How To Get More Reviews For Your Practice on Autopilot

Like it or not, reviews are a must for physicians.

As consumers, we look for reviews of businesses and products before engaging with them. And your potential patients are doing the same. Being intentional about collecting reviews for your practice has the highest ROI of any marketing activity you can think of.

Unfortunately, most doctors don’t do it.

What is the point of investing on SEO if you don’t have a solid rating in your Google search results?

Doctors spend time and money to rank higher on Google, but neglect collecting and responding to online reviews.

These are a few reasons why you are not getting all the reviews you deserve:

• You don’t ask for them.
• You assume patients will leave one if happy.
• You make it too complicated.
• You don’t have a system to request reviews.

In this essay I’ll share with you 3 simple steps to automate this process.

Step 1: Claim your business profile!

You’d be shocked how often doctors won’t claim their listings on Yelp, or Google My Business.

The belief is they only need to show up in physician directories. But that’s not how potential patients think. The benefits of claiming your profiles are several. You can respond to reviews, you can submit official hours and contact info. You can add photographs and videos to your listing. And most importantly, you can manage your reputation.

As a good friend of mine says: “If you don’t manage your reputation online, some a**hole will…”

Step 2: Automate it.

At the end of their visit, you should have an automated SMS and/or email going out to your patients asking them to leave a review.

The keys here are:

1. The longer you wait to send this message out, the less likely they’ll be to write a review.
2. It needs to be easy. Send them a single link (I suggest starting with Google My Business) and a few examples of what other patients have written so they don’t have to start from scratch.

Step 3: Monitor your reviews and respond to them

Lastly, get in the habit of monitoring reviews.

For every positive review, send a private thank you note to the patient who left it. For every negative review, reply to it but be mindful of HIPPA regulations! The only thing you should never do, is leave a negative review unanswered.

People filter reviews to look at the negative ones so it’s important to always reply politely to your reviews.