It use to be simple – you had one website, a few physician bios and practice locations to maintain information for. Not so anymore.
Today there are multiple websites that list physician bio and location information.
In addition, with the increase in merger and acquisition activity and websites who list physicians, it’s easy to see how the information you have on the web can quickly become outdated. Having incorrect addresses, physician information, and phone numbers can negatively impact you, your practice and your brand, resulting in the loss of potential patients.
Directory sites, such as Healthgrades, Vitals, Yelp and Google Plus Local occupy most of the top slots on search engines.
It goes without saying that you, and your practice, should have a presence in these directories. It is equally important, if not more so, that your information is accurate. If patients can’t contact you because the phone number is wrong or find your office because the address is incorrect, you’ve lost a “ready to buy” patient.
Still not convinced you need to clean up your web presence? Consider this scenario…
A potential patient was looking at your outdated, online listings. Based on the information they found, they call your previous practice. What you’ve essentially done is hand that potential patient over to someone else; maybe even a competitor.
As practices are bought and sold and physicians come and go, it becomes more and more difficult to manage your web information.
So, what can you do?
Here are a few tips to help you make sure that potential patients are finding positive, accurate information:
- Periodically check and update your listings on popular directories. You may be surprised at how much inaccurate information you find. I would recommend checking at least quarterly, but you may want to check more often.
- Claim your local listing on sites like Google+Local, Yahoo Local and Bing. This is simple to do and ensures that you, and not your competitor, has control of your information.
- Monitor your online reputation. Whether you know it or not, your patients are reviewing you on sites like Yelp and Healthgrades. You want to make sure you are responding to negative reviews. After all, you don’t want a negative or an inaccurate review to cost you patients.
- Encourage satisfied patients to post reviews . Your patients can be your best sales team, so encourage them to “sell” you to the online community.
If you would like more information on how Practis can assist with managing your online reputation, please contact our online marketing team at 704-887-5300 x 504.
