Attract New Patients With Google Reviews
It’s no secret that online reviews are a powerful tool for your business. Choosing a dentist can be a daunting task for prospective patients. Reviews greatly influence a user’s decision to choose you over your competitor and now they even impact search results. How?
Your Google My Business page is like a “free advertising” opportunity on Google. Reviews on Google have a direct bearing on both local and organic search results. That means that the more Google reviews your practice has, the more likely your website is to show up on page one of Google when a prospective patient searches for a new dentist.
However, obtaining Google reviews may seem like a challenge. Don’t worry — Roadside Dental Marketing is here to help! Working together with many practices, we’ve learned what works and what doesn’t in helping patients to leave reviews. Here are a few of our top tips:
Talk to patients about leaving a review during their visit.
The best opportunity to get a patient to leave a review is while they are physically in your practice! As the patient checks out, ask them if they enjoyed their experience. If so, encourage them to leave a review from their smartphone.
Connect with patients immediately following their visit.
A follow-up email is a great way to get Google reviews from patients. Immediately following a patient’s visit, email them a brief and friendly message with a link to your Google business page. It could say something like this:
It was such a pleasure treating you today at Life Smiles Dental! We hope you enjoyed your visit. We greatly appreciate feedback from our guests. Your opinion matters to us and we would love the opportunity to continue to enhance our services. Please take a brief moment to leave us a Google review and let us know what you thought of your experience.
–add a direct link here to your Google business page–
Sincerely,
Dr. Smith and the Life Smiles Dental Team
Get your staff involved
Everyone on your team that interacts with patients can have the opportunity to obtain Google reviews! If you have an iPad at the practice, patients could use it to leave a review while they wait in the dental chair, as they check out, or as they wait for their take-home bags. This does require that everyone on your staff is familiar with the application and can show a patient how to sign up for a Google account, leave a review, and log out. Consider offering an incentive or prize for the staff member that obtains the most reviews over the course of a month. Talk it up in weekly staff meetings and morning huddles. It can take only a little bit of time to ensure everyone is trained, but the benefit to your practice will be huge!
Request reviews from your fans on Facebook.
You’ve already built up an audience on Facebook, why not take advantage of this and ask them if they’ll leave you a review! Your Facebook post could read something like this:
We appreciate our loyal fans! If you are a patient of ours, please take a moment and leave us a review on Google+. We would love to hear your feedback!
–add a direct link here to your Google+ business page–
Conclusion
We are confident that applying these simple suggestions will help you continually increase your Google reviews! Roadside’s marketing clients can benefit from additional resources and services that we provide to help get reviews, including custom email blasts, printed materials, and one-on-one team coaching. If you are interested in learning more about our services, contact us today at team@roadsidedentalmarketing.com!
Hi Whitney,
I had thought about the ipad idea a few months
ago, but I was told by a couple of reliable sources (one that has a
respected SEO blog) that the big G disregards the reviews if they come
from the same IP address which would be the case with an in-office ipad,
wouldn’t it? Also, told me that they disregard some of your reviews
if you get too many in a short time – say a couple dozen in a week or
two, especially from the same IP. Any thoughts or counter thoughts?
We
are having trouble with G changing (loosing) our reviews. We went from
19 to 1 and then to 14 and back to 19 and now back to 14. And they
haven’t posted the last 3 we got from patients (this from patient
feedback). It is quite maddening. I have been reading a lot of blogs
where many people (small businesses) are having the same problems and
frustrations with G. Then they split you reviews when they double list
your site (I have been working with Brigitte on this for what seems like
forever).
We would really like to find out a reliable way to get reviews on G that stick and don’t get “lost”.
Other
than those comments – I like your post. I don’t in anyway mean to be
critical of you. I am just trying find out if you know anything about
these potential problems and more importantly if you know how to get
around the problems.
I like your Facebook idea, we will have to try that as I think more people are on FB than on G+.
PS
– Yelp is not a good alternative for reviews unfortunately. We had a
couple of patients go to Yelp and post reviews. To no use, as Yelp has a
peculiar “sand box” for reviews and they only show up if you continue
to review and review a large number (12 is my minimum estimate) of
different businesses.
Hi Gil,
As always, you bring up some excellent points! We have heard the same concerns about using an iPad at the practice due to reviews coming from a single IP address. Google has gone back and forth on this issue – one week it’s fine, and the next week it’s no longer accepted. Brigitte has been keeping us all posted on the back-and-forth (it happens all too often!)
One way around that issue, as mentioned in the blog, is to ask the patient to use their own smartphone (if they have one) to leave a review. It can be helpful to teach staff how Google+ functions on different smartphones so that they can be ready to assist a patient if needed.
We’re seeing the most success with “naturally occurring” reviews – reviews that don’t all happen at once, but rather gradually and steadily. For those reasons, try out the post-appointment emails and the Facebook approach. Let us know how it goes!
Thanks so much for reading and commenting on our blog, Gil! We hope these suggestions help you get more reviews!