Getting Dental Patients to Leave Positive Online Reviews

According to Tim Sawyer, president of Crystal Clear Digital Marketing, solving the problem of insufficient patient reviews is a matter of improving your leadership skills. It’s up to you as the leader of your dental practice to establish procedures that will channel patients toward sharing their positive experiences on their web. Creating these procedures is easily accomplished with the help of modern technology.

“How does a modern dental practice get more quality reviews on Google? That’s the holy grail from a search perspective and also from a consumer influence perspective. I would say, though, it starts with leadership in the practice, and we were talking about this off-camera before the interview, I think one of the big things that’s missing in educating the modern dentist is there should be some courses on leadership and there should be some business courses so that they can understand how to manage people. We believe that all things can be solved through the management of people, the installation and implementation of solid processes, and then giving them the tools to do it.

In reference to reviews, first, it’s a cultural shift. If somebody comes in and says, ‘I feel great today. My teeth are amazing. Thank you.’ We need to have a tablet in the office, in the waiting room, where someone can hand that tablet to the patient and say, ‘Hey, Susan, we really appreciate you saying that. By the way, would you mind clicking here and leaving us a review on our website?’ Through simple technology, they go in, it’s a five-star rating. It’s really easy to do. And then that populates to the web site.

So, phase one is getting tons of good, quality reviews on the website because you can control that conversation. And then, your SEO team can optimize that page so when someone types in, ‘Dr. Hewitt Reviews,’ we want that page to come up first.

The second piece to that is, how do we get those folks to leave a review on Google. If you plant the seed, and you have an appropriate talk track in the practice — because as you know, you can’t have multiple Google reviews from the same IP. So they can’t all go in the same room and leave a review because that’s going to be a flag and get you in trouble with them. But what you can do is if you use some simple technology, once that person fills out that in-office review for the website, it’s mentioned to them, ‘Hey, you know what would really help us, is we’re going to send you a simple link along with your Gmail address, and if you could just click and follow the link and just cut and paste, or leave that same review on Google.’ And you’ll get about 20 percent of those folks who are willing to leave an in-office review, because they understand the importance of that, whether it’s Yelp, or Google, or other mediums.

But again, it comes back to people, process and tools. What’s the process? Who’s going to do it? And then what tools can we give them to make it easy. Then, of course, it’s consistency and frequency, and rinse and repeat.”