Two different ways to manage your online reputation
Date: June 4, 2015Category: Author: David Hall
Here at Infinity Dental Web, we’re making a couple of changes to our Reputation Management offerings.
We’re about to introduce the Infinity Dental Web Reviews Management Tool. It sends an email to your patient who just had a visit, asking for feedback on their visit. If the feedback is positive, it automatically generates another email that asks them to post a review and has some instructions on how to do that. If it’s negative, it alerts you so that you can address the problem and hopefully solve it before it turns into a negative review. For those patients with positive comments, it directs them to Google, Yelp, or wherever they’re comfortable writing a review. I’m kind of excited about us offering this. I’m confident it will help those clients who use it to build positive reviews and intercept negative ones. We’ll be charging about $200 per month for this service.
But I’m actually more excited about our other, less expensive new option for clients. We’re going to raise the fees for our Maps SEO services to include some basic reputation management services. (Maps SEO is the name we give to our Local Search services.) For an extra $40 per month, we will provide consultation and training on soliciting reviews, as well as monitoring of your reviews on about a dozen reviews sites, such as Google, Yelp, Kudzu, etc.
If I were still practicing dentistry, I would not use an automated tool–I would just ask my patients to leave reviews. Let me explain the reasons why.
First, let me get into a little bit of the difference between two of the major reviews platforms—Yelp and Google. Yelp is particularly aggressive in trying to get only natural reviews. Their guidelines strictly prohibit even asking for reviews, and they have an algorithm to help determine which reviews are natural and which aren’t. Most automated reviews platforms will not include links to Yelp, because Yelp can detect those. If you want to encourage Yelp reviews, we have found the best way to do that while staying within their guidelines is to have some type of sign in your office indicating that you can be found on Yelp. Or, you can simply ask people in person if they have written any Yelp reviews before, and, if they have, Yelp will most likely accept a review of your practice.
Google is not that strict about that, but it stands to reason that they also want natural reviews. They have been known to take down some reviews that are generated with automated programs that are designed to filter out negative reviews. If I were them, I would also want to discourage ANY reviews generated by automated programs. So to me, just asking for the Google review (or Facebook, or other review platform) is the best way to encourage reviews and should insulate you from having your reviews taken down.
Second, the personal request is, of course, personal. It’s more warm. What I would do in my dental office is something similar to what one of our clients is doing. In their morning huddle, they will identify a patient coming in that day whom they will ask to leave a review. They’ll do that about once a month. So one of my dental assistants, as they are dismissing the patient, would say something like the following: “Mrs. Smith, I hope your visit went well for you today.” After a response the assistant would then ask Mrs. Smith if she could leave a review, would ask if she had ever written an online review before, and, if needed, would maybe give her a handout explaining how to do it. That to me is better than an impersonal email from “the office,” not attributed to an individual.
If you don’t have office personnel that you feel could pull off the personal request, then I would recommend the automated tool. But otherwise, I would do the personal request.
You don’t need a mountain of reviews. While the number of reviews is a ranking factor, it isn’t the strong ranking factor that many SEO people seem to think. There is a threshold of ten reviews that seems to have a modest impact on rankings in local search. But, according to local search expert Mary Bowling, whether you have fifteen or seventy-five reviews doesn’t impact your rankings. And from the patient’s perspective, they aren’t going to read more than a handful anyway. Also, to me, having hundreds of reviews looks artificial. So get a modest number of reviews and you should be good.
And I would keep at it. Studies show that people are more strongly influenced by recent reviews, so I would continue to keep asking for reviews so that there are always some fresh ones.
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