The best way to boost google reviews for your dental practice
Google reviews are critical to your success at attracting new patients to your practice. Data shows that as many as 60% of potential patients will check your Google reviews before deciding whether to contact you. Discover how to boost your reviews at your practice.
Transcript
Hi, everyone. Angus Pryor from Dental Profit System bringing you this week’s Marketing Monday, the weekly marketing show that’s designed to give you actionable tips and tools to boost the dental marketing at your practice. This week we’re gonna talk about increasing Google reviews. First point, why it’s important. Now, we’ve been talking about Google reviews for the last few weeks on this show, if you need to go back and see some of the previous ones.
Three reasons why it’s important that you get a good Google review profile. Firstly, 60%, that’s what the data shows, 60% of clients, when they’re considering whether to deal with a business or not, will check out the review profile. So clearly, that’s a big chunk. You need to be there.
Secondly, in my experience, most dentists in Australia are not actively promoting their reviews. Therefore, it’s a real opportunity for you to be perceived as being better than your competitors, because if you’ve got a profile with a whole bunch of reviews, and your competitors don’t, as long as their profile is positive then clients are more likely to deal with your business.
Thirdly, it’s kind of an insurance policy in a one-star review shows up, which is what happened to a client of mine recently.
Now, the second aspect is in getting them. How do you do it? You just ask. The one thing I need to just interject here is some of you may be thinking, “Yeah, but it’s actually not okay to ask for them.” Yes, it is. If you want to get in touch, we’ve got a copy of the AHPRA Guidelines. You can certainly get onto the AHPRA website. AHPRA is very clear. In terms of promoting testimonials and such, on anything that you control; your website, your social media, and so on, not on. But it very specifically says in their guidelines that it only relates to things you control, and you can’t be expected to control what happens elsewhere, i.e. Google.
So there’s no issue with asking, but in asking, there’s a certain way to do it. Isn’t there? The method that I would suggest is when a client comes out of the consulting room, have your receptionist ready to go and, “How was everything today, fine? Did you have a good experience?” Etcetera, et cetera. Once you know that you’ve got a friendly patient that had a good experience, that is the perfect time to ask them to do a Google review. That’s step two, you’ve got to ask. Clearly, if they’ve come out, and they’ve got some pain or whatever, that’s probably not the people you want to ask.
The third point, make it easy. All right, here’s how we’re going to make it easy for the clients. Firstly, a little tidbit that you should know, people are going to need to have a Gmail account for them to create a Google review. You could actually have a look through your own database, and sort, or do a search or something, and figure out which clients have got a Gmail email address. Then you know that those guys have already got a headstart because it’s not hard for them to do that.
The second part is that what I would suggest you do, is actually prepare something to hand to the client. It’s one thing to say, “Hey look, how was everything today? Great. Would you mind helping us out by leaving a review?” They’ll go, “Yeah, yeah. Sure, sure, sure.” In one ear, out the other. They’ve forgotten. If you can actually hand them something and say, “Look, we want to make it easy for you.” You can have your logo on it, and then sort of step by step, this is how you leave a review. That makes it easy for the client. It also is a visual reminder for them, because with good intention, people often just don’t do it.
To give you an idea, with my clients, we found that generally speaking, you’ve got to ask about 10 to get one review. That just seems to be human nature. I used to deal in an area with promotions, and enter a draw to win such and such. A return rate of 5 or 10% there was seen as very good. So even with a direct personal request, you probably are going to have to ask 10 to get 1. Now, to make it easy for you, at
Now, to make it easy for you, at Dental Profit System we’ve created a nice template that you can use, which you can use with your letterhead, to actually hand to your patients, and ask them for a Google review, having gone through the process above. If you’re interested in getting ahold of that, please get across to dentalprofitsystem.com. There’s an opportunity to contact us there and ask for the Google review template. We’ll be happy to send that to you.
Your homework for this week is very simple. If you don’t have a great review profile, you need to start asking. The risks are very high, and the potential reward is very high too. You’ve gotta start asking. You’ve gotta make it easy for your clients. If you want to, get in touch with us. We’ve got a template that we can send you, that you can use to hand out.
All right, that’s it for this week. If you’ve got something you’d like to see covered in a future episode on this show, please get across to dentalprofitsystem.com. Drop us a note, and we’ll get it in there. That’s it for me, Angus Pryor, signing off. See you next time.