Surefire Ways To Handle Negative Patient Reviews

Surefire Ways To Handle Negative Patient Reviews

Online reviews are worth their weight in gold, and a mix of positive and negative reviews helps improve your patients’ trust in your staff and service. Indeed, recent stats indicate that the presence of negative reviews can improve conversion rates by 67 percent. This is because if the reviews are entirely positive, most people think they are fake. In addition to increasing a patient’s trust in your practice, negative reviews can give him or her a real picture about the success and credibility of your service. In addition, patients who read negative reviews convert better because the fact that they are paying close attention means they are likely to visit your practice.

To begin with, negative reviews do not mean your brand is not good enough. A lot of healthcare marketers deal with negative reviews at some point. Most of the time, negative reviews are a result of mismatched expectations and communication gaps. Therefore, if you happen to get a scathing review of your service, it does not mean your staff or service are bad. In fact, when a medical practice decides to publicly display their negative reviews, it proves it has nothing to hide. Displaying the not-so-good reviews shows that though some patients were not very happy with your service, the majority of patients are satisfied with the way your staff treated them.

While no healthcare marketer wants to get negative online reviews, they are bound to happen. The trick is to mitigate the damage caused by negative reviews by interacting with your patients and reassuring them that you are addressing the pain areas. One of the most effective ways to reverse the damage caused by a bad review is to respond to the reviewer positively. A professional and timely response can mitigate the potential impact of a negative comment and create growth opportunities for your brand.

There are two ways of mitigating the harmful impacts of negative reviews: deleting negative reviews and burying them.

Removing Negative Comments Permanently

Removing a negative review permanently disassociates it from your brand name and ensures searchers never see it again. While this technique is effective, it is difficult to implement.

In some cases, your practice website or social media pages may return a negative result. You can try to handle the situation by responding to the negative comment professionally and politely. If the condition is severe, you can consider removing your social media profile altogether and create a new one.

Often, a negative comment will happen on a web page not owned by your practice. For instance, an individual blogger might share a post about a bad experience with your brand, or a patient may share his or her dissatisfaction with your service or staff. If you do not own or control the web page, removing negative posts from SERPs is much more difficult and may require professional help.

many people actively seek out negative reviews

Burying Negative Comments

The next-best option for minimizing the damage caused by harmful online reviews is with search engine suppression, also known as reverse SEO. Burying a negative comment deep in the search engine results will reduce its visibility. With this strategy, instead of trying to remove the negative comment, you simply create more positive reviews in order to bury the negative comment in the search engine results. In most cases, suppression via reverse SEO also works to strengthen your online brand image and promotes your brand in a positive light.

If the sole aim is to push negative reviews down on SERPs, you must keep an active online presence. Posting great content online will help influence search engine rankings. Fresh and relevant content is a fantastic way to attract good-quality backlinks, which will help improve your website’s authority. You can also start contributing to online forums, blogs and communities within your industry or market. Identify the most influential online communities, create your profile and start contributing to relevant discussions. The positive content frequently posted online will mitigate the harmful effects of negative reviews.

Most Internet searchers only click the first few items in search results. By creating SEO-driven content, your website rises to the top of the search ranks, while other web pages move down. If you are able to push a negative comment to the third or fourth page of search results, it is highly likely that browsers will not even see it.

How To Respond To Negative Reviews?

You are passionate about your practice and care about your patients, so negative reviews are going to hurt. However, overthinking will make the situation worse. So, take a step back and remind yourself that negative reviews do not make you a bad doctor. Instead, negative reviews are an inevitable part of running a practice. Keep these tips in mind when handling negative reviews:

Take the first step to protect your online reputation and request your Online Reputation Assessment.