3 Steps to Fix Negative Patient Reviews on Google Maps

Online reviews can benefit both patients and practices.

As you may know, Google allows reviews on your Google+ account. Building a strong online reputation is important to your business, and positive reviews will help. Positive reviews will also attract new patients and lead to a better search engine ranking. But what happens if someone posts a negative review about your practice?

Although Google doesn’t allow you to delete negative reviews, here are 3 things you can do:

1. You can approach the patient, address his/her concerns, and kindly ask them to remove the review.
2. You can respond online. Google has a feature that allows business owners to respond to negative reviews, so you can directly address the reviewer’s issues in a calm and reasonable manner online. If the negative review makes claims you can argue against, do so objectively, using facts or other customers’ experiences as talking points. (Note: While replying to online reviews, you should not confirm that reviewer is your patient or respond with detail about their specific information because doing so may be a HIPAA violation).
3. You can offset negative reviews with good reviews. Here are some suggestions to get more positive reviews on the Google+ page.

• Ask all your staff to include the Google+ page link in the email signature. Some of the email recipients will check out and write reviews. You can mention this text in the email signature: “Review us on Google: —Link to Google+ page.”
• Encourage happy patients to write reviews on Google. More number of positive reviews will help in pushing down the negative review and decrease the visibility of the negative post.
• Send out an email blast, with a link to your Google listing, asking satisfied patients to post reviews. Your email should be brief and direct. Here is an example. 
• Hi there! At (practice name), we take pride in offering exceptional service to our patients. One of the best kinds of compliments we can receive is a review from you! Google Places is where most people search for local services online, and we’d love it if you can go on there and write a little something about us. It’s a very simple process and will help us out tremendously in getting the word out there! We really appreciate your support and thank you for being a part of our family.

However you choose to address a negative review, you should always be trying to get those positive reviews from your happy patients.