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With the rise of social media and online review sites, word of mouth is becoming more important to dentists and dental business owners than ever. It used to be that an angry patient could tell their friends and family that they didn't like your business, but that was the extent of the damage they could cause. Now, an angry patient can blast their complaints across the internet, potentially scaring off future patients from ever walking through your door.

Bad reviews happen to every business, but as the owner of a dental clinic, you can actually harness the power of these bad reviews and turn angry patients into your biggest advocates. The idea behind this technique is twofold. You want to make things right for the patient who felt wronged, but you also want to publicly show others that your dental clinic takes the satisfaction of their patients seriously. 

Even if you are treating your patients right and following up with patients after every visit, there is still a chance that someone will leave a bad review about your clinic. Fortunately, the following steps will walk you through what you need to do to turn this negative situation into a positive one.

Here is how to turn bad reviews into positive marketing for your dental clinic:

1. Address bad reviews and comments as soon as possible. This means that you should be monitoring your online reputation so that you can quickly respond to any negative feedback. When you respond quickly to any problems experienced by a patient, you are demonstrating that you listen to your patients and care about making things right for them. Some helpful services for monitoring what people are saying about you or your clinic online include: SocialMention, Google Alerts, and Trakur.
   
   
2. Reply to the negative comment or review by offering to right the wrong. Be willing to take responsibility for the bad experience, even if it wasn't your fault. Introduce yourself as the dentist or staff member from the dental clinic and let the reviewer know that you value their opinion and are sorry to hear they had a bad experience. Most importantly, offer to give them something for free or at a deep discount to demonstrate that you will do what it takes to make things better. Look at this offering as an investment. Your quick response and willingness to make things right is a bit of marketing that will show other potential patients that your dental clinic is a step above the competition.
   
   
3. After you have responded to the bad comment or review, wait a few weeks and publicly follow up with the patient again to make sure that you have adequately addressed their needs. This step is crucial because it will really lock in the fact that you truly care to anyone who sees the exchange, including the original reviewer but also potential future patients.

This three prong approach will turn any patient from a complainer into a brand advocate for your dental clini. Instead of publicly putting your business under fire, they will be bragging to all their friends and family about what a great dentist you are. Even better, anyone who sees your quick response to the negative review online will feel like they can trust your clinic to provide the dental care they need.

Ok, now that you have responded to any bad reviews, the next step is to start generating new, positive reviews and comments about your clinic. There is a simple technique that will both prevent bad reviews and encourage patients to leave good reviews. All you need to do is first make it easy for your patients to leave reviews, and then start reminding them about leaving reviews while your services are fresh in their mind. For example, you might follow up with patients by email after each dental visit, asking for them to leave a review and making sure to provide them with quick links to your business profile at online review sites, such as your Yelp or Facebook profile.

Would you like to start getting reviews but are overwhelmed with all the different review websites and social services? Want help linking your website up with places your patients can leave reviews? At DentalMatrix, our Premium and Elite marketing packages are specifically designed to help dentists market their business effectively and our marketing specialists will do all the work for you, including helping you get set up on multiple online review websites. We will even create a "Share Your Experience" page on your website for you, making it easy for patients to leave reviews for your dental clinic. Interested? Contact DentalMatrix today!

You may remember when marketing your dental office or clinic was a one-way conversation. As a business owner, after creating your marketing campaign you were pretty much done. Either your marketing efforts worked or they didn't, and success was easy to measure. Whether or not patients responded to your ads or promotions would immediately let you know if your marketing efforts were successful.

Now, with the rise of social media and online interactions, the playing field for dental marketing has completely changed. With the creation of services like Facebook and Yelp, your marketing efforts are much more likely to involve interacting with your patients instead of talking "at" them. This online interaction has both its upsides and its downsides. In the "old days" a huge dentist's office with a sizable marketing budget may have been able to crush their smaller competitors with their marketing efforts alone. Today, smaller dental clinics can aggressively compete against larger competitors simply by offering a great dental experience and above average customer service. A small dental office with a dedicated staff can leverage their superior service and gain a distinct marketing advantage over big marketing budgets. This helps small businesses compete because even a huge marketing budget can no longer protect big businesses from getting hit hard from a negative social media backlash if they offer sub-par service.

But how do you use social media to show off your great service and market your business? The answer lies in getting patients to talk about your business online. Social media services like Facebook provide dentists with a free way to converse with their patients online and get constructive feedback on how to improve their overall customer experience. Interacting with patients on services like Facebook or Yelp also gives you the ability to turn angry or unhappy customers into the number one advocate for your business.

Have you gotten negative reviews or had negative comments made about your dental office? You don't need to suffer in silence, it's possible to actually use these reviews to grow your business. You can turn a negative review around by contacting the reviewers publicly and making things right for them. This also demonstrates to future patients that you care about keeping your patients happy. Want to learn more? Check back for our next blog post which will teach you how to turn a negative reviewer into your dental clinic's number one advocate!

If you would like more advice on what you need to do to market your business effectively online, don't wait another day! Download this free Dental SEO Guide by DentalMatrix and learn how to market your dental clinic online effectively and get new patients. This exclusive SEO Guide was written specifically for dentists by our marketing experts and will walk you through several free and cheap ways to spread the word about your business online. DentalMatrix also offers "Starter" marketing packages to get dentists off the ground with a new website. If you are too busy to worry about SEO and web marketing, you can opt for our "Premium" or "Elite" marketing packages where we will do all the legwork for you so you can focus on handling all the patients coming through your door. Contact DentalMatrix for a free web marketing consultation today!

You may have heard that Bing partnered with Facebook in May 2011 to improve Bing's search results based on the websites that users are interacting with on Facebook. After the Facebook social search feature was rolled out, websites that were "Liked" on Facebook appear to climb the ranks in Bing's search results, without making any other changes. This has huge implications for dental business owners who want to maximize their results and minimize their time spent focusing on web marketing. If creating a buzz on Facebook can help your website show up higher in the Bing search engine rankings, then Facebook seems like a great place to invest time with your online marketing strategy. However, trying to interact with patients and attract new business on Facebook has been hit or miss for many dentists, where some experience huge successes on Facebook while others feel only frustration. Even though interacting on Facebook may help your website show up on Bing, it is important to note that Bing is still much smaller than Google. While Bing has been gaining ground on Google since its inception, Google still took about 64% of the search volume compared to Bing's 32% of the searches in May 2011 (Credit: Compete). That means that Google gets about twice as many searches as Bing. So what can a dentist do to improve their search results and optimize their websites for Google?

Google has recently released its own version of the Facebook "Like" which is known as the Google "+1." It can get a bit awkward to talk about multiple Google +1's, so let's get the terminology out in the open. If a website gets two or three Google +1's, they will now have +2 or +3.

After the release of the +1, SEO professionals have been trying to figure out what the purpose of this new tool will be for search engine marketing. Then Google changed the playing field. Less than two weeks ago, Google surprised the world by releasing Google+ (pronounced "Google Plus"). Google+ is a new take on social interaction on the internet and in many ways is like other social networks such as Facebook. However, there are some major differences, such as using Google +1's instead of Facebook Likes.

Even though the +1 feature has only been around a short while, preliminary tests already indicate that websites which have received +1's tend to show up higher in Google's search results. This is just like how Facebook Likes seem to help websites show up higher in Bing. The fact that +1's can help a dental website show up higher in Google search results is a big deal for web marketing, since this is a brand new way to improve a website's Google search rankings. Some SEO experts even feel that dentists may get more bang for their buck focusing on getting Google +1's over Facebook Likes.

So what does this mean to you, the busy dentist? Should you be worrying about Google+ and +1's? Chances are, you may have to wait to decide because Google+ is currently in a limited field trial, which means that registration was opened to the public for a short while, and then closed again while Google continues to test and refine the Google+ interface. However, +1's are available to everyone and because the +1 helps websites do better in the Google search results, there are some strong incentives for dental website owners to try to get +1's for their website now, and then try to get a Google+ account when it's officially released.

The most important take away from this article is that social media hubs such as Facebook and Google+ are making a huge impact on the web marketing landscape. Right now, Facebook has a much higher adoption rate while Google+ is still in a closed trial, but Google +1's may possibly be more effective at improving search engine results than Facebook Likes. Chances are, the best results will be achieved by taking a web marketing strategy that utilizes both Facebook Likes and Google +1's. If you would like help creating or marketing your dental website, don't hesitate to contact DentalMatrix today!

If you are a time-crunched dentist and business owner, you probably want to concentrate on only the most impactful online marketing tools for your dental website. In order to effectively market your business online, you will need to know how new patients are finding dentists on the internet. One of the most common ways that patients are locating new dentists is through internet searches on search engines like Google.com, Bing.com, and Yahoo.com. But what must a dentist do to market themselves online and to be easily found by new patients? Google, Bing, and Yahoo are the most widely-used search engines, but what steps need to be taken to get your information to show up in the search engines and which search engine should you be focusing your web marketing strategy on to get new patients?

For a dentist, the first step to generating new patients from the internet is to obtain a search engine friendly and user optimized dental website. For dentists without a lot of competition in their area, just putting up an optimized website with business information may be all that is needed to climb to the top of the search results. For dental clinics that are located in competitive markets, however, the first step should be a dentist-optimized search engine marketing strategy. If you are a dentist who needs help getting started with your own search engine marketing strategy, don't hesitate to refer to our free dental SEO Guide which has been specifically created to help dentists market themselves online effectively without breaking their budget.

Because search engine optimization is so important to what we do at DentalMatrix, we stay on top of new developments regarding successful web marketing and SEO strategies for dentists. That is why we've been keeping a close ear to the ground when it comes to the latest developments between competitors Google.com and Bing.com, two of the most popularly used search engines. These search engine giants have recently teamed up with social media hubs to improve their search results, and the resulting partnerships seem like they will have a huge impact on web marketing strategies. By staying ahead of the curve in regards to what will make a dental website successful in the search engines, we help our DentalMatrix website owners outrank their competition and turn their website into a new patient magnet.

Want to learn more about online marketing for dentists? Come back tomorrow to learn about how Facebook and up-and-coming Google+ can be used to generate new patients for your business.

Maybe you'd rather have someone else do all the legwork for you so you can focus on running your dental office or clinic. DentalMatrix is a leader in dental marketing and can help you create a world-class website as well as provide you with a fully managed marketing plan where we tale care of everything needed to market your website and business. If you would rather leave the online marketing work to the SEO experts, while you focus on the stream of new patients coming into your business, don't hesitate to contact DentalMatrix and get started today!

We are all very lucky to be in a nation where we are free to do business as dentists and web marketers to serve our communities.

Have a wonderful and safe Independence Day.

--The DentalMatrix Team