Google a doctor, as in “Dr. Steven Teitelbaum”, and watch Google’s suggestion feature:
Google Suggests Dr Reviews Because It Gets Clicked!
Try this on your name, and you’ll likely see a similar format:
Dr. [your name]
Dr. [your name] reviews
Google suggested terms represent the majority of queries on the web because it’s fast and reflects what other people like to click on or search. We see this in our data at RealSelf, where we get far more traffic to suggest terms vs. the root term (e.g. “breast implants”).
The majority of aesthetics practices I’ve researched have websites that fail to rank for reviews, which means their missing out on a significant number of prospective patients. Not to pick on any one doctor, but I chose to look for Dr. Jeanine Downie’s results. I figure it’s fair game since I’m speaking on a panel with her at the upcoming ASDS Atlanta conference–and she’s covering reputation management issues. RateMDs, Vitals, yelp, and others appear far ahead of her own website:
Reviews search for Jeanine Downie MD
What can Dr. Downie do about this? One proven solution is to embrace reviews by adding reviews right onto the practice website.
For doctors that qualify to be members of RealSelf, they can use our free, simple “widget” to post their RealSelf patient reviews on their own website. Even though the individual review text isn’t visible to Google, the act of adding a dedicated reviews page to the doctor’s website (and having content that keeps people on the page, not bouncing off back to Google search) helps rank the doctor for review traffic.
Consider Dr. Lorrie Klein of OC Dermatology in Laguna Niguel. She discovered that most of her Google suggestion traffic went to Yelp, which ranked #1 for “Lorrie Klein MD reviews”. She didn’t rank at all for this query. In response, her web team made several changes, including adding a page called “Lorrie Klein Reviews, Ratings and Testimonials” with links from the homepage. RealSelf then feeds reviews directly to her site, and updates for new reviews instantly.
Reviews on Lorrie Klein’s website are powered by code from RealSelf
“I probably get more patients from that than anything else except word of mouth,” explains Dr. Klein. “I think they probably Google me and then go to my website.”
Should a doctor prioritize this activity with their webmasters? Immediately.
My friend Eva Sheie has posted about her findings: adding reviews to a doctors website led to a 1500% increase in site traffic.
1500% increase in visits from adding reviews to the doctor’s domain
Takeaway for Doctors: It works.
