As a medical professional, managing your reputation among clients might be easier in person because you can have interactions that show your sincerity. However, online might be trickier. There are barriers like negative reviews that can be outside of your control and damage your reputation to potential clients.

Digital Authority Partners had some interesting statistics on the topic. These include:

• “When negative media coverage or online reviews about doctors appear online, medical practices see a one third drop in visits and calls to their offices, causing a potentially disastrous financial impact.”
• “As early as 2012, 60% of US customers researched their doctors online. By 2016, 84% of patients researched new medical practitioners before their first appointment.”

These statistics prove the importance of online reputation – it is crucial to recruiting new patients.  

So, what do you do to maintain a shiny gold reputation online?

• Respond to all your reviews, even the negative reviews. Do not ignore them or fight back. Ignoring them won’t make them go anywhere, and you will look inattentive/uninvolved with patients. Check out Ignite Medical Co’s blog titled “How To Respond To Online Reviews” for some tips. https://www.ignitemedicalco.com/how-to-respond-to-online-reviews/
• Encourage individuals with positive experiences to share their reviews. You can do this by incentivizing them with a drawing for writing a review or just asking them when they’re checking out. Generating more positive content will outweigh any negative review, making your overall rating higher – which is what most patients will look at first.
• Create blog posts directed towards your patients. Digital Authority Partners reports this will drive traffic to your website, show your expertise in the field, and is an effective form of free PR.
• Optimize SEO. You want to display relevant and important information when a patient searches for “Optometrists in Columbia, MO”. This is something Ignite Medical Co. can help with, just look at the services tab on our website. https://www.ignitemedicalco.com/services/

While there are countless ways to improve or maintain your online reputation, these are just a few of the key ones. Increasing online presence on any platform will help drive traffic to your website and show your expertise. It is important to remember that you’re never going to please everyone but you can try your hardest to get as many patients on your team.

Check out Ignite Medical Co. for any and all of your web design, SEO, social media, content marketing, logo design, and analytics needs! All the information on our services can be found on our website https://www.ignitemedicalco.com/