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Four Steps to Improving Your Internet Reputation Ralph Burleson

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Leaving your Internet reputation to chance is dangerous. A poor Internet reputation turns potential new patients away from your practice, and no amount of traditional marketing will fix the problem. Currently, there are more than 120 Web sites that collect and republish comments from dental patients. Sites like Yelp.com and RateMDs.com are indexed by major search engines, which broadcast these comments to every potential patient of your practice.

If patients have posted negative comments about you or your practice, having a good marketing strategy or Web site will do you little good. Imagine for a moment, you have several comments about your well-run and efficient office, and several comments about patients leaving your practice because of high prices. Presenting a fancy Web site will not combat your reputation of being expensive. You need to know what patients are saying when they talk about you on the Internet. Then you need to take control of the conversation.

The four steps below will help you catch negative comments before they harm your practice.

1. Diagnose
Knowing your current reputation is vital to improving it. Don't skip this critical step. Just as an initial exam is the first step to repairing dental problems, the first step to fixing your Internet reputation is completing a detailed review of patients' public comments. To complete this analysis, you need to search national, regional and local sites where people might have posted comments about you or your practice. Put yourself in the mind of the patient, and make sure to check the online Yellow Pages, community sites, national rating sites like Doctoroogle.com and RateMD.com. Then check the primary search engines (Google, Yahoo, Altavista and Bing).

Armed with this list of comments, look for recurring themes. Most dentists have mixed reputations. For example a dentist might have five comments about his nice office, three comments about high prices and three comments about friendly staff. Potential patients reading these ratings may quickly conclude that this dentist has high prices and skip over the positive remarks about the practice. In reality, the dentist might have some of the lowest prices in the area, but the potential patient makes a conclusion based only on the posted information.

There are a few services that simply flood the Internet with "good" comments about the dentist. They push a slew of comments without ever understanding the dentist's existing reputation. This approach is like shouting at a group of people in a public conversation, and not taking the time to listen to what they are saying. This one-sided approach is often ineffective. In our example above, if the dentist uses the shouting approach, he could easily end up with 15 comments about his wonderful office and eight comments about friendly staff, but he would still have the same three comments about high prices. The practice will still risk losing price-sensitive patients.

2. Plan
After you understand the themes of online patient comments, decide what you want your reputation to be. Are you trying to build a reputation from scratch? Minimize damaging comments? Promote a new area of your practice? Great comments about you from actual patients are one of the most cost-effective forms of marketing your practice. Maximize the effect of this powerful media and create the reputation you desire.

You improve your reputation by soliciting targeted feedback from satisfied patients, and then posting the actual comments on the Internet. Your plan should define a set of questions that guide responses, which can be posted on the Internet. Using our "high price" example, let's explore how to alter your reputation to move the focus from "high price" to "good value."

Questions you might ask your patients are:
  1. Considering all of the special discounts, have you received great value at ABC Dental?
  2. How would you describe Dr. Smith to a friend? Does his friendliness put you at ease during your appointments?
  3. Why would you recommend ABC Dental to a friend? Using this particular sequence of questions will generate targeted responses from patients, adding the idea of "friendly value" to the practice's reputation. In our example, the goal would be to transform the reputation to include: 10 new comments about good value and nice discounts, and eight new comments about the friendliness of Dr. Smith.
3. Repair and Improve
Armed with your list of specific questions, create an in-practice, take-home or e-mail survey to solicit your targeted patient feedback. Most patients, if asked, will be happy to fill out a survey. Keeping the survey short will generate detailed comments with better information.

When collecting these comments, ask the patient's permission to share the comments with other potential patients on the Internet. Some patients will even offer to write about your practice on a comment site themselves.

Once you have a list of comments from patients, select the ones that align with your targeted message. Over a period of several months, post these actual comments to online rating sites on behalf of your patients. Spread the comments around on three or four sites. It is very important to trickle the comments into the Internet over a period of months; this mimics the natural flow of Internet reviews.

4. Monitor and Adjust
Every few months, take time to refresh your reputation analysis and then adjust your plan accordingly. Doing a regular reputation check-up might even help you in other ways. Reviewing the public comments can provide great insight into hidden problems in your practice. Often, the most negative comments are posted by patients who have left the practice. They might have complained prior to leaving but never gave feedback to help fix the problem. Your last hope of identifying the hidden issue in your practice might be from a theme of public comments on the Internet.

Just like teeth, your Internet reputation benefits from regular checkups and proactive care. Many dentists are surprised to discover what is written about them on the Internet. Using the four steps in this article, you can take control of your Internet reputation today.
Author’s Bio

Ralph Burleson is the president of Dentscape, which is the leader in the field of Internet Reputation Analysis and Improvement. Dentscape provides turnkey Internet reputation services to dentists across North America. For more information about Dentscape visit www.dentscape.com today.
Dentaltown Magazine
September 2025
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