalty.
- Dental care practitioners can host webinars and organize live Q&A sessions on topics of interest to create a great sense of community. These practices will encourage their patients to recommend your treatment services and leave more positive reviews online about your expertise.
8. Manage Your Website and Social Media Profiles
A user-friendly website and social media page creation is not enough. You must keep these updated and manage them to drive maximum engagement. These online assets can offer numerous benefits in online reputation management for dentists. Imagine your virtual storefront, which is your dental care website, shows inaccurate information and loads quite slowly or has complex navigation. Do you think that it will be able to influence people to visit and spend a noticeable time there? No, right?
In such cases, your website will seem outdated to your visitors and they may choose to visit one of your market competitors’ websites where they can have a great user experience. Similarly, social media profiles with inconsistent posts and outdated information will not appear active. Your online presence cannot do wonders unless you keep it updated and upgraded with time.
A research result claims that 59% of patients are more likely to switch from their current medical care provider to one who provides a better online experience. Thus, providing top-notch dental care is not enough in today’s competitive digital age. You must prioritize the performance of your website and social media pages to ensure patient satisfaction and retention.
9. Prioritize Telehealth and Telemedicine Appointments
With the increasing utilization of the internet and digital gadgets in the past few years, telehealth and telemedicine appointments have also seen a dramatic increase. Similarly, teledentistry has also gained immense popularity in recent years. People now have less time to visit a dental clinic and seek consultation while teledentistry has made it more accessible and easier for them to treat their dental issues with the use of technology and seek dental care remotely.
The convenience and accessibility that teledentistry offers are something patients love the most about this new medical advancement. They can book virtual appointments, seek crucial dental health consultation from renowned dentists, and receive a seamless experience throughout.
However, it is not something practical and may not offer benefits like an in-person dental treatment. But it is still an option for those who experience difficulties in visiting a dentist regularly for their dental care needs. Dental practitioners can offer this facility to keep up with the new advancements and stay ahead of their competitors who still have not implemented it in their practice. It can increase your patient satisfaction and ensure their retention for a longer period.
10. Make the Most Out of Negative Reviews
The unhappy patients may share their feedback and give negative online reviews about your dental practice. It can happen to anyone even with the most renowned dental professionals. Sometimes a negative review can be humiliating and harm your online reputation. But every negative thing has some positive consequences as well. It offers dental practitioners an opportunity to show their responsibility and accountability. You can identify the areas for improvement regarding your patients’ care and show how much you value your patients’ opinions.
Negative reviews help you to improve your dental services and turn that negative feedback into an opportunity to win the patient’s trust again. A study has claimed that 94% of consumers tend to avoid a business because of its negative reviews. Thus you must not ignore such feedback and leave it unresolved. You must hear each patient who has left negative reviews and try to resolve their issues. The process requires continuous monitoring and effective strategies to implement. Want to know how you can do this effectively? Let’s have a look.
How to Address and Handle Negative Reviews?
- You must professionally apologize to those patients who are unhappy with your dental services. You need to acknowledge the reviews and showcase that you truly regret the unsatisfactory experience they had.
- Never leave a review unattended and unresolved. It may indicate that you don’t care about those unsatisfied patients and the average or bad experience they had with your dental care services. Be responsive to the negative reviews and resolve them at the earliest.
- You must be empathetic and professional when you reply to these negative comments. You can offer additional assistance to those patients and assure them that you will resolve their issue offline. You can also request them to visit your clinic regarding this.
- Once you resolve their issues, you can request them to change their reviews as it significantly matters for your dental practice’s online reputation. However, you must maintain patient confidentiality while you reply to their reviews and have a detailed conversation.
- Dental professionals must not be impatient or rude with the patients if they leave bad reviews on their online profiles. They need to understand the part of their experience that was unsatisfactory and ensure to offer a suitable solution.
11. Conduct Patient Surveys
This can be one of the most beneficial elements of online reputation management for dentists. Interactive surveys can help you generate more reviews from satisfied patients. You can conduct specific surveys for your local patients and showcase a positive reputation for your dental practice on local search results. Just like you send review requests to your existing patients, you can send email requests to the satisfied patients to participate in your surveys.
Dentists can prepare short and uncomplicated surveys post-appointment to know the experience of their patients. Surveys will help them gather valuable insights about the experience the patients had with their dental care services. The professionals can also gather information about the significant areas of their dental treatments that they must improve.
You can ask many questions related to the quality of care, communication transparency, and waiting time. It is not enough to conduct the surveys; rather you need to make necessary changes in your patient care and encourage more of your practice’s reviews.
Sample Questions You Can Ask through Your Surveys
- How satisfied are you with your recent visit to our dental clinic?
- How would you rate your overall experience with our dental care treatment service?
- Would you recommend our dental practice to your family and friends?
- Did you experience any issues with our dental service?
- Were our staff members cooperative and friendly to you?
Challenges in Online Reputation Management for Dental Professionals: 5 Common Pitfalls to Avoid
Though your strategies are exceptional, you may experience certain challenges in managing your dental practice’s online reputation. You need to identify these common pitfalls to avoid them or prevent their consequences. The following are five common ORM challenges a dental practitioner can experience.
1. Negative Patient Feedback
Dentists can receive negative feedback just as they receive positive feedback. It is normal to receive negative reviews even if you provide top-quality dental care services. Even the top-rated dentists receive negative reviews from their patients. There’s no need to worry if you have received the same. You just need to effectively handle those reviews and make necessary improvements in your patient care.
Negative reviews even help you identify the area that needs your attention and understand what your patients expect from your practice. You need to respond quickly to these negative reviews and shouldn’t lose your cool while you interact with them. Unanswered feedback can make your patients feel ignored. The conversation tone must be professional and empathetic. You must try to resolve the patient queries and turn these reviews into opportunities to win the patients over.
2. Inaccurate Business Information
Will you trust a business that has provided inconsistent information across various online platforms? The answer must be a big NO! As a dental care provider, you must provide your patients with accurate details about your practice. The business hours, phone numbers, or address must be accurate and consistent wherever you have added them.
Outdated and inconsistent information can lead to confusion and harm your practice’s reliability. Online reputation management for dentists will be incomplete without updated and accurate business information.
3. Online Controversies
Social media trolls and online controversies can seriously affect your dental practice and convey a negative online image of it. We suggest that you not act rudely with a patient who has left negative reviews for your dental practice. You shouldn’t engage in any arguments or online controversies that can severely harm your digital reputation.
You must resolve such sensitive issues patiently and emphatically to show how much you value your patients’ opinions. It is quite normal for the patients to feel angry or frustrated if is not satisfied with your dental services. You can apologize to them for the inconvenience and try to resolve their issues at the earliest.
4. Negligence regarding Updates on Credentials
Many dental care practitioners often don’t prioritize their medical credentials. This can cause serious consequences for them. These credentials make you who you are and they effectively showcase your dental expertise. You must add these medical credentials to your listing on relevant review sites where you request patients to leave their feedback.
Dental experts must regularly update their listings in case of new achievements or certifications. These credentials will help you stand out in the competitive healthcare industry and show your potential patients why your dental expertise is unique and more beneficial than other providers.
5. Inconsistent Massaging
A dental practitioner must ensure that their brand messaging is similar and consistent across different online channels. Inconsistency can confuse your potential patients and break their trust in your dental care expertise.
They must maintain a consistent brand voice and messaging to build long-term connections with the patients. For instance, if you have mentioned a specific treatment approach in your website, you must mention the same approach in your social media profiles.
Conclusion
You may provide top-notch dental care services, still you must have a strong online reputation to showcase the credibility and reliability of your treatment services. We hope that our proven strategies of online reputation management for dentists will help you establish a reputable digital image and build patient trust. From an increasing number of new patient appointments to effective crisis management, it will benefit your practice in numerous ways.
Then you can effectively manage and monitor both the positive and negative patient reviews. We have made dental reputation management easier for you. Follow our proven ORM strategies and achieve countless benefits for your dental practice.
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