Patient reviews play an important role in your local SEO efforts, but are you struggling to bring new ones in? If you want to have the most patient reviews of any local company on Google, you need to be following this crucial advice.
#1 Ask Everyone.
It sounds extremely simple, but honestly, the best way to go about bringing in new reviews is to just ask for them. Surveys have found that about 68% will leave a review if you simply ask them to do so. That means just mentioning it to a happy client after their next visit is enough to get them to go online and leave some stellar feedback for your practice. At DIGI Search, we encourage the use of the word ‘feedback’ instead of ‘reviews’.
Just be sure that you don’t ask a client more than once, as that can seem pushy and rude. It can also harm the relationship if they have, in fact, already left feedback for your practice. That is what is great about our Patient Reviews & Reputation Monitoring Program – we can automatically stop sending a reviews text to someone who has already received it!
#2 Ask Right Away.
Although it seems counter-intuitive, we have found that the practices that are the most effective and have the most reviews, ask their patients at the beginning of their appointment to review. Most practices are surprised at this fact, but the logic behind it is that your patients are spending at least some time in the waiting room before any procedure, and they are likely going right to their phone.
At the end of an appointment, there is more of a likelihood that they will want to get home or to their next errand. We don’t want patients reviewing your practice in their car! We want them to provide thoughtful feedback while they are sitting in the waiting room.
#3 Make it easy.
Let’s face it. When you’re asking for feedback, that is all about you. The patient’s day isn’t going to change by them leaving a review about your practice, but yours might. So, to get as many reviews as possible, you have to make the option to leave a review as simple as possible.
That’s why you should use DIGI Search’s Patient Reviews & Reputation Monitoring Program. We utilize cell phone technology to put your practice’s review sites right in front of your patients. No more asking patients to find you on Google plus or walking patients through a review signup on a tablet! You can help get customers to leave a review even when they otherwise would not have done so.
We tell our dental clients that it is no longer good enough to have ten reviews, you have to get to 100! Just think, would a prospective patient want to go to a practice with 100 5-star reviews or 10?
