Your Online Chiropractic Reputation is Vital
Having been in this industry for ten years now I have come to understand the importance of your online reputation. It is so easy for anyone of your patients to hop on a forum or a blog and defame you. If they use your name with keywords like chiropractic or chiropractor the likelihood of search engines finding it and returning it in a related search query is huge.
I used to work for a large internet marketing consulting firm, who shall remain nameless and the firm’s biggest nuisance was the smudge that unsatisfied clients left on the web. Whenever a search was done for the company name all the negative information came up in the results and it was not pretty. The bad outweighed the good because people don’t have much to say about you online when you do great things for them.
Do a search in Google for “paypal”. The page is filled with anti paypal websites and reading these makes paypal sound really risky to use. Do you think this hurts potential clients? I do believe in accountability and if you are an unethical business or chiropractor people should be aware, but there is no way to measure the validity of online information. So anyone can say anything online and your gonna suffer.
There is an increasing number of “interactive” website popping up all the time. Wikipedia is probably the best example of the new generation of interactive websites. Did you know that anyone can create or edit a wikipedia page!? This leads to checks by the general population which is great, but only those who know they can create a free account at wikipedia and edit have a say about the information. You will not be spanked on wikipedia, unless your big time, but there are plenty of places for people to vent and as the awareness of such sites becomes greater trust me THEY WILL TALK!
So what can you do?
I mentioned this before: encourage your patients to blog about your practice. Many people have blogs, if they blog about how you helped them this will easily be found by many potential patients browsing the web. Plus a testimony about you on another website is huge! Choose clients you like and who like you and encourage blogging about your practice without being to intrusive. Simply ask for a review.
Get involved with online communities. Find a forum where you can participate and as a health expert talk to people and answer questions. In your forum signature add the location of your practice and a link to you website. It’s easy and very effective.
Create your own blog and occasionally blog about local topics. Don’t make everything so broad that Google doesn’t relate your blog to your local area. It’s all about keyword use. If you include the city you practice in then you will be found by those most important–>the local population.
Finally:
You can always hire me to manage your reputation. I have been implementing reputation management into my seo and it’s working wonders for chiropractors. The basic premise is to create a large number of pages all over the web talking about your practice in a positive light. If anything negative comes online we will outnumber the bad with the good. This management is standard in my seo at no additional cost to you. Contact me and I can give you more details.
Periodically check the net for information about you and your practice. If you find nothing that’s not a good thing. We want to have lots of great information online about you, so get out there and make it happen. If you find lots of negative…if you deserve it then that’s one thing but if not I can help.
Some popular rating sites:
There are many more… Find a few and rate your practice. Have fun and it is worth the time and effort.