Your medical and dental practice web marketing should include the garnering of reviews from patients that have been with you a while. Make it easy on them by providing a place to submit a review in your waiting room.

Check out this Google result for dentist reviews chicago

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The overall volume of dental and medical patients checking reviews on the Internet is rising at a staggering clip. Check out these next two images detailing the increase in search volume for medical and dental practices since 2004. The data is courtesy of Google Insights.

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You can find the complete explanation concerning how Google arrives at these figures here.

At the moment Google and Yahoo are not taking into account whether a review is negative or positive as part of the local algorithm but rumor has it that this will change fairly soon. Both companies are very interested in the Local Search market and are looking at purchasing companies that aggregate and make sense of a review and it’s meaning.

A lack of reviews is at best a neutral indication of the quality of your practice and at worst a strike against you for being completely absent of these reviews.

You should be constantly scouring the web for your name and the name of your practice. Check out my post on controlling your online reputation on this blog for more on the subject of automating this process.

If you are finding disparaging reviews about your practice you can try to remove them or hire a firm to remove the defamatory posts.

Do: Start asking your patients to submit reviews of your practice.

Don’t: Ignore these reviews and neglect to manage the reputation of your medical or dental practice online.