BRINGO Blog

The USA Today recently published a good article summarizing the phenomenon of online reviews. As we’ve highlighted before, traffic to local business maps and reviews sites is growing at an incredible rate, and most local search properties now offer the ability for users to rate and review local businesses, including dental, chiropractic, podiatric and other medical practices. The number of reviews online is also growing fast, with some sites claiming hundreds of thousands of reviews.

Thus, managing and soliciting reviews is a critical part of the online marketing mix that also includes creating an effective practice website, driving traffic to your website, measuring and tracking results, and managing online listings. Studies have shown that a majority of searchers for local businesses will read reviews about a business before making a decision, and many consumers’ decisions on providers are affected by reviews. We’ve also seen evidence that having many reviews from a large variety of sources can also help a practice website or practice directory listing rank highly in search engines’ local category searches, which increases visibility of the practice and helps to drive traffic and ultimately patients.

Actively managing your review profile should include actively soliciting good customers to write reviews of your practice online, paying attention to reviews that are written about your practice on the various directories, and responding to both positive and negative reviews that are out there. Doing this properly can take some time, but in the end it can have big payoffs in terms of a positive online reputation for your practice, greater visibility on the web, and ultimately more traffic to your website and patients in your office. If you don’t have time to do it yourself, this is a service that we offer to our dental, chiropractic, and other medical practice customers

Great article in the Dallas News about advances in dental technology, practices and amenities that can really differentiate a dental practice. Now more than ever, it’s not one size fits all in terms of dental practices — practices are increasingly investing in new amenities that make them stand out vs. other offices.

One thing that we often encounter in our online dental marketing service, are dental practices that have invested a thousands or tens of thousands of dollars in office equipment, training, practice improvements, but fail to effectively make these differentiating features about their practices known to prospective patients. These features are often the things that make the practice stand out from others, and should be at a minimum featured prominently on your dental website.

In addition, often consumers will search explicitly for these types of features — they will type the name of those features into a search engine when looking to choose a dentist. So, patients may type in keywords such as “Spanish speaking dentist in LA”, or “Chicago titanium implants” — so any online marketing campaign (whether search engine marketing, or search engine optimization) should look for these unique features and target these keywords in search engines. The overall traffic may not be large overall, but the traffic that does come will be highly targeted — these are potential patients that have identified a specific need — so they will be much more likely to call, and schedule an appointment.