March 14, 2019

Are Online Reviews Important for Dentists?

In the age of Yelp and Google reviews, there’s no escaping online reviews for dentists. They’re a fact of life. Consumers of all kinds—even dental patients—get keyboard-happy every time they buy a good or receive a service. Patients are primed to publish reviews of your dental services.

These reviews can have very real effects on your digital marketing and local SEO efforts. Depending on the quality of your recent online reviews, you may read that sentence as a good thing or a bad thing.

When you’re tackling the topic of online reviews for your dental practice, you first have to accept that what people write about you online is often out of your control. But you can take steps to improve your online reviews and get more and better reviews. 

Reviews Can Affect Your Digital Marketing Efforts

Reviews can affect dentists in a direct and obvious way: Negative reviews make potential patients hesitate to call you to schedule an appointment; positive reviews encourage them to give you a call.

That’s obvious. But the effects of online reviews for dentists go much deeper than that. Your online reviews can affect your digital marketing efforts.

This may come as a surprise to those who aren’t steeped in dentist SEO and marketing, but Google takes more than just keyword density into account when determining which pages rank on the first page or in Google Maps results for important dental searches. One of these additional factors is your relevance as a business.

There are a lot of ways to establish relevance and authority in the realm of dentist websites. One of them is to have plenty of recent and positive reviews. Google, as well as a prospective patient, may see a red flag when it comes across a dentist with no online reviews.

That’s not to mention the effects of negative reviews. For more information on how to counter negative online reviews, keep reading.

What to Do About Negative Reviews

Negative reviews are going to happen. A negative online review of your dental services is nothing to lose sleep over, but it is something you should address.

We advise our clients to take a few simple steps after receiving a negative review:

• • Determine whether the review is legitimate. If it isn’t, have your dental SEO provider report it to Google.

• • If the review is legitimate, respond to it. Using a professional tone, apologize for the reviewer’s experience and say you are taking steps to address the supposed problem.

• Bury the negative review with lots of positive ones. You know positive reviewers when you see them. They’re the people who leave your office with a big smile. Ask them for a review.

Call the Dental SEO Experts at ApricotDental

Are online reviews important for dentists? Yes, they are, and you can take control of your online reviews with a few simple steps. The first step is to get in touch with the dental SEO experts at ApricotDental. We’ll help you build a strategy to boost your search rankings, maps rankings, traffic, and conversions, and part of that will include a plan to get you more and better online reviews.

To reach us, give us a call at 877-491-6981 or fill out the online contact form at the bottom of this page.