Online Reputation Management is critical to any business or practice that wants to grow, expand or increase referrals for new business. Reputation management involves establishing a solid reputation in an internet/electronic context. A solid reputation can be established quickly especially on-line, however it will become seasoned over time and the consistency of positive feedback over a period of time is important.

Reputation management websites include: Yelp, Citysearch, Google+ Local, HealthGrades, Vitals, Yahoo, RateMDs, YellowBook and so many more. These websites allow businesses/practices/physicians to create profiles with their information and also allow patients/patrons to post reviews. This is today’s eversion of word-of-mouth referrals. Studies have shown that even when a physician has been referred to a patient by another physician or by another patient, that prospective patient will research on-line reviews before actually going to see that doctor.

Goldman Marketing Group manages an average of approximately 20-30 reputation management profiles for each of our clients. The managing of these accounts involves ensuring the information is accurate, photos are uploaded, reviews are posted and adding relevant keywords to each profile. The keywords are critical because search engines use them to find the profiles. Ensuring the profiles are accurate can sometimes take months since these sites are very careful about their listings and changes made to them. These types of profiles receive a higher ranking with reviews, the more reviews the better. For example, when a prospective patient searches for ‘ENT doctor Beverly Hills’ even if that physician’s website is not highly optimized, often Yelp will be on page 1 of google (as long as there are reviews posted) and so this then link back to the physician’s website.

Consistency is key with on-line reputation management, consistency in the physician’s/practice’s data as well as in the reviews themselves. If the information is incorrect on these websites often prospective patients will be led to competitors’ websites and/or get frustrated that something as simple as a phone number is not accurate and go elsewhere.

One thing to keep in mind is that the reputation management websites are very well optimized so even if a physician’s website is not ranking high on google, these 20+ website will provide backlinks to the website. Backlinks are important because they increase the number of referring websites to your website which increases your website’s SEO. The reputation management websites are also indexed and searched by google and often this increases the ranking of the physician’s/practice’s name because it is being found in more places on-line.

Keep in mind that even if a website is ranked #1 on google and will show up for several keywords, prospective patients will often still cross reference review sites to determine if they should go to this particular physician. So either way, the on-line reputation of any physician or practice is very important and can often be the key to growing your practice or a hurdle in doing so.

On-Line Reputation Management increases your website’s SEO, increases your overall web presence, offers prospective patients more ways of finding your practice and is a great forum for patients to share their experiences with your practice.