If you’ve been approached to have a dental microsite built – think twice! Here’s why….

Microsites, i.e. small websites focused on a single topic, used to be a prominent technique used by SEO companies to gain advantage in the search engines. However, these days the technique is essentially defunct and more often than not, disadvantageous.

A good example of this was recently covered in the national press where the online retailer, Asos, had developed a number of regionalised microsites to try to increase search positions and web traffic, but the effect was hugely negative. We’ll explain more about that in a moment.

The negative aspects of microsites have been known about in the more educated echelons of the search marketing community for some time, and so I was somewhat surprised to see a large invisible aligners company actively pushing the technique for their clients, apparently unaware of the possible problems. This is rather disappointing as the dentists likely assumed they were getting something advantageous, whereas the likelihood is that they were actually diluting their existing websites and search rankings.

So why is?

The dangers of microsites

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The evidence suggests yes!

Another frequently asked question from dentists to the team here at the Dental Media office is “do reviews on Google affect where my website appears in the search results?”

Before we go into detail, let’s break this down a little bit more. When we talk about “organic” search results, we essentially mean the index of results which appear on page one of Google which are not from the paid channel i.e. not Google Ads. This can then be broken down a little bit further into the “map/local” results (the 3 results which appear with extra annotations e.g maps etc) near the top of the page, and also the “traditional” free search results (typically 10 although this can now vary).

It has long been known that reviews do influence whether a business appears in the “local/map” results and just how important this is; but more recently, there is increasing evidence that reviews also influence the rest of the traditional ranking results as well.

Whilst Google has neither confirmed or denied this, the evidence suggests that it is indeed so. The SEO team at Dental Media looks after search marketing for lots of dentists across the UK and as part of this remit we regularly check search positions, number of reviews etc and try to correlate what we see. And what we see is that, in general, reviews can indeed influence traditional search ranking as well as the local/map results.

Is this definite?

As with all things associated with Google, unless they confirm it directly, we can never be 100% sure; we can simply report trends and apparent correlations. Consequently we cannot guarantee that lots of good (or indeed bad) reviews will definitely affect your search positions. However, we can say with a degree of certainty, that in most cases, this does appear to be so. Those websites/businesses which accrue lots of positive reviews do seem to fare quite a lot better with their organic search positions.

There is also some logic to this. If you consider that Google is trying to surface the most appropriate results to satisfy a user’s queries, why wouldn’t they use reviews as a quality signal?

That said, there are also the usual anomalies which crop up from time to time. For example we have seen businesses steadily gain reviews over time and fail to get into the local/map positions for a long time. We have also seen dental businesses accrue reviews very quickly (contrary to advice) and been apparently red-flagged by Google for doing so. More of this below.

A recap on managing the Google review process

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Dental marketing agencies come and go – don’t get left in the lurch

You may have seen the large increase in the number of marketing agencies trying to get into the dental space over the last two or three years.

These typically range from single-handed freelancers to digital agencies from other sectors who decide that dentistry *must* be lucrative and hence they’ll try to get a piece of the action. More often than not they fail, leaving their clients in a mess and without support.

There is a case at the moment where a new company appeared a few years ago and made a big splash at dental shows and and all over the web. This gained them a number of clients quite quickly, albeit the fees they were charging, on the back of huge promises, were significant. However, it would appear that the promises they made regarding huge influxes of new patients, didn’t materialise, resulting in clients slowly slipping away. Today, the company has ceased to exist with the bits and pieces being picked up by others. But as often happens in these cases, clients are being cherry-picked and lots of the smaller businesses are being cast aside.

You might think that this would be relatively easy for a dentist to recover from, after all business fail all the time. However, in this circumstance, significant assets such as websites, had been built using non-industry standard tools which made it nearly impossible for other marketing companies to step in with immediate support. This meant that those businesses which had been cast aside, needed to start from scratch with new websites etc. Time-consuming, costly and potentially disrupting for their businesses too. All considered, not a good situation at all and with lessons to be learned!

Do your homework before starting out with a new dental marketing company

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Proactive management of dental reviews for reputation preservation

Lots of dentists and/or their practice managers know the huge benefits of a comprehensive social media presence and use it very effectively.

It is extremely useful for demonstrating “social proof”, for broadening brand awareness and, via advertising, promoting your services to a targeted local audience. It has sometimes been described as “word-of-mouth on steroids” and when used effectively, social media is a significant tool in the overall dental marketing arsenal.

But with the benefits come a few downsides and one of these is the ever-present issue of negative reviews. This is something I’m asked about on a regular basis by dentists who are worried about embarking on their first social media campaigns or who have dabbled, only to be put off when their first negative review inevitably arrived.

Unfortunately it is not possible to prevent negative reviews and they are a fact of life for any company with an online social media presence. But does that mean we should shy away from Facebook and the like just in case, or should we embrace the opportunities they offer and be prepared to manage a negative review when it comes along? Unless you are adamant that social media isn’t for you and that you understand the implications of not taking part, then the latter option is the way to go.

Why do negative reviews happen in the first place?

Irrespective of how good a business’s service levels are, sometimes things can go wrong. Even when the issue is relatively minor, it’s all too easy for a patient to hop on the the web, track down your Facebook or Google page and leave a bad review. Very often they don’t think twice about the harm that could cause and they just blurt it out regardless. It’s frustrating because most of the time a mature discussion with the dentist or practice manager would likely have solved the issue amicably. But very often the first thing you know about it is when the negative review lands.

The good news is that most web savvy users understand that the odd negative review will crop up when it comes to reviewing businesses and in most part, if the large majority of reviews are positive, they will opt to work with you anyway. So all is not lost if we know how to spot those negative reviews and deal with them appropriately when they land.

Why can’t I just delete a bad review?

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