Reviews are a vitally important part of a local SEO strategy for dental practices. When choosing a healthcare provider, nearly 70% of patients report that online reputation to be very important, which makes your practice’s online reviews an essential part of your overall patient attraction strategy.
Unfortunately, a lot of practices are going about collecting reviews in the wrong ways. Many practitioners are skittish about asking patients for reviews. Even among the practices who do actively ask patients for reviews, many just ask, leaving it up to the patient to locate where and how to leave a review, which often results in reviews being left on disparate websites or in the patient abandoning the effort to leave a review at all. Beyond that, many practices collect reviews on internal reviews portals like those owned by SolutionReach and Revenuewell, which pass up the most important SEO-related benefits of reviews.
So needless to say, the online reputation of lots of excellent practices is scattered, deficient or non-existent, leaving them to be trounced in search results by their savvier or better-financed peers. It doesn’t need to be this way, and with a few simple steps, you can set your practice up for online reputation success. But where should a practice get started, and what websites are the most important to collect reviews on?
Focus on Google
The most important reviews sites for your dental marketing strategy are well-known, public reviews sites that prospective patients might read when selecting a dentist. Simply put, reviews that appear in search results are always going to be more important for your practice than those that don’t.
Of these, Google is the far-and-away favorite. The number and average rating of all of the reviews that Google can access has some bearing on your practice’s local search rankings. Reviews on Google itself carry the most weight, as they appear on your practice’s Google Business page in search results. Overall, Google Reviews are easy to get compared to other reviews sites, which should make them a top priority for your practice.
How to Automate Asking For Reviews, and How SolutionReach and Revenuewell Mistakenly Hurt Practice Review Efforts
The most effective way to ensure your practice gets more reviews is to automate the process, leaving as little up to chance or confusion as possible. If your practice uses a patient communication software, you probably already have a template set up for an automated post-appointment survey. The trouble with these surveys, however, is that they’re set up to keep reviews semi-internal by default. Some don’t ask patients to leave reviews at all and many route reviews that patients do leave to a public microsite, or worse, an internal portal. Reviews on a microsite don’t carry nearly as much search-ranking potency as collecting reviews on Google would. In fact, every client we’ve ever worked with has come to us with more reviews on Solutionreach or RevenueWell microsites than on Google itself. If the practices had been collecting reviews on Google all along, they’d have by-far the most Google reviews of any practice in their cities. Here are just two examples we’ve come across:
484 reviews on PatientConnect365, the RevenueWell microsite, and only 66 on Google. Far from ideal. Here’s how to fix this:
How to collect Google reviews using Solutionreach
If your practice uses Solutionreach, a post-appointment survey gets sent out as a link in a default scheduled email. Patients access the survey through a button in the email, and Solutionreach unfortunately hard-codes the button into the automated email. However, we recommend that practices rewrite the default survey invitation email to steer patients towards writing a review instead. While some patients may still click the survey button, we’ve found that many respond to the request for reviews instead, which is more beneficial to the practice. Follow these steps to change your post-appointment survey email:
- Log into your account and click on the message center dropdown.
- Click “Surveys”
- Select the “Post Appointment Survey” tab.
- Navigate to the “Actions” dropdown and select “Edit Invitation”
- Edit the email invitation
People respond best to personalized emails, so we recommend taking some time to write a note to your patients. Thank them for their business and tell them that you hoped they had an excellent experience at your office. Then, ask them to help other patients find your practice by leaving a quick review on your Google profile.
- Get a link to your Google My Business profile in the email invitation
Don’t leave anything up to chance. Get patients directly to the place they need to review your practice. To do this:
- Open a separate browser tab search your business name
- Go to your Google Business profile and click on the “Write a Review” button.
- Copy the full URL that appears in your browser’s address bar
- Insert your review link into your Solutionreach email invitation
Go back to your Solutionreach survey invitation email and add this link into your email. You can even anchor the link behind some text (for example “Click here to leave us a review”) by highlighting the text you’d like to link, clicking on the link button in the Solutionreach email editor and pasting your full Google review URL into the pop up. This isn’t necessary, but it does make the link a lot nicer looking, as the regular review URL is usually very long.
- Finish your email and click Save in the bottom right hand corner.
Et voilà !
How to collect Google Reviews using RevenueWell.
RevenueWell collects patient surveys/reviews with an automated post-appointment email. They allow offices to customize whether to ask patients for surveys (internal) or reviews (public) and they also have an option to allow patients to submit their reviews directly to search engines. It’s important to let patients do this, otherwise the reviews will end up on a RevenueWell microsite, where they’ll do little good for your practice.
Follow these steps to change your post-appointment communications to ask for reviews:
- Log into RevenueWell and click on the “Campaigns” tab.
- Navigate to the Reviews & Survey Requests line under Automatic Communications
- Move the “Reviews vs Surveys” slider all the way to the left to request Reviews rather than Surveys
- Navigate to the “Public Reviews and Preview” section in the “Review Request” section below. Click the link which reads “Click here to choose whether to allow patients to submit their feedback directly to search engines.
- Toggle the option to Yes that reads “Allow patients to submit reviews directly to your public profiles”
- Toggle the option to No that reads “Determine patient satisfaction before asking them to leave a review”
It sounds nice in theory, but Google recently changed their rules to explicitly tell businesses not to do this. If they find out that you have been “gating” reviews in this way, they can take down some or all of your Google reviews, which would be devastating to your practice’s online reputation.
- Toggle the Google option to Yes and all other options to No. Click Save.
Google is the most important place to collect reviews, so I’d recommend not giving your patients decision paralysis. If you must, including Yelp and Facebook are two good options, but I would recommend splitting the vote on the rest.
- Click Save and Exit OR see Extra Credit below
Extra Credit: Write a personalized message
People respond best to personalized emails, so we recommend taking some time to write a note to your patients. Navigate back to the Review Request section and Click Edit Message below the message preview. Write a quick message to your patients to thank them for their business and tell them that you hoped they had an excellent experience at your office. Then, ask them to help other patients find your practice by leaving a quick review on your Google profile.
Get a link to your Google My Business profile in the email invitation
Don’t leave anything up to chance. Get patients directly to the place they need to review your practice. To do this:
- In a separate browser tab search your business name
- Go to your Google Business profile and click on the “Write a Review” button.
- Copy the full URL that appears in your browser’s address bar
- Insert your review link into your RevenueWell email invitation
Go back to your RevenueWell survey invitation email and add this link into your email. You can even anchor the link behind some text (for example “Click here to leave us a review”) by highlighting the text you’d like to link, clicking on the link button in the RevenueWell email editor and pasting your full Google review URL into the pop up. This isn’t necessary, but it does make the link a lot nicer looking, as the regular review URL is usually very long.
- Finish your email and click Save Changes in the bottom right hand corner.
- Click Save and Exit