1Mar, 2022

Should I Respond to Negative Reviews?

March 1, 2022

Dental Advertising, internet dental marketing, Online Reviews

Man,Hand,Showing,Thumbs,Down,And,One,Star,Rating,On At ProspectaMarketing, we know mistakes happen. Sometimes, a patient coming to your dental practice has to wait an undue amount of time, runs into a scheduling issue, or is simply unhappy with treatment. If you have been closely monitoring your reviews, as we’ve detailed in our previous blog posts, the possibility of a bad one might be making you cringe.

We encourage you to see this as a positive moment. But in order to take full advantage of it, there are some things you need to accept. Yes, the customer is dissatisfied with the service you’ve provided. Most likely, they are going to leave a review. And yes, there’s a high probability that people will see the review.

According to BrightLocal’s 2022 Consumer Review Survey, 98% of people at least “occasionally” read online reviews. 77% of consumers ‘always’ or ‘regularly’ read online reviews. The percentage of people ‘never’ reading reviews, on the other hand, has dropped to an all-time low of 2%. Furthermore, 7% of people leave reviews for bad experiences, and a whopping 33% leave them for good AND bad experiences. So patient feedback counts for a lot!

It’s easy to tell what this means: If you have any sort of digital presence, chances are people are reading your reviews in order to choose between your practice and a competitor, and bad reviews will lead them to ignore your practice, if no action is taken.

What To Do About Bad Reviews

This can be alarming if you have any bad reviews, as the first thought is that a massive amount of people will see them. Indeed, online reviews play a major role in creating and maintaining consumer trust in the healthcare industry. 83% of those polled indicated that reviews played a ‘very important’ or ‘important’ part in their choice of healthcare provider.

But here’s the good bit: you can turn it around! The same survey details that 80% of consumers will leave a positive review if they initially had a negative experience, but it was turned into a positive experience. There’s no better way to curtail bad reviews than by having the same customer leave a good one that states how their issues were fixed during a follow-up appointment.

Our suggestion is to always read negative reviews in order to ascertain what went wrong. Don’t write them off as occasional messages from disgruntled customers that are simply pouting. Learn from them. This way, you can ensure the problems never repeat and the patient leaves positive feedback following future appointments.

But should you respond to negative reviews? BrightLocal says yes! Respond to all reviews, positive and negative. When asked which factors of online reviews would make them feel positively about a practice, 55% of people said that the business owner responding to the review was vital. Similarly, when asked how likely they were to use a business that deals with responses in a variety of ways, 89% of people said that they were ‘highly’ or ‘fairly’ likely to use one that responds to all reviews.

How To Respond

Don’t Be Defensive: Respond to every negative review with kindness, direct information, and professionalism. Understand that this is not a personal attack on you or your team, but simply a case of a customer letting a business know how it can improve its services.
Keep It Accurate: If a patient’s complaints are inaccurate, or somehow don’t reflect what actually occurred during the appointment, do not respond as you would in an argument. Experiences are filtered through our unique, subjective perspectives, and what one person might see as an egregious offense, another might see as a small nuisance. Give your patients the benefit of the doubt, don’t attack them, but do make sure to clearly state what actually happened, so other patients can understand the situation. Offer apologies for their negative experience and commit to making their next appointment a positive one.
Grammar Counts: People often see poor grammar and written mistakes as indicative of a lack of professionalism. And why shouldn’t they? If your practice is to be an authority on healthcare in any capacity, the information patients receive from you must be correctly and accurately transmitted, and so must your responses to patient feedback.
Respond Quickly: Don’t let reviews, good or bad, sit in the queue unanswered. When asked which factors would make them feel positively, 49% of those polled by BrightLocal stated that the review being posted within the last month was important. This means about half of your patients are reading recent reviews and deciding to use your services based on them. If a negative review was recently written, it is important to respond to it in a timely fashion, so that anybody sorting by ‘Most Recent’ can see the lengths you’ve gone to in order to fix the issue.

The verdict is in: responding to reviews helps build up consumer trust and improves communication between practice and patient. Don’t let a negative review get you down. It is yet another marketing opportunity you can use to make sure you’re getting the right message out.

At ProspectaMarketing, we can help manage your review responses for you! We are an experienced Internet marketing firm specializing in dental practices and the tools of Internet marketing. We help you reach key prospects who are looking for what your practice has to offer. Our unique and thorough approach provides visibility, financial accountability, and ongoing refinement and improvement. You can find out more by contacting Lane Anderson toll-free at 1-877-322-4440 Ext 101, by email using the form on our Contact Us page, or online at ProspectaMarketing.com.

15Sep, 2018

Keep It Current! Your Dental Practice Website

September 15, 2018

PM Blogger

Dental Advertising, Dental marketing, internet dental marketing

Virtually every dental practice has a website these days. It’s all but impossible to succeed without one. Yet a lot of dentists don’t take the time to keep their sites current, and as a result, they lose ground to their competition. It is essential to stay on top of online trends to set your self apart from your competition.

Investing in your website may, in fact, be the single most important thing you can do to stay competitive. At the top of the list is making your site mobile-friendly. It’s essential for any website to be compatible with smartphones, but the web is increasingly mobile-centric, so the smart move is to convert to a mobile-first strategy.

Google has always used the desktop version of a website to rank it in searches, but no longer. “Since the majority of users now access Google via a mobile device, the index will primarily use the mobile version of a page’s content going forward,” the search engine giant announced on its website earlier this year. “We aren’t creating a separate mobile-first index. We continue to use only one index.”

That means websites that are designed mobile-first – designed for mobile devices – are going to rank higher in search engine results than sites designed for desktop computers. We are increasingly mobile device-oriented. Research shows that people are five times more likely to leave a website if it isn’t mobile-friendly.

A site that is mobile-first is, for one thing, designed for smaller displays. It is also intended to be a company’s primary website. Some businesses, such as Uber, target mobile devices almost exclusively. Their desktop sites are more of a landing page.

Chances are, your own experience bears this out. Do you really want to do a lot of zooming, pinching, and scrolling, just to get at the content you’re looking for?

If your dental website is designed with desktops in mind, don’t despair: you will not fall off the map. Google says that while it primarily crawls and indexes web pages made for smart phones, searches will still give users the most relevant search results, whether it’s desktop or mobile.

But the shift is on, and you should not ignore it. ProspectaMarketing specializes in marketing dental practices on the Internet, and can help your practice reach its audience. We use the tools of Internet search marketing to reach key prospects looking for what your practice has to offer. Our unique and thorough approach provides visibility, financial accountability, and ongoing refinement and improvement. You can find out more by contacting Lane Anderson toll-free at 1-877-322-4440 Ext 101, by email using the form on our Contact Us page, or online at ProspectaMarketing.com.

30Mar, 2018

Finding Your Practice: Dentistry And Search Engines

March 30, 2018

PM Blogger

Blogs, Dental Advertising, Dental marketing, Internet Marketing, Local Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Websites

The numbers are staggering: forty thousand times per second, three and a half billion times each day, 1.2 trillion times a year. That’s how often people navigate to Google and types in search terms.

More and more of these searches ask about local businesses: show me the auto mechanics in my town. Show me a tree pruning service. All the pizza places.

This is as true for health care as it is for everything else. Eighty-five percent of Internet users turn to search engines when they’re looking for dentists and doctors. An online presence is critical for any practice.

Search Engines Are Essential!

Your practice has a website, right? A practice website is one of the most vital marketing tools available, because potential new patients read them. If you don’t have one, they may never find you.

Your practice website must be user-friendly, and engaging to visitors. The goal is to convert them into new patients.

It also needs to be mobile device-friendly. Mobile devices – smart phones in particular – are the device of choice for many Internet users, especially younger ones. As recounted here in February, mobile devices were being used in more than 60% of dental searches by the end of 2017, and that is only likely to grow.

Optimize, Optimize

Moreover, your site must be properly optimized. Internet users tend to scan, whether they’re looking at Facebook or your practice’s website. And they prefer tiny bites. The content on your site should be broken into short paragraphs with headings and bullet points, with plenty of images.

Another thing about that content: with any Internet experience, people like to feel they’re getting something from it. Your site should have informative content that is free of jargon, and makes a connection with visitors.

Where Are You?

So how do Internet users find you online? The short answer is via search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. Your practice can have a unique listing on local search engine sites. Listings include basic contact information, and also a map showing your location.

There are step-by-step instructions for getting your practice listed on Google My Business, Yahoo Local, and Bing Local.

Properly marketing your dental practice is critical to any practice. It is also a discipline in and of itself. Prospecta Marketing specializes in using the Internet to find new patients for dental practices. To find out what Prospecta Marketing can do for you, contact Lane Anderson toll-free at 1-877-322-4440 Ext 101, by email using the form on our Contact Us page, or online at ProspectaMarketing.com.

9Feb, 2018

The Consumer Move To Mobile- What Do You Need To Do?

February 9, 2018

Prospecta Marketing

PPC, responsive design, SEO, Website Dental Advertising, Internet Marketing

In 2015 Google announced that the number of searches from mobile devices (excluding tablets) had surpassed the number of searches from desktop devices.

While that was true overall, it wasn’t the case for the dental industry, yet. Mobile searches for dental terms still lagged behind desktop searches even through 2016.

2017 – The Dental Year of the Smartphone
That changed in 2017. From March to June the winner of the search traffic bounced back and forth between desktop and mobile.

Once July came, mobile searches never looked back. By December 2017, mobile devices were used in 56% of dental searches and desktops were only 38%. The remaining 6% of dental searches were performed on tablets.

If you haven’t yet paid close attention to your mobile website presence, now is the time!

Changes in the Google Indexes
Recognizing this shift, Google created a new search index specifically for mobile devices. If you searched on a desktop, Google would use its desktop index to find the websites most closely matching your search. If you searched on a phone, Google would use its mobile index to find results.

This mobile index considered additional aspects beyond what the desktop index used, such as the user experience with this website on a small screen, the speed of the website, and the available content.

In November 2016, Google announced that they were moving towards a single, mobile-first index. This mobile-first index means that even if you were searching on a desktop, the results would be based on what Google found on their mobile index. This mobile-first index should be fully implemented sometime in 2018.

So What Do You Do as a Dental Practice?
Do a little sleuthing on your own website. Here are five things you can look at to see if your website is ready for mobile consumers.

1. Your website must provide a great user experience on mobile devices.
Just a few, short years ago it was good to have a separate mobile website with stripped down content and few images. That was when mobile phones and data plans were slow.

Now both the phones and the data plans have improved dramatically. People expect to see graphics on their phones and to easily be able to find what they are looking for.

Pull out your phone and look at your website. Is it engaging? Would it be to someone who isn’t a dentist but is looking for one? Can they easily navigate through the site and even search for content? Can they easily contact you and find where your office is located?

2. Visitors to your website need to easily contact you by their preferred method.
Smartphones add additional features to websites. If the website is coded correctly, a visitor can simply touch the phone number to start the call. Or they can simply touch your address to be taken to a map to provide directions.
With our new Click to Text tool, you can now even allow people to text you from your website! You can receive and respond to texts through a screen on your desktop and continue texting with the potential patient.

As you are on your website on your phone, try touching your phone number or address or even texting from your website. Is it easy? If it isn’t, your potential patients will likely leave your site without contacting you.

3. Your website needs enough content to be found and understood by both real people and the search engines.
There is a constant battle between website designers and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Specialists. Designers want graphics and very little content. SEO Specialists know that if a website doesn’t have content (especially the home page), the search engines won’t know what your website is about and therefore cannot rank it well in the index.

Starting with your home page, look at each page of your website on your phone. Is there enough content that a person could understand what you are about and what you can offer them? Can people easily scan the content to find what they are looking for? Are paragraphs short enough that a reader typically won’t have to scroll to get through them?

4. Your website needs to be fast!
Part of the user experience is having the website load very quickly. In 2016 Google said that “53% of mobile sites are abandoned if pages take longer than 3 seconds to load.”

Site speed has been a ranking factor for desktop searches since 2010. In January 2018 Google announced that mobile page speed will be a ranking factor in mobile searches. If your site is slow it will have a harder time ranking well for any searches.

How fast is your mobile site? Or even your desktop site? Test it out at https://testmysite.thinkwithgoogle.com/ and https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/.

5. You need to appear at the top of the search results.
With a smaller screen, fewer search results from the search engines are visible on the screen. Typically, the listings at the very top of the page are Pay-per-Click (PPC) ads. Depending on the size of the screen, only 1 or 2 results are visible on the screen and they are ads.

If you are not using PPC ads for your practice, people will have to scroll down the search results to find your practice on their mobile device. After the ads come the map results in Google. Then come the organic, or natural, rankings.

Ranking in the 1st organic position is good, but not as good as it used to be. It now means that 1st position ranking is really the 6th or 7th listing (and a few scrolls) on the page.

Have questions or want help?
Specializing in sourcing new patients for dental practices online using internet search, ProspectaMarketing has developed a unique and thorough approach that provides visibility, financial accountability and ongoing refinement and improvement. To learn more, contact Lane Anderson toll-free at 1-877-322-4440 Ext 101, by email using the form on our Contact Us page, or online at ProspectaMarketing.com.

28Sep, 2011

Choosing the Right Media for Your Message

September 28, 2011

Lane Anderson

dental advertising, dental marketing, local dental marketing Advertising Media, Dental Advertising

When evaluating media alternatives, there are a number of considerations. One question that arises from time to time is the effectiveness of TV advertising for a dental practice. Doctors we have worked with have had success and disappointment with TV. Having worked in a media department of an ad agency and as a marketing manager earlier in my career, there are three things worth considering when evaluating TV or any other media for advertising.

1. What is your objective and message: Depending on what you want to accomplish, TV may or may not be the best way to deliver the message. TV can be good practice name and positioning reinforcement. It can also be a great way to showcase the benefits of your work with the live video. However, will the ad format give you enough time to deliver the message you need to send?

2, Evaluate what you are really buying with the TV schedule: When are they running the spots and what is the expected audience for the ad schedule. The three common measures for a media buy are * Reach (percentage of audience reached during the schedule), Frequency (avg. number of times someone is likely to see the ad) and CPM (cost per thousand viewers reached). This should all be measured against the type of patient demographic you are trying to reach (ex. women and men ages 25-64). It is a good idea to also look at the geography of the TV coverage and determine how much of it is your market area (where patients will realistically drive from to reach your office). There is a level of waste in TV and any marketing. Consider then how much of that coverage will be helpful to you. If you are wasting 80% of the coverage on people too far away to drive to your practice or on viewers who are not your target demographic, there may be better options that are more targeted to your practice. Much of the effectiveness will also depend on how good the ad is. Then look at the cost per thousand, and you can more easily consider the cost against the costs of other marketing options such as internet marketing or direct mail.

3. Consider the value of the TV spot production: Just the production of a quality TV spot can often carry a large price tag. If you have access to the ad video (which you should be able to do) you could use it on your website (becoming increasingly important on websites now) and also post it on YouTube for additional visibility online. So, there may be some value in the production itself to consider.

If you are still unsure, conduct a test and track the results. Make sure you run it long enough to fairly evaluate the results but contain your commitment until you have a better idea how it will perform for your practice.

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