If you run a dental practice then it’s crucial that you maintain an impeccable image in order to get new customers and clients. After all, when someone pays you to work on them, they will not only be giving you their money but also their trust. They are putting themselves in a very vulnerable position and then trusting you with their dental health. One slip up from you could end very badly for them!

A few bad reviews online can be bad for any business but for a dentist? It’s a death sentence. And here’s the bad news: a ‘few bad reviews’ is almost inevitable. Even the best company in the world is always going to upset a couple of their customers and clients and of course it’s those disgruntled customers that are far more likely to leave reviews.

And that’s where reputation management comes in. Let’s look at how to use social media and SEO for dentists to start improving your image.

What is Reputation Management?

Reputation management is essentially the process of trying to ‘craft’ your image and particularly online. This means trying to improve your ratio of good to bad reviews, trying to make positive feedback more prominent and generally trying to control what your potential customers see when they type your name into their search engines.

How does this work? It comes down to a few different factors:

Reviews

You probably have a business listing on several online directories, as well as on social media accounts like Facebook and Google+. In all these places, you may find that you start to accrue reviews – some of which may be critical or negative. Reputation management means trying to improve the quality of these reviews and that means a) encouraging your satisfied customers to leave feedback b) responding to negative reviews and c) trying to reduce the ‘visibility’ of the negative reviews.

SEO

How do you reduce the visibility of a review you may be asking? The answer is that you use SEO for dentists – or Search Engine Optimization – which is essentially the process of increasing the ranking of your site or another site on Google via a combination of ‘link building’ and writing good content.

In the context of reputation management, the goal of SEO for dentists is to build the prominence of your site as compared with the competition and to increase the prominence of positive reviews, versus negative reviews. Ultimately, you are trying to very slowly ‘curate’ what people see when they search for your brand on Google.

Social Media

Reputation management also means using social media for dentists as a platform to get to know your customers and to put forward a good image. You can also use tools like Trackur to get notifications whenever your brand is mentioned, so that you can provide an appropriate response.