Becoming Who You Want To Be

Let’s start off by making one thing absolutely clear. The age when you could market on the Yellow Pages or in the local newspaper or in a local magazine is quickly drawing to a close. The new medium to reach out and attract new patients for your medical practice is going to be through the Internet, and it’s very important that you develop a strong online marketing plan.

Once you’ve made the move to get a website it is important to realize that just having a presence online is not enough to continue to generate a steady flow of new patients. A website is a nice way for people to be able to reference your contact information but to optimize your new website as a tool for marketing your practice, you will have to move beyond being a tiny presence on the World Wide Web, you will have to do something to draw, or push people toward your website or no one will realize it’s there. You have to do something to make your website stand out, which is where online marketing will help.

As a physician, your ideal result of implementing an Internet marketing plan for your medical practice would be having the information for that practice show up anytime a person in your community searches online for the medical services you provide. The information found needs to make that person feel confident that they will find the best care available at your reputable practice.

You have probably completed the first step to online marketing by setting up a website. The next step is to develop a marketing plan that will successfully highlight your services to those searching for a doctor online. The very best way to attract attention to your website is to provide positive feedback from your current patients. People who are looking for a new doctor look for the best reviews to ensure they find the best services and using positive word-of-mouth is the best avenue to deliver this. Good feedback about how well the services were performed, how courteous your staff was, and how satisfied your patients are with your practice need to be easily seen during an Internet search to draw new patients to your office.

People have always used word-of-mouth as a way to rate a product or service and it hasn’t changed. They still feel this is the most reliable way to find a caring physician. The advantage available to you now through the Internet is that you will be able to circulate large amounts of favorable feedback onto the Internet instead of waiting for people to discuss your practice in conversation. More people will be getting information much faster than before by searching the Web.

Say you get a large amount of reviews written about your medical practice turning up with search engines. A big worry would be that an unhappy patient would write a negative review about your practice. This has the potential to harm your online reputation, which is not the best outcome. The best way to handle this situation would be to have control of what reviews are seen on the Internet. Lots of practices rely on third party sites such as Citisearch to collect reviews for their practice. While this is a good way to collect lots of reviews, the problem is that these third-party sites publish all the reviews, the good and the potentially harmful ones. You would have no way to take the harmful information down from the site, and it would be there for people to see when they search for a doctor in your community.

The best way to get control over the reviews that determine your online reputation would be to create your own review site, complete with your logo and contact information. It would be a website designed for the purpose of gathering your patients’ reviews about your practice, over which you would have the deciding choice to publish the good onto the Internet and keep the moderate or unhelpful reviews to use internally.

The fact that 60 to 80 percent of people who search for services on the Internet starting with a search engine like MSN or Yahoo!, begs the question of how new patients in your community will be able to find your review website. The best way to make sure your practice shows up in a search is to make sure that it ranks very high on search engine results. It’s a fact that the practices who have had online reviews written about their services pop up first in any city when they are searched using Google.

People who are seeking a new physician trust the reviews they read online. The first hand reviews written by a physician’s current patients are the driving force for a successful online marketing plan for your practice because good feedback is what a prospective patient will want to see when considering making an appointment with your practice.

When you have created your own review site, it will get indexed by search engines such as Yahoo! and Google the same way your own web site has gotten indexed by the various search engines, and as you collect more reviews and decide to publish more reviews to your own review site, eventually, you will have hundreds and hundreds of reviews. That means pages and pages of growing, changing, unique content. When search engines find this kind of information about the medical services you offer, your reviews will rank very highly when someone goes searching for medical services in the community in which you practice.