Category Archives: Online Reviews

A four-star retaurant. A five-star movie. As consumers, those stars get our attention; they suggest a proven quality or track record. But a new study indicates that as attractive as all those stars might be, the quantity of online reviews any small business gets – and that includes dental practices – is far more important to its bottom line.

The study by Womply, a reputation and customer relationship management company, shows just how important online customer reviews are.  They are “the new word of mouth,” Womply says. Since more reviews means more profit, you should do everything possible to generate as many online reviews as you can for your practice.

Increased Revenue

The study evaluated online review data for more than 200,000 small businesses across the United States: from restaurants to hair salons to dental practices. The most important findings include:

• More reviews means up to 54% more in yearly revenue.
• Businesses claiming their free listings on four or more customer review sites earn 58% more revenue than those that don’t.
• Responding to as few as one of every four reviews can boost revenue by 35%.

A couple of the findings seem counter-intuitive:

• Small businesses with 3.5 to 4.5 star ratings do better than those with 5 star ratings.
• Businesses with 15-20% negative reviews earn 13% greater revenues than those with bad reviews in the 5-10% range.

We’ll get to that in a moment. First:

Reviews = Trust

Potential patients always look for a dentist with positive reviews, and they trust the reviews they find – that new word of mouth. Positive online reviews demonstrate your expertise, and will bring new patients to your office.

But, why would businesses with more negative reviews have greater revenues than those with fewer? It doesn’t add up, and Womply doesn’t know for sure why that is. But they think that when consumers research a business, they expect to find a certain number of negative reviews. Businesses that don’t have very many seem new or unproven.

Why would a 5-star business earn less revenue, on average, than one with fewer stars? There are no firm conclusions here, either, but 5-star businesses generally don’t have as many total reviews as those in 3.5 to 4.5 range. That may make consumers skeptical: maybe the business is cooking the numbers.

The More, The Merrier

The lesson from all of this is clear: the more reviews practice gets, the better. Multiple stars may look good in search engine results, but in the long run more reviews means greater profits. You should do everything you can to increase the number of online reviews your practice gets.

For dentists, the most important review sites include:

• Google My Business
• Facebook
• Yelp
• Healthgrades
• 1-800-Dentist
• Dentistry.com

How can your dental practice improve its online profile? ProspectaMarketing is an experienced Internet marketing firm specializing in dental practices. We use the tools of Internet search marketing to 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.

It’s no secret we believe reviews have become an essential part of running a successful practice (read more in Online Reviews: Can Your Practice Afford to Ignore Them When Your Patients Are Not and Reviews, Online Reputation, and the Success of Your Practice), but what about including patient reviews on a landing page?

BrightLocal, which provides local search marketing tools for agencies, consultants, and local businesses, recently conducted a study to determine how online reviews impact landing page conversion. Their research shows that putting reviews on landing pages helps boost conversion by 12 percent. This isn’t a big surprise to us, and we have been encouraging our doctors to do this for some time.

Let’s take a look at the specifics of the study.

Reviews Continue to Be an Important Part of the Buying Process

In their 2016 Local Consumer Review Study, BrightLocal discovered the following statistics:

• 74 percent of consumers say that positive reviews make them trust a local business more
• 84 percent of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations
• 54 percent of people will visit a company’s website after reading positive reviews

BrightLocal wanted to take these facts a step further to find out if these reviews helped build trust and how promoting a firm’s reputation would impact landing page conversion.

The Latest Findings on Consumer Trust and Landing Page Conversions

For their experiment, BrightLocal divided their participants into two groups: a control group of 30 percent of the participants who were showed landing pages that had no ratings or reviews displayed, and test groups with the rest of the participants who were shown different landing pages, some with reviews and some without.

According to BrightLocal: “The panelists were asked to imagine they were searching online for a local plumber, florist or realtor. We showed the consumers two landing pages—one page that highlighted an actual customer’s review about the business and another page where the business said they were the ‘dependable’ company.

“For this research study, we tracked whether consumers picked the businesses with or without the customer review on the landing pages. Additionally, we asked consumers to give us feedback on a variety of other factors that impacted their decisions and opinions of these ‘sample’ businesses.”

The results showed that 83 percent found the business with the consumer review on the landing page to be trustworthy. And 15 percent of survey participants felt the business without reviews was not trustworthy.

When asked how likely they would be to contact the business with reviews, 74 percent of people said they would versus 62 percent of people who said they would contact the business with no reviews.

You can read BrightLocal’s full results here.

Questions About Using Patient Reviews on Your Website?

If you have questions about conversion rates or online reviews, contact us at
877-322-4440 Ext. 101.

The statistics are telling: 92% of consumers read online reviews for local businesses. The fact is, however, that even though far too many local businesses continue to ignore the importance of online reviews, their potential customers are not.

We wrote an article recently about how important it is for businesses to manage their online reputation which presented the results of a survey conducted by local search specialists at BrightLocal. Their survey results were revisited at the recent SMX West SEO and SEM Conference.

SMX West and the Value of Online Reviews

Search Engine Land columnist Greg Gifford recapped a session from the expo by Thomas Ballantyne, who is director of marketing at a local business, about the value of online reviews.

There were several valuable takeaways from the article:

• More than half of people looking for a local business trust content that has been generated by past customers over any information they can get from a company website or in a news article. Ballantyne explained that “people trust reviews written by other people much more than anything written on your website, which is why it’s so important for business owners to focus on their online reviews.”
• Your brand’s message? It’s owned by your customers—or in the case of ProspectaMarketing readers, your patients.
• Ballantyne points out that “reviews are the crossroads of social media and transactions.” Reviews aren’t going away—and businesses can’t afford to ignore them because their customers are not.
• According to Ballantyne, getting great reviews is simple: “First, you’ve got to provide good customer service. You’ve got to hire people who will love your customers. Second, you just have to ask. If you ask customers to leave a review, most of them will do it—but most businesses never ask for reviews.”

Use Online Reviews to Your Practice’s Advantage

Are you doing all that you can with your online reputation? Are you asking your happy patients to leave reviews? We offer a tool that sends a review request directly to patients’ phones. It’s easy to use—for team members and patients!—and is highly effective in growing your online reviews.

If you need help managing your online reputation, contact us at 877-322-4440 Ext. 101.

Patient testimonials are a great addition to your website, Facebook page, or YouTube channel. People enjoy seeing other patients talk about their positive experiences with your practice. Reviews not only enhance your web presence and online reputation, but they can have huge impact on whether or not a patient decides to make an appointment with your practice.

Tips for Recording Patient Testimonials

If you are going to record a video of your patients, be sure that you are getting a great quality video. Here are some helpful tips:

• Have correct lighting. Try to avoid a windowless room with just fluorescent lights and don’t have the light source directly behind or above your subject. Have your patient sit by a window with natural light to their side or in front of them.
• Invest in a good microphone. A Lavalier microphone will ensure there is no echoing or other issues caused by bad sound.
• Be sure the microphone can hear them. Don’t stand so far away that the microphone can’t pick up their voice. If you are interested, there are a variety of clip on microphones available that you can attach to the patients shirt and then plug the microphone adapter into your iPhone.
• Make sure your patients are comfortable. Stuart Anderson, who creates professional video productions for the Crown Council, a prestigious group of dentists committed to continual improvement, recommends that they should be sitting or standing in a relaxed position that is conducive to a conversation.
• Make eye contact. Anderson also recommends that subjects not look at the camera while they are speaking: “They are less likely to do so if you make good eye contact,” he says.
• Note where you are placing your subject. Make sure there’s nothing odd in the background. That fern on your windowsill may look lovely, but make sure it doesn’t look like its growing out of your subject’s head.
• Invest in a tripod. You don’t need to spend lots of money and rent a lot of video equipment, but make sure you have a tripod or a way to hold the camera very steady. If you are filming with an iPhone, always hold the camera horizontally. This will result in much better looking videos when you upload them and watch them on computer screens and TVs.
• Don’t use zoom. Instead of zooming, physically move the camera forward. If filming with your phone, using zoom will work but will reduce the quality of the video.
• Try Q & A style interview. You can email your patient the questions beforehand so they have their answers in mind. Then when you film them, have someone off camera ask them the questions and have them respond to the interviewer that is off camera. This way you can get concise direct answers instead of a stream of consciousness that sometimes happens when people are being filmed.
• Have patients sign a consent form. Before using any patient testimonials online, you must have them sign a consent form giving their permission for you to do so.

You don’t need to spend a lot of money to get great patient testimonials. It only takes a few minutes of a patient’s time and can really help to improve the quality of your online presence.

Questions About Patient Testimonials?

If you have questions about getting patient testimonials for your own practice, contact us at
877-322-4440 Ext. 101.

Anyone running a small- or medium-sized business is aware that their online reputation is becoming more and more important if they are to be successful. In spite of this, however, business owners are not always paying enough attention to their online reviews. They may not realize that online reviews can have a huge impact on whether or not a customer decides to purchase a product or service.

For the past six years, the local search specialists at BrightLocal have conducted a survey on online reviews to help small- to medium-sized businesses and digital marketing agencies understand how they influence purchasing decisions.

The results make it clear that online reputation needs to be taken seriously by all business owners, and that includes those running a dental or medical practice.

What the Online Survey Research Results Found

BrightLocal’s survey explored just how consumers read and use online reviews, and whether or not the reviews influenced their buying decisions.

In a nutshell, the results showed:
• 84 percent of survey participants trust online reviews just as much as a personal recommendation
• 90 percent of consumers read fewer than 10 reviews before they form an opinion about a business
• 74 percent of those surveyed say that positive reviews make them trust a local business more
• 73 percent of consumers report that reviews that are three months or older are not as important as more current reviews
• 54 percent of those surveyed say that after reading positive reviews, their next step is to visit the business’s website

According to the survey, the most commonly read reviews by consumers are for the following categories restaurants and hotels and bed and breakfasts, with medical/healthcare professionals coming in third place.

What the Online Survey Research Results Mean for Your Practice

The number of consumers using the Internet to find local businesses continues to increase.

BrightLocal’s take on the reasons for the growth is simple: “Over the past few years, many local businesses have realized the importance of optimizing their online presence for the local market by claiming their Google My Business or Bing Places for Business pages, creating location-specific pages on their website, adding Google Maps to their site and other local SEO strategies.

“Additionally, Google shows online reviews in many search engine results pages, and they even recently started adding third-party review sites and reviews to a business’s Knowledge Panel.”

The bottom line? Reviews are everywhere. And your potential customers are reading them. But rather than fear them, you should see them as an opportunity to engage and receive feedback about your practice.

Why Your Practice Needs an Online Reputation Strategy

For your practice’s continued success, you must monitor what patients are saying in online reviews. You should also have a way to get positive reviews from happy patients.

Why? Because potential patients will read the most recent reviews first; if those reviews are negative, they may not read past them to get to the positive reviews—even if there are more positive than negative. New positive reviews will push the negative reviews down the list.

It should be noted here that reviews for dental and medical practices tend to have a longer shelf life than, for instance, restaurants; this is probably because people visit restaurants and other businesses on a more frequent basis. That said, however, it is still critical to have a steady flow of new reviews as an ongoing part of running a successful practice.

How are you handling your reviews? Are you asking happy patients to leave reviews after they visit your practice? According to BrightLocal, seven out of 10 consumers will leave a review for a business—if they’re asked to do so.

Find Out More About This Year’s Survey

Do you want to see even more questions and answers, as well as a deeper analysis of the results of this year’s survey? You can read the full 2016 Local Consumer Review Survey here.

Questions? Need Help Managing Your Online Reputation?

If you have questions about the survey or would like help managing your own online reputation, contact us at
877-322-4440 Ext. 101.