Do you work as a private doctor or do you want to work in the private sector as a newly graduated doctor in the coming decades?
It is important to know that your entire professional career will be accompanied by an online presence , as in the 21st century, your patients use the internet as their primary source of information.
Your patients are interested in you, they want to know what kind of professional experience, specialties you have, where you can be reached and what kind of reviews you have received from your patients. Anyone who does not manage their online presence properly runs the risk of outdated, irrelevant, bad, or negative information about it appearing on the Internet, which directly affects the number and quality of your patients.
You are not a marketing specialist, you are a doctor, so – presumably – you do not have the time, knowledge or energy to monitor, update, filter and control your online appearance on various online channels . Due to the consolidation of the private medical sector, there are plenty of professionals working under private clinics where the private clinic either considers personal branding as an important activity or ignores this.
When you change your working place, your data is updated slowly, the information related to you as a doctor has not yet been downloaded from the website of your former workplace and probably is not yet available at the new one. If ratings were included in your professional profile at your former employer, they will be lost when you change your job, or worse, they will remain on the website of your former employer and generate income for your previous employer.
How can this situation be handled?
We encourage you to be conscious about building and keeping your online presence up to date. Think about what interface you want to be present in the online space in the long run, design it and keep it fresh.
However, the personal doctor profile does not only appear on the website of the given employer, it is a common international practice that more and more doctor consolidator websites contain such data. It’s a good idea to check from time to time (e.g. every 2-3 months) what search results the Google search engine lists in your own name and how relevant and up-to-date the content is in the top 5 results.
Can you find the same information about you everywhere? Do you copy information from your own website when you publish to these pages?
If both questions are answered with yes, then there is a high risk that your website traffic will drop. Why?
Because typically consolidator sites have been present in the online space for a long time, with more content than your personal website, or have more professional, higher-budget for online marketing. The solution is not that you keep yourself away from these platforms. Manage your online appearance in a system and provide these platforms with unique content and up-to-date data.
The more platform you are present the better, as you may not know which platform will remain live in the long run, gets stronger, weaker, or will even disappear.
If you have your primary online personal channel – which can be your own website, or your Facebook page – try to backlink from all consolidator sites. This will give your website a better ranking in the search engines.
Evaluations – handle positive and negative evaluations
In our discussions with doctors, we often hear that “I don’t want to be present on your website because there might show negative user reviews, too”
The question is not whether you and your work are rated online (yes, you are rated), but how much you see and control these ratings, how you can respond to the reviews, or how can you get them removed if few of them are not true.
Positive evaluations contribute greatly to the success of your personal brand, and thus directly to the success of your medical practice.
It must be accepted that user habits do not always differ from when users purchase a television or a medical service.
At first glance, it is outrageous that online searchers choose a doctor the way they buy a cell phone or LCD TV, but practice shows that similar to searching for technical articles, information is obtained online, and evaluations matter when making an actual choice.
The competition is getting bigger here too, you have to get the right patients to choose you!
There is a basic need for patients to read other patients ’ reviews, preferably not on the doctor’s own website, where patient testimonials may be biased / manipulated. More than five to ten reviews is already a reassuring amount, and it has better authority to have a good review on more than one neutral / consolidator website. In this case patients will look for you with great confidence.
Long-term, planned and controlled online presence without intermediary service providers
It is important for you to consciously plan and control your own professional online presence, because your individual professional success depends on it.
Our solution helps to build a personal brand in the long run , as the professional appearance of the doctor can be continuously expanded and updated, and the current contacts (website, community page, phone number, email address, etc.) can be updated.
Thus, if you change jobs, start a private practice, or move abroad, you can still find materials and evaluations presenting your professional background in one place.
In a unique way, medicalservicefinder.com also allows you to link your current website, show your preferred email address, phone number, Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, Twitter profile and can accomodate your personal blog, podcasts, videos, etc., thus helping you in the long run to master the personal brand building.
