A New (Old) Way to Review Your Dental Practice on Google+

Lots of changes have taken place of late in the dentist local search for new patients space.

From a newly minted Google Maps to recently added structured data attributes, there are some simple and some not so simple local dental seo ways to separate yourself from the competition when someone in your area goes on the local search for a dentist.

We’ll get to the maps and reviews in a second, but here’s what Google has to say about highlighting your local dental practice data…

You can use Data Highlighter to tag data about your business, such as its name, address, customer reviews, and ratings. Then Google can present your data more attractively — and in new ways — in search results and in other products.

Now call your dental website provider and make sure they are taking advantage of every single snippet of your dentist office local new patient grabbing data.

How Have Reviews for Dentists Changed on Google Maps?

If your dental practice is at all concerned with how many reviews your Local Google+ listing(s) communicate to potential new patients in your local area, now is your time to be a star!

Remember back when Google bought Zagat and changed their review system to Zagat’s 30 point scale?

Well, Google has now gone back to the old 5 Star rating system for local businesses – sort of.

Human beings are social animals, and generally speaking we’re also a fairly needy bunch; we’re constantly on the lookout for attention from and approval of others. Now whether that statement applies to us individually only sometimes or all the time, it’s usually the emotional elixir of getting attention and receiving approval from others that drives the behavior.

It’s not the approval and attention we’re after; it’s the way the attentive approval makes us feel that reinforces our triggers to go seek more of it.

We all have emotions that sometimes drive our actions a little more so than they should.

That’s all well and good, but what in the H E double hockey sticks does this psychobabble BS have to do with North Korea, Dennis Rodman, or digital dental marketing new patient acquisition?

We left off in Part 1 talking about 2 of the 5 changes Facebook has made in 2012 that will help dentists acquire more new patients & retain a greater portion of existing ones throughout the upcoming year…you can read part 1 here.

The $64,000 question left dangling back in 2012 that we’ll answer now, was how could page owners (you or us) target all – or a significantly larger portion of – our fans, followers, and dental pied pipers?

Here are a few ways to do that…

When things change in the dental social media or local search world we usually don’t hear about it until after the changes have been unknowingly thrust upon us.

Whether its Facebook rolling out a new Timeline feature or Google Places metastasizing into Google+ Local, one thing is certain; customers (read: patients) of local small businesses (of which your practice is one) usually know about the social media or local search changes – and participate in them – way before the local business (read: dental practice) has had a chance to digest what the actual changes are, and how these changes will potentially impact new dental patient (read: customer) acquisition.

Here are 5 Facebook changes we noticed having a particularly beneficial impact with our socially savvy member dental practices…

Last week Pinterest rolled out their new welcome mat to the business world, or is it the business world now has a better way to roll up on Pinterest?

We’re confused enough, so here’s the digital dental marketing skinny on dentists effectively using Pinterest to acquire more new patients and communicate better with existing patients.

In case you’re not the coolest dentist on your block already connected with us, Pinterest is a relatively new ultra-popular photo posting & sharing community. Pinterest for dentists is a way to show how you are an up to date tech-savvy practice capable of communicating engaging images worth sharing…

Fear is a powerful emotion; it can prevent us from doing things that would benefit us greatly, but it also can keep us safe from future harm.

How do we know which fear to kick to the curb, and which fear to heed like a caveman?

When the topics turn to digital dental marketing, dental office social media, local seo for dentists, or mobile dental marketing, fear seems to be ruling the roost for a lot of dentists we talk with.

WTF? (Why the Fear…get your head outta the gutter, you’ve been texting too much!)