As a doctor you need to take control of your online presence so you have a say in how your patients see you when you show up in search results.
When was the last time you Googled yourself? If it’s been a while, it’s about time to go take a peek at your online presence.
When you do, you will most likely find yourself in several places. Here are just a few:
- Practice or physician website
- Google My Business (GMB) listing
- Healthgrades and Vitals profile
- Personal bio on a hospital site
Many of these sites have a rating system, and here’s the golden question: “Does your online rating accurately reflect the level of care you provide?”
Patients Check You Out Online
It’s not as creepy as it sounds. Patient behavior reflects the technology they are surrounded with. That means that just like with everything else, people search online for a doctor.
How often do you ask your phone to find a restaurant or hotel near you? Or use it to navigate from point A to point B? We’ve all become pretty reliant on the internet. In fact, with vast amounts of information available to us at our fingertips, the internet has become our go-to source for info of all types.
When people need healthcare, the majority turn to online search first to find a doctor. What’s more, 71% of people who are searching for a new doctor use online reviews to evaluate physicians. They trust crowdsourced (and therefore unbiased, they hope) information in making their important decisions.
In other words, a person looking for healthcare goes online to search for a doctor, checks out their online reputation—generally on their GMB listing—and makes a decision based on the doctor’s online presence. If your online presence does not accurately reflect the high level of care you provide, you are missing out on attracting patients.
That’s why you need to make sure you are being portrayed accurately online. Your patients are already looking. You need to know what they’re seeing.
Check Yourself Out
You can check into your online presence in a couple of ways. One is to simply type your name in the search bar and see what comes up. (Hint: if nothing comes up, that’s bad. If something comes up, you can work with that.)
The other way you should check yourself out is through a reputation report. We offer a free reputation report that shows how you stack up against other doctors in your practice and in your area. I’ve blurred out the names on the example report below, but you get the idea.
If you have a great star rating, and if you’re beating out your competition, good for you. If not, you should probably do an upgrade on your online reputation. With a little love and care, your online presence will be an accurate portrayal of who you really are.
Update Your Online Presence
It is easier than you think to improve your online reputation. Take Johns Hopkins Orthopedics as an example.
Though well known and well trusted in their community, their online presence did not match up with their patients’ sentiment. They partnered with SocialClimb to improve their reputation and saw dramatic results. In only a few months, they received over 2,800 new reviews and jumped from a Google rating of 3.67 stars to 4.81 stars. Their improved reputation has helped them dominate Local Search results and capture a profitable market share of patients.
How does it work?
Most of your patients are happy with the care they receive, but they don’t think to leave a review. Patients who leave reviews generally do so because they feel strongly about the care they received. That could be really good or really bad. Left to rely on organic results, you run the risk of having a lower star rating than you deserve. However, we’ve found that if you set up automatic, personalized text requests for reviews that go out to your patients within 24 hours of care, about 10% of your patients will leave you a review.
Simply asking for reviews will increase the number of reviews you receive, boost your star rating by 1.2 stars on average, and make your online presence a more accurate representation of who you are. Our platform will integrate seamlessly with your patient management system to automate your review requests, improve your online reputation, and attract more patients.
Don’t leave your online reputation to chance. Take control and make sure your online reputation represents the high level of care you give your patients.
Read more about the importance of online reviews for doctors.
Learn best practices in optimizing your GMB listing.
Take it to the next level with predictive analytics and targeted marketing.
Set up a demo to see how we can help you improve your online presence.
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