Three Tips for Google Reviews for Health Care Related Businesses
Peter Brissette • Nov 27, 2018
Hey everybody, Peter Brissette here, digital marketing dude. Welcome to the Monthly Marketing Message. I wanted to talk to you this month a little bit about Google reviews, and in particular, most of our clients are in some healthcare-related industry. And I wanted to highlight some of the really important stats that are out there from a recent study put together by a company called Bright Local that manages and researches online reviews for local businesses.
I’m going to share my screen with you here, so that we can take a look at some of this information. Let’s take a look here. All right, the first slide here that I’m gonna talk about is the percentage of businesses with reviews in terms of volume of reviews.
At the top end of this are bars, restaurants, and hotels. They really dominate the online review space. But, at the other end of this, and kind of in the middle, is where I really want to focus. So, when you start talking healthcare-related businesses, you can see dentists here are at about 84 percent in terms of volume, compared to other businesses.
Health and fitness, which would be any kind of fitness space, is at 75 percent, and then medical in general is at 73. And for those of you that are senior living industry, assisted living, memory care, et cetera, only at about 70 percent.
So, the ones that are below that are, you know, real estate, landscaping, construction, marketing companies, and accountants. So, there’s a couple things that this tells me in terms of the volume is that, if you work at this and you’re in health and fitness and medical, senior living, that you can actually really outshine your competition because in general, there’s not as many in terms of the volume of reviews that are being left out there.
Again, this is by industry in terms of the average number of reviews. Again, senior living, the average number of reviews is only five. That’s incredibly low. And not surprising. So, it’s difficult to get a volume of reviews in that space. But again, this means there’s opportunity. If you work hard at this, you can do well.
Again, health and fitness averages only 20. So, if you’re in that range or below that range, you’ve got some work to do, to really improve that and see that grow. That average rating by industry, so this is interesting. Unfortunately, for senior living, the average rating is only 4.05. I think that’s large, in part, because as an industry, senior living does not work very hard on asking for reviews and getting the good reviews.
What can happen often is the only reviews that are out there are negative reviews. So, there is work to be done, in particularly, in the senior living space. Medical in general averages 4.2. And health and fitness, actually, has pretty good overall ratings in that space, and doing pretty good on that.
So, how does that affect your rankings online? That’s really the key question here. So, on average, when you’re looking at all reviews, if you have a 4.47 average or higher, you likely are gonna be able to rank from one to three. So, that’s in the top three results, in particular for your Google reviews, Google My Business page.
So, that’s pretty significant. And then, if you realize that, well, if I’m only less than four and a half, 4.46 to 4.45, that’s not much difference. That’s .01 difference, can drop you from four to six, or seven to 10. And not, and kick you out of that top one to three ranking.
So, your overall average does matter in terms of how you are going to rank in the search results.
Three tips for you. First of all, check your reviews. If you’re not checking and looking at your reviews, please do that. If you need help with that and you don’t have our review in marketing service, talk to us about it so that you can stay on top of that.
Secondly, I would check and see how many reviews does your close competition have. So, those folks that are five to ten miles around you, what are their reviews? How many do they have? And what’s their overall rating? That becomes your goal. Then, you know what you’re looking for, and what you’re trying to accomplish in your reviews.
And number three, ask for reviews. If you have a conversation with your clients, and they give you positive feedback, immediately ask them to leave a review, and ask them to leave it on Google first, so that you can get your Google reviews up, so that you can help improve your search rankings.
All right, so, those are your tips for this month and your Monthly Marketing Message. Hope you found those useful. Please like, comment, and share on this video. Let others know if you know business owners who could get some good use out of this video, please let them know. And we wish you a fantastic month.
Thanks to Bright Local for the research they did on this topic.
The last question that should we follow our competitors on social media? Sure, why not. You know, you want to see what they're doing and see what's happening there. You know if you're going to be active and you're really trying to use social to build your business then having a good idea what's what your competition is up to is probably important. And you know sometimes what I find with so called competitors is that we you know often times find people that we can collaborate with. It doesn't necessarily mean they are competitors so we work with a number of other marketing agencies and provides some services for them for their clients that they don't necessarily do, but they hire us to do it for them. So like I work with other marketing agencies, so they're not necessarily, you know, your competitor and everything. So but yeah, see what's going on you know, investigate, read up on them, see what they're doing, check out their websites, see what they're ranking for. You know, the more you understand the competitive landscape, the more you know what you should be doing and what you need to do.
And the last question that we have is, can you say more about running a test on TikTok yeah, I so I'm not on TikTok I'm not using tiktok. I wind up watching a lot of TikTok videos on Facebook and the Facebook reels. I think it's fascinating. I find it very interesting. But it's not a platform that I've taken the time to jump on at this point. Again, based on where I'm at with strategy and so forth, it's not a fit for me. But anytime you're using any platform, if you're going to do something, you want to come up with some means of measurement. How am I going to measure success? What does success look like? Is it I, you know, posted a video and I got a thousand views. Is that success you know or is it actually driving traffic and are you tracking how much traffic and then are you tracking what happened to that traffic? Did they fill out a form, did they make a phone call? Like what's the, where do you want that to go? So we really need to step back and think about that whole process. Of creating content, I'm pushing this through to, you know, to my website. And this is what I want to have happen. This is what I wanted the results to be. And then how am I going to track it? How am I going to measure it and do that so anytime you're spending, anytime you're doing something new in particular. Or you're spending any money you need to track it all the way through. All the way through.
The next question that we have is if you have a GoDaddy web page already and are having some issues, are you able to switch over somehow? You can build your website on any other platform and then just you just change the domain where the domain points. So yeah, you can do that anytime. Thank you, Peter.
Next question is how powerful are paid plans to things like Google Adwords or whatever it is called now regarding driving traffic, how can you possibly compete when you don't have the cash to put towards such programs? Yeah, so that's where you gotta get creative. So again we're small businesses and we don't have you know, unlimited funds to you know, just throw a bunch of ads up and you know compete with some other big companies so. Again, this goes back to what are the things I can really do better, because chances are your website is getting some traffic and it could be getting good traffic, but if your messaging isn't clear on your website, you're not getting them to take the next step. They're not making a phone call or filling out a form. So where I can put energy and effort is in that messaging and that and being very clear about who I'm working with, the problem I solve, how I solve it. So that whoever does come across my radar, I have a much higher chance of converting that person then someone else. So you know it's not the best product that always wins, it's who's the best communicator. And so that's why I talk about what you own and what you can't can control and making sure that is dialed in. And doing what it's supposed to do so that if you do go I, if I'm dialed in and I know everything is working well with my website and it's communicating clearly now, I can spend a small amount on ads and drive a small amount of traffic knowing that I'm probably going to get a decent amount of conversions because my messaging's on point and so I don't have to spend as much as the big guy. But I can be more effective because I've spent time working on the stuff that really matters. Thanks, Peter.
The next question is, we have a couple more here. What is your choice for a website hosting platform? So if you're going to host WordPress, my number one choice would be sitegroundsiteground.com That would be my top choice for WordPress hosting that, great support and all that. And again, you can have your. Domain on GoDaddy and it can point to wherever. It can point to Squarespace. It can point to site ground wherever it needs to go. But yeah, for WordPress site ground would be my top choice.
The next question is, can other businesses similar to mine attach to my website and then their ads show up on their Facebook page? No, I don't see how that can happen. Thank you.
The next question that we have is I used to utilize local provider gizmo to be able to personally update my website due to its ease of use. If you knew word you could do gizmo. Do you know of a website editing platform that would be as simple. I don't need an online store so our website just needs to be simple clean design that I can update content. So any of those platforms we talked about we believe with Squarespace can do that. Our platform that I mentioned can do that as well. So that's something that I know someone that was asking about that, I'll just give you my contact info. You guys you know can provide my contact info. If you're interested in looking at that, we can we can talk about that one-on-one Thanks, Peter.
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