According to Google, online customer reviews have a weight of 6.47% in local search results. Now, think about this statistic as you try to grow the visibility of your counseling services in your local neighborhood.
Reviews offer a great opportunity to optimize your online presence and get more and more patients to your counseling sessions. However, it can be difficult to deal with the variety of reviews that pour in about your service.
You can opt to buy Google 5 star reviews and improve the social perception of your counseling service. In this blog, we will list the need to respond to reviews and the best practices for doing so.
Why Responding to Online Reviews Is Crucial for Counselors?
All businesses need to respond to their clients, but as counselors, this responsibility is tenfold, and here’s why,
- Reputation Management
Patients and their experience with your counseling sessions can make or break your online reputation. So, ensure that you garner favorable reviews to build and maintain a strong reputation online.
- Client Trust
By acquiring positive reviews and dealing with negative reviews, you showcase to potential patients how much you care for their experience and opinions. This helps in building trust among your community of patients.
- Addressing Misunderstandings
In case of any misunderstanding during or post the session, you can clarify the same by responding to patient comments. This helps you in setting the record straight and clarifies your positioning to the general public.
Best Practices for Maintaining Professionalism
Here are the best practices you must keep in mind while responding to all kinds of reviews that your counseling service receives:
- Keep responses brief and respectful
Be precise in your responses when dealing with patients in the reviews and address their queries directly. By coming straight to the point, you will avoid a lot of unnecessary chatter around an issue.
Additionally, by being respectful and simply responding to a review, you’ll showcase your interest in their concern but will also be able to maintain the ethical guidelines.
- Avoid engaging in public disputes
Be aware of making any issue public, even in case of a negative review, which might be a false allegation. It is natural to be defensive, but do not deal with such matters in front of the public eye and take the matter offline.
Additionally, in matters where sensitive data is involved, it is best that you protect anonymity and follow HIPPA guidelines by dealing with the issue privately.
- Focus on local SEO
Keep your focus dedicated to the local search results and grow them first before entering the city-level rankings. You must know the requirements of your neighborhood and the dynamics of life surrounding it.
By responding to reviews by infusing keywords, you can enhance your chances of ranking better in local searches and grow your reach in your area.
- Be consistent across all review platforms
You must keep a note of all the activity that happens across various review platforms. Make sure to set an alert for any new review so that you can easily check and respond to the review on time.
Also, you can choose AI tools that compile data from all reviewing platforms and make it easy for you to maintain and respond consistently across varied platforms.
- Learn from Negative Reviews
Negative reviews offer valuable information that does not come across well through positive ones. These negative reviews point out areas that need improvement from your end.
Look at the concerns mentioned in these reviews and learn from your mistakes to provide the best possible counseling service to your patients.
- Ethical Considerations When Responding to Reviews
One cannot emphasize enough the importance of sticking to ethical guidelines while responding to any review.
These guidelines could include your online code of conduct, maintaining patient privacy, and dealing with matters in a professional manner. Be sure to follow these guidelines to avoid any future conflict.
- Protecting Client Privacy
Coming from ethical considerations, the most important has to be safeguarding the interest and privacy of your client.
Whether you are responding to a positive review and thanking the client for sharing their experience or bringing a solution to any negative reviews, ensure that you do not discuss any case details publicly.
- Follow professional guidelines
In case of any response to reviews, know that you must abide by the professional guidelines as a counselor.
By avoiding doing the same, you will not only disappoint your future patients who read the reviews but can also lose your practicing license.
- Acknowledge the patient’s feedback or concern
It is crucial that your clients feel supported both during the session and via online interaction with your counseling practice.
By acknowledging an issue in your response to even a negative comment, you reassure your patients that their well-being is what matters the most to you. This approach can turn a negative review into a potential next visit to your counseling practice.
- Utilize after-treatment private surveys
Once the sessions are done, provide your patients with an opportunity to leave feedback anonymously or discuss the issue privately with you.
By taking a private survey, you can ensure that your clients feel supported and open enough to share their genuine concerns. This will allow you to understand the real issues of your practice and improve it over time.
Conclusion
It is a multifaceted job on its own to be someone’s counselor, and then adding the responsibility of dealing with your online reputation can rock your settled boat.
To sail through the challenging tides of increasing online trust and visibility, one has to follow best practices like thinking about patients’ interests, learning from their feedback, and offering acknowledgment of negative reviews.
You can now additionally buy Trustpilot reviews to improve the online image of your counseling practice. By consistently responding to reviews and sticking to ethical guidelines, you can boost the local SEO rankings of your counseling practice.
