Eva Sheie, Online Strategist

Marketing evangelist David Meerman Scott echoes today on his blog a principle of internet marketing that we firmly believe here at RealPatientRatings... that certain kinds of content on your website are assets that grow in value over time and generate highly qualified inquiries. This concept guides the creation of all the features we create for our members to help grow their practices.

The 3 Most Important Marketing Assets for a Plastic Surgery Website

On a plastic surgery practice website, your photo gallery, blog, and comments from patients are your three most valuable assets. If you were to analyze the specific sources of your online conversions, you would most likely find these three areas of your website at the top of the list.

1. Photo gallery

The size of your photo gallery is an indication of success. Subconsciously or consciously, the visitor makes assumptions about how long have you been in practice, how happy your patients are, and how much surgery you have done.

Grow the gallery by including multiple angles of each case, details of the patient, and including the capability of filtering the cases.

2. Blog

On your blog, follow the simple concept of answering questions that your patients ask. Understanding that a blog post can hold value indefinitely will make you think differently about the subject matter. Quality is always better than quantity. Don't post junk for the sake of posting. Don't auto-post to Facebook.

3. Patient-Generated Content, or "Word of Mouth" Content

We all agree that no greater form of marketing exists than the word of mouth referral. The next best thing is what we like to call "Word of Mouth" content, which is anything created by your patients that can be posted on your website.

Examples of "WOM content" include thank you notes, testimonials, video reviews, and of course, patient review feeds from RealPatientRatings.

Conversion data from a wide sample of practice websites shows a 2x to 6x increase in the number of contact forms completed when visitors have engaged with this "word of mouth" content. Even if adding these features to your website is time-consuming, the ROI is so high that it is always worth the investment.

Do you want more leads, consults and cases?

If so, add reviews to your website. A year's worth of data gathered from 14 plastic surgery practice websites shows these visitors who read reviews at part of a visit convert at least twice as often as those who don't. (In this case, "convert" simply means they completed a form on a website.)

People who are ready to take action search differently than those who are earlier in the buying process and simply gathering general information. When it comes to search volume, quality is much more important than quantity. For example, a visitor searching for "plastic surgeon reviews" will convert 10 times more often than a user just searching for "breast augmentation."

Consider the patient's thought process for a moment... they research plastic surgeons in their area for several months or longer, and begin to make plans. When can I take time off from work? When will I have enough money to do this?

They have a timeline for when they want to have surgery. They ask friends, "do you know who I should go to for this? Who is the best surgeon for the procedure I want?" Their minds are open to receive messaging during this process. Surgeons are mentioned, websites are consulted, photos are studied carefully.

What message do you want them to hear while they're actually listening?

Differentiate yourself. Every plastic surgeon on earth aims to create a "safe, comfortable environment" for their patients. Instead of platitudes, let your patients be your cheerleaders. They will tell the true story of your quality in their own words. You can't develop content as compelling or effective than a multitude of reviews from your real patients.

The proof is in. Authentic and transparent reviews published on your own website inspire more patients to move forward and either email or call your office. (Thank you notes and written notes are great too, but don't call them "testimonials," it's a terribly weak keyword).

Incremental changes can make a huge difference in revenue

Just a tiny increase from the typical website conversion rate of 1.5% (or 1 out of every 65 web visitors) up to 1.7% (1 out of every 58 visitors) can be obtained by adding review content to your own website and making that content easy for users to find.

For every 10 web leads that you receive now, you'll be getting 12. If you get 10 leads per week, in a month that's 8 more highly qualified leads.

To monetize this change for your practice, factor in your conversion rates. Do you know your ratio of emails to surgeries? If so, it's easy to determine the financial impact of just 10 more web leads per month. Our friends at Etna Interactive tell us that the typical range of email-to-surgery conversion rates is from 13.2% with the best practices as high as 24%.

How would just 1-2 more surgeries each month impact your bottom line?

RealPatientRatings supports and willingly conforms to the American Medical Association's recent policy addressing Anonymous Cyberspace Evaluations of Physicians (D-478.980).

Specifically,

(2) continue pursuing initiatives to identify and offer tools to physicians that allow them to manage their online profile and presence;

Physicians participating in Real Patient Ratings are given complete control over the information presented to consumers. However, the only patient comments that may be edited or removed from the Ratings Feed are those which violate the content and community guidelines.

(4) work to secure legislation that would require that the Web sites purporting to offer evaluations of physicians state prominently on their Web sites whether or not they are officially endorsed, approved or sanctioned by any medical regulatory agency or authority or organized medical association including a state medical licensing agency, state Department of Health or Medical Board;

Real Patient Ratings is officially endorsed by the American Society of Plastic Surgeons.

and whether or not they are a for-profit independent business

RealPatientRatings is an independent, privately owned, for-profit business.

and have or have not substantiated the authenticity of individuals completing their surveys.

A patent-pending process that eliminates all non-patients ensures that the individuals completing surveys from RealPatientRatings are indeed authentic. Consumers can trust that the reviews published on RealPatientRatings were written only be real patients of each participating physician.

It can be useful to look at patterns in keywords to get a view inside your consumer's thought process.

One way to do this is to filter in Google Analytics on the words what, where, how, and why. As an example, we filtered 14 months of searches including the word "what." 

The most obvious pattern is consumers seeking cost information. If you aren't sharing price ranges on your website, we think you should. (For more on this topic, see Marie Olesen's article "Why plastic surgeons shouldn't keep prices secret").

Another recurring theme seems to be around pain control.

Here are some actual phrases consumers used to find the RPR website:

• surgery with dr lee daniels eugene oregon what to expect
• what is a bair hugger
• dr simeon wall what pain medicine does he after tummy tuck
• explain what you feel when your skin have incontact with plastics
• show patient-rated doctos in georgia and what they had to say
• sidelaze practiced in what cities
• touchmd what is it
• what are the root causes of plastic surgery as an epidemic
• what can i do if i'm not satisfied with my plastic surgery results
• what does dr john diaz offer after the operation
• what does dr steven teitelbaum charge for augmentation
• what does dr. chasan charge for rhinoplasty
• what if my doctor won't refer me for scar revision
• what is dr paul chasan fee for rhinoplasty
• what is rpr facial rejuvenation atlanta
• what is the best consult to surgery ratio for plastic surgeons?
• what is the cost of implants at greg ratliff
• what is three legal and factor of a plastic surgeons
• what is typical recovery time mastioplasty
• what kind of plastic surgery is there
• what largest implant dr joanthan kramer has done
• what makes dr. robert hardesty of riverside unique
• what pain meds do dr prescribe for mommy makeover
• what people say about dr. shaw plastic surgeon
• what to ask at a pre op for mommy makeover
• what to look for on a plastic surgeons cv
• what to write in comments on a patient survey
• what type of liposuction does michael chairamonte
• what's the average cost for dr nein 

Whether you have a large practice or a small one, writing content by studying to patient data is a fantastic way to communicate with your audience.

Now that RealPatientRatings.com has more than 10,000 reviews to study, it will be interesting to analyze deeper patterns of consumer keyword searches. We'll be sure to share our findings with you!