Before the internet, people relied on personal referrals or the Yellow Pages to find a dentist. But now they can search the for dentists from their computer or smartphone — and get a lot of opinions at once. These opinions come in the form of online ratings and reviews on websites like Google and Yelp, but many dental practices haven’t realized the weight of these online reviews or don’t know how to improve them.

Why Reviews Matter

When people search for a dentist online, they look for one with reviews from happy patients. Who can blame them?

However, it can be difficult for dental practices to generate positive reviews: Most people only go to the dentist a couple times a year, so it’s not top of mind. So to get good reviews, you need to ask for them, or you may end up with reviews only from patients who are upset or unhappy — and you definitely don’t want those. Likewise, if you don’t have any reviews, prospective patients won’t know what conclusion to draw from the lack of “evidence,” so they’ll keep looking.

Getting Good Reviews

How do you solicit positive reviews without creating more work for your staff? To start, you can create an email process where you ask patients to post reviews after their visits.

But you can do so much more to bolster the online reviews for your practice. With a reputation management service like Demandforce, you can automatically send patients a review request after their appointment. Or, when patients are checking out, your team can ask if they had a good experience. If so, use your reputation management service to send a text link that allows patients to quickly provide a positive review on the spot. Patients are more likely to click and rate or review immediately, and your practice will benefit from these positive reviews that your service can automatically send to popular platforms like Google, Yelp and Facebook.

You’ll also want to add the best reviews to your practice website. You should feature some on your home page so that visitors see those right away, and if you can garner enough, consider having a dedicated tab of testimonials on your website as well. For prospective patients, this will help build confidence in your practice right from the start.

Time to Take Control

Demandforce makes it simple to improve your online reputation by automating much of the process of gathering and posting reviews from satisfied patients where prospective patients are seeking dentists online. Learn more about how to effectively manage your online reputation by visiting henryscheinone.com/demandforce. Or find out more about the Dentrix-integrated version of Demandforce, Dentrix Patient Engage, at dentrix.com/products/eservices/patient-engage .