---
title: How to deal with patient reviews
description: Are patient reviews a good thing or a bad thing for your practice? Want to know how to deal with reviews? Read this.
---

[Traditional, internet and inbound marketing... and life.](https://www.coombsmarketing.com/coombs-content)

# [How to deal with patient reviews](https://www.coombsmarketing.com/coombs-content/how-to-deal-with-patient-reviews)

 Written by [Mary Coombs](https://www.coombsmarketing.com/coombs-content/author/mary-coombs) | October 22,2019

**Reviews** not only have the power to influence **patients’** decisions but can strengthen a medical practice's credibility. **Reviews** have the power to gain **patients** trust, and they encourage people to interact with the practice. **Patients** interaction ultimately leads to improved profits for medical practices.

Reviews are **important** to help boost **patient’s** loyalty towards your practice. A person who takes the time to leave a positive review on **Yelp** or **Google** about a particular practice is likely to come back for more services should the need arise.

Not only do patient’s read reviews, they read multiple reviews and directly allow the quality of a reviews to influence their trust in and engagement with that practice. Setting your practice up in directories to get reviews and proactively reaching out for reviews is crucial to the growth of your practice.

**88% of patients trust online reviews** as much as personal recommendations. That’s good and bad. Overall, 34 **percent of patients** say they are likely to **leave** a negative **review** after a bad experience, but the good news is, we basically see the opposite with positive reviews. We have found with our client’s, **negative reviews** are rare, and if they are **responded to** **quickly and thoroughly** with the right personnel, they are not a problem. We have even seen other patients rebuke a negative review with their own.

The short answer is yes, **Google Reviews do help** improve search rankings and overall **SEO** efforts. While there are a lot of factors involved in search rankings, online patient **reviews** can be a strong signal to search engines that communicates trustworthiness and authority.

- They improve your organic search CTRs (click-through rates). ...
- They help improve your SEO. ...
- They provide solid social proof. ...
- They build immediate trust. ...
- They provide you with priceless feedback.

Be careful not to ever provide information that violate HIPPA standards in your responses, but do respond and follow up to any negative review. If the problem was resolved, feel free to ask the reviewer to do a follow up review for the practice.

[View full post](https://www.coombsmarketing.com/coombs-content/how-to-deal-with-patient-reviews)

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