Get More Patients With Dental Reputation Management Software
2X reviews and 4.5★ average — see how Dr. Patel did it!
W hen it comes to online reviews, there’s no such thing as too much of a good thing. And glowing, 5-star reviews of your practice are a really good thing.
Consider the numbers…
- 90% of dental patients consult online reviews before booking an appointment
- 70% of patients say online reviews are as important as a dentist’s credentials
- 42% of people won’t go to a dentist with less than a three-star rating
- A single negative review can drive away approximately 22% of people
- Source
While more numbers will illustrate the power of online reviews, here’s what you really need to know…
Good reviews (and lots of them) will give your practice a major competitive advantage and are a critical part of a modern dental SEO strategy.
How do you get there? What’s the best way to drive a steady flow of positive reviews and control how you’re viewed online? Dental reputation management software.
What is dental reputation management software?
At its core, online reputation management for dentists is the process of improving and controlling what’s said about your practice on the internet.
A strong digital public image can’t happen overnight—it takes time, growing 1 online review at a time. With this in mind, dental practice review management software is a comprehensive, long-term tool designed to monitor what people say about you, promote your practice through more positive reviews, and correct negative patient experiences.
Dental practice review monitoring software is focused on popular sites like Google My Business, Yelp, Healthgrades, and Zocdoc, and typically involves the following:
- Soliciting reviews from patients and distributing them to these review sites (68% of people will leave a review when asked to do so)
- Responding to reviews to either thank the patient for their great feedback or address their concerns
How dental review management software helps
You can certainly manage your online reputation all on your own, but dental reputation monitoring software makes it so much easier—almost incomparably so.
This software is so beneficial that if you don’t utilize it, you’ll be at a disadvantage when competing with a practice that is.
Just consider these 4 important capabilities dental reputation management software provides:
1. Monitoring
Once you implement the management software, you can keep a close eye on everything that’s said about your practice online. Anytime someone talks about your practice, you’ll know about it!
2. Control
More than just monitoring what’s being said, you can control the conversation. Online dental reputation management software allows you to act on the feedback you receive with ease, providing a simple way to respond to your reviews, drive patient loyalty, and solve their problems.
3. Conflict resolution
One common misconception about review management software is that it allows you to delete negative reviews. More accurately, this type of software helps you address problems with the goal of resolving the issue and changing what the patient thinks of your practice.
If a negative review comes in, it helps you contact the patient with the goal of learning more and correcting the situation. This often leads to the patient updating their review to one that’s more in your favor.
4. Analytics
A successful dental practice relies on patient feedback to help make changes and improvements to their processes and patient experience. Reputation management software will help you generate these insights from customer feedback through analytics and graphs. You’ll get an inside look at what exactly your patients want.
Dental reputation management software impacts local SEO
Online reviews do more than build your reputation and help potential patients feel more confident in choosing you as their dentist. They’re also a critical part of your SEO strategy—just as much as building citations and on-site optimization!
We work with dentists throughout the US. Time and time again we’ve seen how Google rankings favor dental practices with great reviews. If someone uses a common search term like “best dentist”, Google will only display local practices with the top-rated reviews.
We’ve also seen first-hand how reveiws have major implications through their ability to affect:
- Rankings in local search engines — Online reviews make up to 15.44% of Google’s Local 3-Pack and 6.47% in localized organic search results.
- Click-through-rates — Going from a 3-star rating to a 5-star rating leads to 25% more clicks from Google Local Pack and a 5-star rating earns a business 39% more clicks from Google Local than a 1-star rating.
- A person’s purchasing decision (or in this case, their dentist selection) — When someone interacts with a positive review of your practice, they are 58% more likely to convert.
Keep in mind that Google is looking at more than just the overall star or number rating of your reviews. Other important factors include:
- Number of reviews
- Content in the reviews
- Variety of review sources
- Status of reviewers
- Speed and consistency of reviews
We can confidently say that managing your online reputation and having a strategy for acquiring new reviews is an important SEO strategy for every dental practice. Your competitors are doing it, and you need to be, too.
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| Campaign Management | Yes | Yes | No | Yes |
| Customer Review Platform | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Response Management | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Review Monitoring | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Sentiment Analysis | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Social Media Monitoring | Yes | Yes | No | No |
BirdEye is one of the most widely used platforms among dentists and other small businesses. This all-in-one software includes a microsite with all your reviews on it and allows you to manage all your reviews and resp
ond to them from a simple-to-use dashboard. It’s mobile app is another selling point, making it incredibly simple to manage your practice’s reviews.
ReviewTrackers markets to businesses of all sizes and has healthcare experience. Practices using ReviewTrackers appreciate how the software centralizes all your review data in one app and allows you to request reviews via text. This software also partners with Hootsuite so you manage your social media and your dental reviews in 1 place.
Podium specializes in working with local businesses of all sizes. A few of Podium’s unique selling features are its ability to facilitate two-way texting between you and your patients and the ability to set up internal competitions to achieve the best online reviews. The biggest drawback is its lack of campaign management and social media monitoring.
Created specifically for the healthcare industry, RepuGen caters to medical groups, hospitals, doctors and of course, dentists. Some of the best features of this platform include the ability to reach out and perform a service recovery before a dissatisfied patient posts a negative review. They tout a service recovery rate of 80%!
Why we recommend BirdEye for dentists
We’ve spent over a decade working closely with dentists and have a deep understanding of just how busy managing a dental practice can be. BirdEye, with its completely automated customer-driven features, offers a seamless and easy-to-implement solution to dental reputation monitoring that’s hard to beat.
BirdEye will help you keep practice information up-to-date and consistent across 50+ consumer sites and business directories. And with your own personalized dental practice microsite, you can look at your reviews from over 150 sites across the web. Another feature we love? This microsite is optimized for search engines and indexed by Google. It even gives patients the option to book an appointment with you directly!
More than its simplicity and comprehensive, SEO-friendly features, BirdEye gets results.
BirdEye helps a California dentist
more than double her reviews in 18 months
Our own dental clients are proof that big results are possible. Take Dr. Nammy Patel as an example. Her practice, Green Dentistry, is located in busy San Francisco. Before implementing BirdEye, her online reputation was so-so. For years, she had sat with an overall star rating of 3.98. And keeping a consistent flow of new reviews was nearly impossible.
Considering that the national average dental practice rating is 4 stars, anything less than that will cost you new patients — especially in a competitive city like San Francisco. Dr. Patel needed to take control of her online presence, and we offered BirdEye as a solution.
We helped Dr. Patel implement BirdEye and right away her reviews (and her rating) took a turn for the better. After 18 month, Green Dentistry has more than doubled her number of reviews (from 224 reviews to 503—a 125% increase!) . Even better, her overall star rating grew to 4.48!
Bonus: 4 tips for getting even MORE great reviews
Here at :Delmain, we’re all about digital solutions. But there are a few things you can do offline to help encourage more online reviews, too:
1. Train your team to “make the ask” for a review when checking out patients—something like, we’d love to hear your feedback about your appointment.
2. Create print materials that list all the different sites patients can review you—some of our clients leave a card in their patient goody bag.
3. Request a “Find Us on Yelp,” sticker to put on your front door, by your front desk, or in your lobby.
4. Make patient satisfaction a top priority for your practice. Take patient feedback to heart and if you notice a pattern—for instance, patients talking about long wait times—take steps to change that and provide a more positive experience.
Discover our comprehensive approach to online dental marketing
When searching for dental care, 98% of patients will choose a dentist on page 1 of search results. At :Delmain, we’re focused on helping optimize your online marketing efforts to make sure you have the best chance of appearing on that page, getting more patients, and growing your practice. That includes helping our clients get set up with dental reputation management software.
Have questions about reputation management for dentists and optimizing your online presence? Let us know how we can help.