The advent of social media and the internet brought the voice back to the general public. When before the consumers find it hard to reach out to manufacturers and business owners about their complaints, they can now publish their negative (and positive) reviews online and leave the manufacturers to ponder on how to respond to them. The same thing can happen with dental marketing strategies. A bad review can torpedo months-long of marketing efforts though public relations people will tell you that a bad PR is still good PR.
But such is not the case with dental practices. Though bad PR can be good PR for some products and services (because people are naturally curious and they won’t believe what they read unless they get a taste of the “bad experience”), this is not the way people think when it comes to dental products and services. Clients are more sensitive and more prone to believe reviews and recommendations when it concerns dentists.
This is one reason why dental practices should avoid at all costs getting negative reviews from their clients. Not only will they not recommend your services to their friends and family and their extended network, but they will also try to stop anyone from coming in and availing of your services again. If you try to delete or remove that bad review on your website, that can only fuel their annoyance and anger and might lead to a viral post on Facebook about how you’re trying to censor your reviews and recommendations.
When that happens, no one is going to believe what they read on your website. All those hours you spend on creating, executing, and measuring dental marketing strategies will be wasted. When fewer people visit your site because of one bad review or non-recommendation, Google will automatically analyze the worst about your site.
For Google, low web traffic means bad loading time and irrelevant content. These search engines are programmed in such a way that they will only measure the value of your website based on what you post and how web users react to it. If they notice that your site isn’t gaining visitors but rather is losing them, it will gradually detect “points” from your search index score.
Of course, that does not mean that bad reviews always equate to negative marketing results. As long as you’re on your toes and responds to these kinds of problems immediately, you can easily overturn these bad reviews.