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Why Patient Testimonials Matter
Testimonials are great for helping to convert visitors to your website to patients at your practice! They add legitimacy to your website and make people more willing to start treatment with you.
Helping leads feel comfortable with your brand and gaining their trust is a big part of successfully converting potential new patients. Although there are many ways to do this, strategically placing testimonials from current patients on your website is one highly effective strategy.
When a potential patient is contemplating whether or not to get any dental or ortho service done with your practice, they’re wondering how it will solve a problem they have or benefit them. Often, they will be swayed to schedule an appointment by simply seeing the practice or photos of the product or service in action. Other times, they need a bit more convincing in order to take action. Testimonials are helpful because they provide an opportunity to state specific benefits from others who have had experience with that specific product or service.
Rules to Note
It is against Google’s rules and regulations for any business to duplicate testimonials across platforms. For instance, if you copy reviews from your Google My Business platform and add them to a testimonials page on your website, Google sees that as duplicate content.
Your website itself has the potential to be penalized in search engine results, and your Google My Business profile could lose the reviews you worked so hard to gain. Google must feel like they can trust you. If you don’t have any unique reviews on the platforms – if every single review is copied to another platform–then that’s probably a strong indicator of mistrust.
Evaluating Your Current Testimonials Status
First, take a look at your website. Determine if you have a testimonials page. If you are able to find that page on your site, great! If you can’t find it, make a note that this is something you will want to add to your site.
It’s also very important to have updated testimonials. Seeing a good review from 2014 isn’t nearly as impactful as a review from last month. If possible, make a note of when your last testimonial was received. The easiest way to do this to simply see if a date is included next to the review. If you can’t find a date, that’s okay. Having any testimonials is a great start.
Taking Action
If you are lacking testimonials or have them but want to continue to grow that base, we have a few strategies for you. The first is to send a post appointment survey or a follow-up email to a patient asking for feedback on their visit. That’s a great resource for on-site reviews.
You can also do bigger email campaigns. Send an email to all of your patients and ask them to leave you a review. Asking for feedback from all patients who you see is a great practice in general, and will help keep you in tune with the perceived value your practice is providing to all of your patients.
Finally, simply ask a patient as they leave for a review or give them a handout as a reminder. In this scenario, they are in your office and your practice and the services you provide are the most current thing on their mind. Why not take advantage of that fact and just let them know you would love their feedback? Handing them a flyer is often a successful strategy because it’s something tangible. Even if they forget, at some point they will have to pick up the flyer and will think to themselves “Oh right! I did say I was going to review them!”
Do you have any other questions or are you in need of some testimonials marketing support? Feel free to reach out to the Sesame SEO Team. We are happy to help!
—Naomi Newell, Lead SEO Specialist, Sesame Communications