A new dental marketing opportunity has developed in the last several years about which most dental practices have absolutely no idea. It presents an excellent dental marketing idea. Did you know that sixty percent of patients do some form of online checking before showing up for their first dental visit? Even when new dental patients are referred to you by one of their trusted friends, they tend to do some form of online validation.

Most search engines including Google, present such local search results with the dentists reviews off to the right side. That means when a new dental patient searches for you online they will also be shown your information along with the information of your competitors.

The firsthand reviews of patients are very powerful in the decision making process of patients. There is a fair amount of consumer data to back this up. Even if your practice had been recommended by a friend, a competitor might be able to steal that new patient away if that competitor had a high volume of extremely favorable reviews compared to your handful of positive reviews.

Having a handful of positive reviews is not enough to keep attracting the new patients who are researching online for a new dentist. Patients go with their gut feeling when picking a new dentist. The first person experience afforded by a review is an excellent way for new patients to gather information when making their gut feeling decision.

The way best way to avoid this scenario is for your practice to take charge of its online reputation. This is simple to do when your practice creates its own review site. One of the big but hard-to-measure benefits is your practice will appear to be a credible provider of dental services. This is important because people do validations inadvertently, motivated by trying to get your phone number or address. When they stumble across numerous favorable reviews that have been written by your patients, they are going to be very impressed. This will increase the odds that they are going to follow through with their first visit. Even if they were considering some alternative dental practices, they are going to be attracted to your practice because of that favorable reputation that has been developed online.

Because a typical dental practice sees at least fifteen patients a day, collecting reviews is not a challenge when you have your own review site. You will not need to pre-screen patients for the ones who know are going to write a good review. With your own review site, you control which reviews are published on the Internet and syndicated to search engines. Because of that control, you will be able to collect a tremendous number of positive reviews in a couple of months.

The best way to think about an online dental marketing media program is like a grocery store. Imagine that the Internet is a very big grocery store, and right now you have a dental practice that occupies one little thin sliver of a shelf at the very bottom of the aisle that belongs to dental services. By collecting favorable reviews, you will be increasing the width of that shelf space. Over time, as you gather more and more reviews, the width of that shelf space will occupy the entire aisle or even multiple shelves on that aisle. Therefore, any time a prospective dental patient is walking down that aisle searching for dental services, the odds that they are going to pick your office for a new visit are much higher.