The Importance of Online Reviews for Chiropractors and How to Get Them
Online reviews for your chiropractic office can improve social credibility and brand trust. If your patients have great experiences at your office and leave reviews, prospective patients can be confident that they’ll enjoy the same treatment. For chiropractors, customer reviews can be used to build trust with patients, before a patient even walks through their doors.
Online Reviews and The Power to Influence
Online reviews influence a potential patient’s opinion about your practice and their decision to visit your office, serving as proof of the quality of services you offer. These reviews have the power to influence people when they’re online choosing a chiropractic practice and booking an appointment. If you’re a chiropractor looking to increase your patient base, online patient reviews will play a major role in helping your practice succeed. Many people rely on reviews to form an opinion about a business. People tend to believe most of what they read on online platforms, especially when it comes to healthcare.
If you want to stay competitive, managing your online presence is crucial.
What are Online Reviews?
Online reviews are a form of customer feedback that comes straight from a person who has received service from a particular business. Whether the consumer is happy with their experience or not after they have received a service or purchased a product it’s made known to the public, to encourage or deter other consumers from visiting that business. This feedback is often sent through online review sites such as Google and Yelp.
When a person is seeking chiropractic treatment in their area, often the first place they check is the internet. Potential patients will usually look at the top reviews before they book an appointment. Unfortunately, research has shown that over fifty percent of consumers say negative business reviews cause them to avoid seeking treatment from a particular practice.
If your reviews are negative, consumers can easily view this negative feedback, which can be devastating to your practice.
Why Are Online Reviews Important for Chiropractors?
When it comes to consumers, online reviews matter and can determine which chiropractic office they will visit. Most people turn to online reviews to choose a chiropractor, which can help your practice, or cost you business, depending on the types of reviews that have been left.
Gathering Positive Reviews
There are many ways you can gather reviews from your chiropractic patients. You can speak with patients and ask them to leave a review on your website, Google, and other review sites. You can also encourage a patient to leave a review on your social media accounts, such as Facebook or Instagram. It’s crucial that you make it easy for a patient to leave a review by providing links and clear instructions.
Requesting Positive Reviews from Patients
Requesting positive reviews regarding your chiropractic services can be a simple way for you to gather valuable feedback from your patients, boost your rankings, and improve your services. By requesting reviews from patients that have had positive experiences, you can expect great feedback that can be seen on multiple platforms, which can encourage other patients to leave feedback and also draw new patients to your practice.
Encouraging Excellent Experiences to Generate Positive Reviews
The most important way you can encourage your patients to leave you positive ratings online is to provide excellent patient care. You want to compel all of your satisfied patients to leave positive feedback regarding the quality service and excellent care they experienced at your practice. Do this by elevating your care standards and going above and beyond for your patients.
Utilizing Email Marketing Tools and Other Direct Links to Gather Reviews
You can send patients follow-up emails the day after their visit. In this email, you can thank them for visiting your office and request feedback regarding the chiropractic care they received. This portion is all about concern for their customer experience, so focus on customer satisfaction. This can help build a trusting relationship. Toward the end of the email include a couple of lines of texts with links that ask them to share their experience at your practice. These links can be for your social media accounts, website, Google Business profile, and other review sites.
Consideration of Personal Recommendations from Existing Patients
After a positive experience at your chiropractic office, existing patients may recommend your services to family and friends in need of an experienced, knowledgeable chiropractor. By providing above-and-beyond patient care, taking the time to answer a patient’s questions, and focusing on providing stellar treatment, patients are often encouraged to recommend your practice and provide word-of-mouth referrals to family and friends.
Handling Negative Reviews
Negative reviews can be difficult to handle, especially if these complaints are unjustified. These reviews can also have a major negative impact on your rankings in the search engine. Because of this, it’s important that you respond to each negative review. When you do so, you must remain calm and professional. When an unsatisfied patient sees your attempt to resolve any issues, they may change their mind and their review.
Responding to Negative Reviews in an Appropriate Manner
When you ignore a negative review, it can look like you and your practice don’t care about that patient’s negative experience at your office. Additionally, the patient that left the review may feel justified leaving the negative review because you failed to acknowledge the issue.
Instead of ignoring the review, use it as your chance to highlight the positive qualities of your chiropractic office. However, make sure you focus more on empathizing with the unsatisfied patient and provide honest answers to their concerns. It’s important to show that you genuinely regret the patient’s bad experience. Avoid becoming defensive, even if the negative review was untrue or slanderous. Some reviewers post in bad faith. If you choose to engage with them, it can escalate the situation. When you respond to negative feedback, make sure you address the patient’s concerns, keeping your response polite, short, and to the point. Keep your tone neutral and correct any false statements. You should also offer to discuss the matter further via email or over the phone if it seems appropriate.
Understanding the Impact of Negative Reviews on SEO and Potential Patients
A negative review can damage your image and trustworthiness. One bad review can drive away over 20% of patients. Three or more bad reviews can drive away over 50% of patients. A patient will also hesitate to seek treatment from a chiropractor if there are no online reviews. Unfortunately, online reviews can affect your search engine rankings. Search engines factor in a practice’s review profile when they calculate its ranking. Search engines want to help people searching for a particular service to find it as quickly as possible. An online review can serve to help patients find the best chiropractor for their needs by separating the good from the bad.
Developing an Effective Review Collection Strategy for Chiropractors
It’s obvious that gathering positive patient reviews can be valuable for your practice and your online reputation. However, the process can be challenging for many chiropractors. This is because not all patients are motivated to leave a review, even if they’ve had a positive experience at your office. This is where some expert tips and a little creativity come into play.
Patient feedback can come in many forms, from testimonials, emails, star ratings, and reviews. You can use positive feedback to encourage prospective patients to visit your practice and enjoy high-quality service. By creating a strategy to collect patient reviews, you can focus on strengthening your online reputation and drawing more new patients to your practice.
Implement User-Friendly Review Platforms
Setting up profiles on user-friendly review platforms can make it easy for patients to leave feedback about your services.
Review sites can help increase your patient base, allowing you to reach more prospective patients across multiple platforms. These sites can put more eyes on your practice, building trust.
These sites can include:
- Google My Business
- Yelp
Personalized Follow-Up Communications
Responding to a patient’s review in a timely manner leaves an impression on prospective and existing patients. Responding to reviews can also encourage curious individuals to check out your practice. Responding shows your patients that you care about the services you provide and their health care needs. Make sure you always follow up with both positive and negative reviews.
Address Negative Reviews and Learn from Feedback
If you receive negative feedback, you must respond and address the situation. A negative review can have a major impact on your practice’s ability to attract new patients, especially if you don’t have many reviews to begin with. Dealing with a negative review doesn’t have to be difficult. Make sure you address the patient’s concerns and use this opportunity to make things right. Always act strategically and quickly. Avoid trying to win the argument and instead, apologize for the patient’s bad experience, explain what went wrong, if possible, and accept fault. Remain positive and be appreciative of the feedback.
Leverage Social Proof and Testimonials
Social media is a great tool that you can use to promote your chiropractic office, showcase your expertise and engage with potential patients. Consider creating an Instagram account, Twitter account, and Facebook page. Make sure you share engaging and educational content, patient success stories, and updates about your practice. Social media platforms can also be a great place to share positive patient testimonials, which can build trust with your target audience and encourage potential patients to visit your website and/or book an appointment.
Conclusion
Positive patient reviews can have a major impact on the success of your chiropractic office. By ensuring your patients receive the best care and services possible you can feel confident that any feedback they leave you online will be positive. However, you must also take a proactive approach to encourage your patients to leave reviews, making it easier for them to do so by sending links in emails, setting up profiles on review sites and social media platforms, and simply asking your patients to leave a positive review on your site or other sites. Improving your patient reviews can boost your search result ratings and boost your online reputation, resulting in more traffic to your site and an increase in leads.