How to manage negative reviews in the medical sector on Google My Business?

More and more, healthcare institutions (hospital groups, private clinics, care centers, retirement homes, nursing homes, etc.) as well as medical-sector professionals (general practitioners, specialists, medical practices, surgeons, professors, etc.) see their activity heavily impacted by the quality of their e-reputation. The cause: negative reviews and comments that spring up all over the web and seriously tarnish the reputation of healthcare institutions and players. And the consequences are as numerous as they are disastrous: a drop in activity and footfall, patient confidence in free fall, and even going as far as the closure of the institution or the end of a professional career. The situation has become so worrying that last September, the French National Council of the Order of Physicians launched a guide dedicated to managing the e-reputation of players in the medical sector.

To this day, the main vector of e-reputation for medical-sector professionals is Google My Business. The profile provides a wealth of extremely valuable information for anyone wanting to form an opinion about a healthcare professional or institution: address, phone number, photos, reviews, ratings, questions/answers, etc. Their content plays a decisive role in internet users’ final decision-making: consult or not consult a given doctor or practitioner / go or not go to a given hospital, practice, or clinic.

But Google My Business is by definition uncontrollable, which gives it a dangerous aspect. Indeed, the creation and prominence of a My Business profile depend on Google’s goodwill, and many professionals suffer from this daily.

In this article, Semji offers you a quick overview of the internet’s impact on medical-sector professionals and institutions, along with a spotlight on the main difficulties they face. We will also give you an overview of the various solutions that exist to best manage your Google My Business profile and protect your e-reputation as a whole. Let’s go!

E-reputation applied to the medical sector

Let’s begin with a short recap of what e-reputation really is and what it involves when applied to the healthcare field.

E-reputation is nothing other than digital identity, built through all the elements present on the internet about a natural or legal person. In short, e-reputation today comes down to what Google says about you. For the healthcare sector, it is even more accurate to say that your e-reputation is almost reduced to what is said on Google My Business.

To illustrate this, Bertrand Girin, co-founder of the Semji agency and an e-reputation expert, recently gave an interview to La Croix. In particular, he discusses how difficult it is for a professional to deindex a Google My Business profile. Indeed, even when the unflattering reviews left by patients and internet users are entirely illegitimate and unfounded, freedom of expression generally prevails over everything else, except in exceptional cases (disparagement, defamation, insult). In his remarks, Bertrand Girin also highlights the growing importance of the role played by web cleaners for medical professionals and institutions.

Why does the internet directly impact healthcare professionals?

The internet is a real goldmine of information and allows everyone to form an idea about a company, a topic, a news item, and so on. But this “free speech” has a very serious impact on the daily lives of healthcare professionals, who often struggle to restore their image once their e-reputation has been tarnished.

Internet users have at their disposal a multitude of “places” to express themselves and do not hesitate to strike. Faced every day with the reality on the ground, our e-reputation experts unanimously observe a new trend: having to defend companies whose e-reputation is soiled by internet users’ reviews, often under the cover of pseudonyms, fake profiles, or anonymity.

We can classify negative reviews into three categories:

• gratuitous and unjustified attacks. They most often come from competitors trying to destabilize you, or simply from ill-intentioned people.
• negative comments that are greatly exaggerated compared to reality. For example, some internet users do not hesitate to leave a comment like “Doctor who is always 2 hours late” when in reality the doctor is more like 15 minutes late. These small hiccups during appointments are, moreover, extremely frequent and in no way call into question the skills of the doctor in question.
• comments that had a grain of truth in the past but no longer reflect the truth today. An institution’s past can be truly disabling for its present and its future. In the case of a practice made up of several dental technicians, it only takes one of them to have a bad reputation for the entire practice to be impacted. If the dental technician personally concerned by this bad reputation leaves the practice, unfortunately the negative reviews remain and are still considered current in the eyes of internet users.

In a previous article, Semji reported on the healthcare professionals most affected by e-reputation issues. Doctors, dentists, surgeons, and anesthesiologists are the first concerned, but all professionals and institutions belonging to the health/medical sector are unfortunately the most affected, right after restaurants.

Source: Bright Local

Google My Business: the number 1 place for negative comments

This e-reputation vector is without a doubt the most important. And for good reason: the Google My Business profile associated with a person or company is displayed at the very top right of the SERP, following a query that is most of the time informational.

In the context of a healthcare institution, the query generally corresponds to “name + location”.

As for a query aimed at f inding a healthcare professional near home, it generally comes down to “specialization sought + location” or directly “doctor + name” when the latter is known.

Why is Google My Business e-reputation tricky to work on?

Very important for your e-reputation, the Google My Business profile is nonetheless difficult to manage.

Here are the main elements that make Google My Business an e-reputation channel to approach with caution:

• Replying to negative comments: many websites and professionals advise replying to negative comments. According to them, this attitude demonstrates a genuine consideration of internet users’ opinions by the company, coupled with a desire to improve in order to meet expectations. But at Semji, we have learned through experience that this practice is a double-edged sword. These remarks should therefore be nuanced. Why? Because replying to negative comments pushes the “bad reviews” up and gives them importance, to the point that they are considered the most relevant. Mentioning the name of the institution or professional in the reply to the bad comment is also a relevance criterion in Google’s eyes. As a result, you have every chance of seeing the negative review in question rank in the Top 3 most relevant reviews

Do you really want to put more coins in the jukebox to listen to songs you dislike? Not so sure. It is therefore important to consider replying to a negative comment on a case-by-case basis. Are you facing this situation? Contact us!

• The rise of mobile and local search: in 2018, the Baromètre du Numérique estimated that 94% of French people were equipped with a mobile phone and that 3 out of 4 people owned a smartphone. Google has clearly understood that mobile is taking up more and more space in French people’s daily lives, to the point that it has become the number 1 traffic channel to websites.

With the aim of providing the best browsing experience, Google highlights the My Business profile, which contains all the important information about the healthcare professional or institution being searched for. If this profile shows a poor overall rating, with 3 negative reviews highlighted on top of that, it’s hard to make a good impression.

Mobile is increasingly used for local searches that generate many visits to physical locations. In other words, a bad image on Google My Business deprives healthcare professionals and institutions of many nearby patients. What a shame!

The trust placed in internet users’ reviews: Today, the trust placed in users’ experience feedback is far greater than that placed in what a person or company says about itself.

While these examples illustrate purchasing behaviors, those related to gathering information with a medical/health purpose are similar.

Here is an example of a hospital that has a poor overall rating and additionally suffers from a bad e-reputation through the “questions/answers” section, highlighted in the Google My Business profile just below the address:

• The formal ban on “advertising” in the medical field: Within the medical sector, advertising is not allowed. This act simply constitutes a violation of the public health code. Promoting the services of a plastic surgeon like those of a “classic” product or service is simply unthinkable. Individuals’ health is directly concerned; there is no place for marketing here. A telling example is that of a highly publicized nutritionist who was implicated for the self-promotion carried out on the site https://savoirmaigrir.fr/. The only “advertising” for a healthcare professional or institution comes directly from the patients who visit them, and by extension from their reviews left on the internet and Google My Business. So it’s better if the feedback highlighted is positive, right?

The problem: the reviews considered “the most relevant” by the algorithm on which Google operates are not necessarily the most relevant in reality. This notion of relevance is very arbitrary. Despite everything, your e-reputation depends on what Google decides to show about you.

A physical address = a Google My Business profile

The creation of a Google My Business profile can perfectly well be initiated by the healthcare professional or institution. But be aware that Google itself generates profiles as soon as a business is listed as existing at a physical address. One of the eligibility criteria for creating a My Business profile is the possibility of physical contact between the healthcare institution or professional and its patient base. The goal is to best guide internet users, especially in the context of local search. But this also implies an obligation to manage this profile and the comments. It’s hard to manage a profile whose existence you are unaware of.

Whether or not you want to appear on the internet as a professional matters little to Google; the fact is that you are indeed present there! Google does not yet have the ability to tell the true from the false, nor to assess whether a negative comment is really justified or not. This therefore forces everyone to manage their e-reputation.

Online review platforms and forums: important channels for your e-reputation

While Google My Business alone builds the largest share of the e-reputation of doctors, practitioners, hospitals, and clinics, there are other channels that also convey information about you and should in no way be neglected.

Online review platforms

Increasingly numerous and consulted, these platforms play a very important role in building the e-reputation of a healthcare professional. Among them, we mainly find Yelp.fr, a generalist platform that includes many topics fed daily around healthcare professionals and institutions.

As for the site Choisirunmedecin.com, it offers a search tool to find specialists nearby, but also to rate them and leave reviews!

Forums

Before choosing a healthcare professional or an institution to turn to, internet users very often rely on the reviews given on forums. Among the most consulted, we find http://www.doctissimo.fr/ and https://www.quechoisir.org/, two forums on which bad reviews and negative criticism fly very quickly.

Because of their traffic and reputation, these 2 sites have a strong tendency to rank among the top results on the SERP. And to give bad comments great visibility!

No matter where the negative reviews come from: they have a direct and significant financial impact on the activity of the doctor, hospital practitioner, or healthcare institution. Are you wondering how to assess the financial losses caused by a bad e-reputation? While there is no calculation method dedicated to the medical sector, the fact that a bad comment scares away 30 customers can already give you an idea of its impact on your patients.

On the other hand, Moz conducted a study that highlights the disastrous consequences of negative reviews on a company’s business. Dan Hinckley teaches us that their “research also revealed that businesses risk losing as many as 22% of customers when just one negative article is found by users considering buying their product. If three negative articles pop up in a search query, the potential for lost customers increases to 59.2%. Have at least four negative articles about your company or product appearing in Google search results? You risk losing 70% of potential customers.”

To find out more, head to our article “ How to measure the impact of a company’s e-reputation on its business and its ROI? “.

To help you counter these negative reviews and content, our agency mainly uses two techniques to build you a digital fortress:

• Producing positive content around your brand, intended to take precedence over the negative and restore your image with internet users;

• Making bad reviews lose visibility and therefore importance by relegating them to the 2nd or 3rd page on Google.

Healthcare professionals and institutions: what solutions to protect your e-reputation on Google My Business?

While it is impossible to guard against negative reviews and comments, because no one can claim to control the internet, there are nevertheless several methods to correct course and try to protect one’s e-reputation as much as possible.

Daily and permanent monitoring

Staying on the lookout for what is said about you is essential! To help you carry out this monitoring, tools exist. You can, for example, turn to Google Alerts, Alerti, Feedly, etc.

Despite the support—certainly very useful—of these various tools, carrying out this mission properly requires constant attention.

Requesting the removal of negative reviews

Following a bad comment or an inappropriate review on your Google My Business profile, it is possible to report it to Google to request its removal. For Google to respond favorably to your removal request, it must be justified. The review, for its part, must meet one of these criteria:

• defamatory,
• insulting,
• spam,
• advertising,
• off-topic,
• conflict of interest,
• inciting hatred or violence, etc.

In principle, this verification is subject to human action and can therefore take time. While waiting for the removal—when possible—the comment remains in plain sight for everyone.

Semji offers a service to protect you from negative reviews on Google My Business; you can find out more by consulting this page on managing Google My Business reviews.

Requesting the removal of the Google My Business profile

A radical but nonetheless effective solution, the removal of your Google My Business can be considered if it contains too many bad reviews that harm the doctor or healthcare institution on a daily basis.

Be careful, however, because removal is not always possible! Google reserves the right to keep or delete a page, probably because of the massive use of this technique to remove bad reviews. If the removal is accepted, it can take up to more than 6 months by going through Google support. By calling on Semji, this timeframe can be reduced to 48 hours.

Burying negative results

Another technique consists of collecting positive reviews so that the Google My Business profile projects a good image and the negative reviews are pushed into the background. But this takes time, and once again: the result does not depend on you. Likewise, the negative reviews do not disappear for all that and continue to negatively impact your rating.

Burying negative results takes time and requires deploying a lot of technical as well as human resources. The financial cost also skyrockets, and obtaining convincing results remains fairly uncertain.

To master and best manage one’s e-reputation, unrivaled responsiveness is essential. As soon as a negative review or comment appears, it is essential to act as quickly as possible. The challenge is to limit the visibility of this publication: first of all with your current patient base, who could quickly lose confidence and turn to another professional, but also with future patients who would immediately give up the idea of coming to you as soon as they read the comment.

Why call on an e-reputation agency?

Faced with a reality shared by more and more professionals and the risks of e-reputation, the Order of Physicians decided to react and come to the aid of victims of bad reviews and comments. Through a practical guide that offers valuable advice for minimizing the effects of a “bad” e-reputation, the Order of Physicians tries to provide its help to healthcare professionals in best managing this sometimes dramatic situation. But applying this advice takes time.

Even though it has the merit of existing, the legal framework does not provide a satisfactory and quick answer for healthcare professionals and proves insufficient to protect them from the excesses of the internet. Why? Because the steps to take to have an illegitimate negative review removed and/or one that breaks the rules set out by law are long, tedious… and do not necessarily succeed!

Rather than taking the risk of suffering a double failure (loss of time + no results), turning to an agency specialized in e-reputation management presents itself as the most effective alternative.

Our e-reputation solutions rest on a solid technical base and make it possible to deploy several actions around your Google My Business profile, notably with the possibility of starting it over from scratch. This implies the rapid disappearance of all reviews, positive as well as negative, and therefore the possibility for you to rebuild an e-reputation on healthy foundations.

This solution was designed and conceived with the goal of helping medical-sector professionals build a solid safeguard to protect their image on the internet via a valuable Google My Business profile. Thanks to the assistance and expertise of an agency like Semji, take back control of your e-reputation.