More than most people, doctors are vulnerable to negative publicity and need to consider online reputation management to protect their practice. The years spent developing their skills and building up a practice can be wiped out in a very short period of time by negative publicity regardless of whether there’s truth to a claim or not.
The anonymity with which some people use the Internet to malign someone’s reputation make doctors easy prey for someone with a personal axe to grind. In addition, negative publicity which has connection whatsoever on a doctor’s competence or fitness to practice medicine can be just as damaging to one’s practice as a direct attack on one’s reputation. Without proper online reputation management, bad news from one area of your life can spread to other areas just like a cancer.
More and more people are relying on the Internet to make decisions about everything from choosing where to eat to finding a general practitioner or specialist. It would be naïve to assume that people who use the Internet to look up your name will bother to get a second opinion to determine the truth behind anything negative about you they encounter online. More often than not, they’ll just move on and look for someone else.
Negative posts have a disturbing tendency to linger people’s consciousness, undermining the confidence they place in their physician’s professionalism.
Completely eradicating negative online publicity is nearly impossible to accomplish. Even if one succeeds in getting a particular post removed, unflattering comments tend to spread like a virus to other sites, especially now that social networking sites have become so popular. Your best option is to bury negative publicity under several other pages of positive content under your control so that casual web searches using your name won’t turn up anything undesirable on the first page of the search engine result page (SERP.)
The old adage about prevention being the best medicine also applies to online reputation management. Using advanced SEO techniques, creating a healthy wall of defense made up of links, profiles and web pages you control can prevent bad publicity from ever doing damage to your reputation. Just as early detection can stem the spread of a disease, proper reputation management is about being aware of what can harm you and implementing some measures to prevent a problem from arising.
There are other benefits to online reputation management. The information you provide to dominate the first pages of the SERP also serve as an effective way to promote your practice and make it easier for prospective clients to find you and learn about your areas of specialization.
To learn more about our approach to online reputation management for doctors please click here