Are medical SEO and online reviews co-related?
Online doctor reviews have developed over the past few years into an essential tool in the toolbox of every healthcare marketer and medical practice. The number of independent review sites has increased, and patients are writing and citing reviews of doctors online at an exponentially increasing rate.
Prospects can use online reviews to determine the best services and doctors to see. Reviews have become a crucial component of healthcare marketing, making it more important than ever to manage one’s online reputation.
Numerous studies have been done to find out how reviews—especially unfavorable ones—affect a medical practice’s visibility, awareness of its services, conversion rate, and financial success.
But there’s more to it than that. Online evaluations of physicians are becoming more significant, and as a result, search engine algorithms have begun to incorporate them, affecting both rankings and overall results. In actuality, it is impossible to ignore the significance of online reviews for medical SEO.
Let’s review how reviews affect your bottom line before talking about the connection between medical SEO and online reviews for doctors.
- importance of reputation and online reviews
Your medical practice’s four- and five-star ratings demonstrate that you are a reliable brand. This shows that patients are more likely to select you over your rivals.
- Multiple positive reviews increase the chance of persuading clients to pay more for services.
Reviews are a potent word-of-mouth marketing tool because over 80% of people trust an online review as much as a personal recommendation.
According to a recent study by Harvard Business Review, improving the review rating on Yelp by one star could lead to a 5 percent to 9 percent increase in revenue.
- Impact of negative online reviews on your healthcare brand
One single negative review can drive away almost 22 percent of patients, whereas three bad reviews can drive away nearly 59 percent of patients.
- Patients hesitate to visit doctors with no online reviews.
In an era where digitization has taken over healthcare marketing, online reviews for doctors are bound to drive patients either toward or away from your medical practice. Making patient satisfaction an essential part of your medical practice can only help its sales and profitability.
Do online reviews affect medical SEO?
Yes, search engines factor into your review profile (including quality and quantity) when calculating your ranking. It has been established that patients love reviews and, most times, use a good or bad review to validate their decision whether to schedule an appointment with a doctor.
Given that they share many of the same goals, it should not be surprising that healthcare SEO and online reviews for physicians are closely related. A search engine wants to make it as simple as possible for users to find the best service. Online reviews help patients find the best doctor for their needs by separating the good from the bad.
Consider online doctor reviews as crowd-sourced referrals. Search engines can confidently display that medical practice in a high-visibility location if they receive four or five-star reviews.
Online reputation and medical SEO
Online reviews account for 13% of search engine judgments, according to the Moz Search Ranking Factors Survey. Metrics like the quantity, velocity, and diversity of reviews for a medical practice are all taken into consideration by algorithms that incorporate online reviews.
As competitive differentiators, having online reviews across a variety of platforms, having many positive sentiments in the reviews, and having pertinent keywords have all been identified.
Google reviews: Are they important for medical SEO?
They found online reviews to be the most important factor for establishing and improving SEO-driven results, according to a study of SEO ranking factors by SEO Guide.
For instance, if you have a lot of online reviews and include the city and keywords you want to rank for, your medical practice is more likely to appear higher in search engine results.
Google will no longer permit users to review doctors online in an anonymous or unidentified manner. Google took action to implement this ban, and medical practices with deleted online reviews dropped in the rankings. This implies that your medical practice’s search engine ranking will be directly impacted by the quantity of online reviews it has.
Online reviews feed the search engine crawlers
If you’ve ever worked with a company that helps people repair their online reputations, you know how important new content is to SEO. You are constantly urged to write blogs, develop new landing pages, and spend money on healthcare content marketing because of this.
Analyses function similarly. Regular reviews give search engine spiders a steady stream of new content to ingest. This is especially true if the reviews are posted on reputable directories like Google My Business and Yelp.
We can assume that negative reviews would result in a drop in search rankings given the emphasis placed on obtaining positive reviews and the knowledge that reviews affect ranking. This is not the case, though.
One or two unfavorable reviews wouldn’t be enough to cause a drop in search engine ranking.
Numerous large medical facilities or hospitals have thousands of reviews, the majority of which are unfavorable. Reading online reviews is also necessary because the quality of the content is just as important as the quantity.
Healthcare SEO and managing online reputation
When we combine all of these facts, it becomes clear that an SEO review management strategy should be put into place. It should be obvious that getting positive online reviews is essential to a medical practice’s success in achieving objectives like increasing brand recognition, trustworthiness, and profitability.
Why work with Practice crown for digital reputation management?
PracticeCrown understands that in order for medical practices to remain competitive, they must have outstanding review profiles. Building a reliable reputation and retaining patients’ love are more crucial than ever because online reviews for doctors are becoming more prevalent.
Because of this, Practice Crown has created tools for digital reputation management or online reputation repair that make it easy for doctors to create, track, and display online reviews.