dentist online reviews Archives - The Wealthy Dentist

Dental Practice Marketing Involves Managing Online Reviews (video)

June 26, 2012 By Jim Du Molin

Recently online review site Yelp.com announced that it is powering the Microsoft Bing local search engine results.

This means that online reviews of dentists will continue to be important as more and more patients use local search to find dentists.

From a dental marketing perspective, they are great, just as long as no one is trashing your dental practice.

The Wealthy Dentist conducted a survey that asked dentists if they have been searching for themselves online.

A Washington orthodontist responded, “From a marketing point of view, all dentists should know if and where they are on search engines (increasingly patients pick their dentist from Internet search) and what is being said about the practice/dentist.”

In 2011, Inc. magazine wrote that 97% of Internet-connected consumers used online searches to find local businesses. It’s a smart dental marketing practice to check your name and your dental practice name once a week on all the major search engines.

A New York dentist agrees and said, “It’s a good idea to see what your patients are reading about you.”

To hear more of what dentists have to say about monitoring your dental practice online, Click on Play to watch the short video below —

How are you monitoring your dental practice in search?

What dental marketing tools do you use to manage your reputation online?

Filed Under: Dental Videos, The Wealthy Dentist Tagged With: Dental Marketing, dental practice marketing, dentist, dentist marketing, dentist online reviews, dentistry, dentists, Internet dental marketing, online review sites, survey, survey video

Dentists Beware: Yelp Results Now Showing in Bing Searches

June 19, 2012 By Jim Du Molin

Just when dentists thought they had enough of online reviews, now Yelp and Bing are forging an new online search alliance.

This week Microsoft announced that search engine Bing will be featuring content from online review company Yelp, including dental reviews, in its search results.

According to Yelp, Bing search users should begin seeing the Yelp results in search within the next two weeks.

The announcement comes on the heels of a recent comScore report that Google led the U.S. search market in May 2012 with 66.7% of the search market share, followed by Bing with 15.4% and Yahoo! with 13.4%. Ask.com accounted for 3%, followed by AOL, Inc. with 1.5%.

17.5 billion searches were conducted, with Google search sites ranking first with 11.7 billion. Bing search sites ranked second with 2.7 billion searches, followed by Yahoo! search sites with 2.3 billion, Ask.com with 521 million and AOL, Inc. with 268 million.

Bing increased its share of the search market from May of last year and the new partnership with Yelp is an obvious attempt to continue this upward trend.

In the recent blog post, Bing and Yelp Help You Do More with Local Search, Bing writes, “As one of the web’s leading local listing services, Yelp is a great resource that helps connect you with local businesses and restaurants. Scanning reviews from real people can often make the difference between the perfect night out and wishing you had stayed in. At Bing, we’re dedicated to helping you do more, so we are pleased to roll out increased Yelp coverage in Bing search results.“

Microsoft keeps pushing support of Bing against Google by reporting that U.S. searchers on Bing are likely to spend 9% more than U.S. users searching with Google.

As search continues to be influenced by social activity on sites like Yelp, Google Plus, YouTube, and Facebook it will be interesting to see if Bing can compete on a larger scale with Google over time.

How do you feel about Yelp reviews showing up when dental patients search for local dentists on Bing?

For more on this see: comScore Releases May 2012 U.S. Search Engine Rankings

Filed Under: Dental News, The Wealthy Dentist Tagged With: Dental Marketing, dentist, dentist online reviews, dentistry, dentists, Internet dental marketing, marketing, online reviews, search engine marketing, search engines, Yelp Online Reviews

Dentists on the Fence About Social Media Site Yelp

March 29, 2011 By Jim Du Molin

When asked if their dental practice has been affected by consumer review website Yelp.com, dentists were divided between feeling that Yelp is good for their practice, Yelp has caused problems for their practice, and being unsure if Yelp was having an effect on their practice.

Yelp.com is a social networking, user review, and local search website. A few years back it was accused of burying negative customer reviews in exchange for money.

Due to this allegation and the backlash it ensued, Yelp changed its review policies and advertising techniques.

We were curious if this was having any effect on dental practices. Many of the dentists surveyed had strong opinions about their experiences with Yelp.

“One of our dentists had one negative review and many positive reviews,” noted one dentist. “Yet the negative review was always the first one shown.”

In this survey, 41% of dentists didn’t know if Yelp was having an effect on their practice, 31% felt Yelp caused problems, and 28% say Yelp is good for business.

Here are some dentist comments:

“We have had a couple poor reviews from two young males. Both complained about our fees.” (California dentist)
“Patients get to lie on Yelp, but because of HIPAA, we cannot tell the truth about the patient and what really happened.” (Georgia dentist)
“I’m not a big believer in Government Regulation, but I don’t believe attacks should be one-sided . . . there are always two sides to every story, and the dentist’s side Never gets out! These sites should be forced to allow the Practitioner response.” (Arkansas dentist)
“Only one review — and it’s positive — so don’t know the impact.” (Georgia dentist)
“According to San Francisco Chronicle, the owner is a lawyer who started his business by fabricating bad reviews about 800 businesses, which he extorted money from in order to remove the same bad reviews. He tries to hide behind the first amendment. He has caused tremendous damage to dentists all across US by letting disgruntled patients vent numerous insults, while making good reviews about the practice from happy patients disappear to an unreachable filtered section.” (California dentist)
“Anonymous blogs/posts can be placed demeaning anyone! The Tattletale websites: Yelp, Angie’s List, Yahoo, etc take no responsibility on the accuracy. These sites have a poor track record (in my opinion).” (General dentist)