How Urgent Care Centers Can Benefit From Patient Testimonials

A significant percentage of prospective patients landing on your website don’t take a desired action—like scheduling an online appointment or calling your office. Of the many probable factors, it’s the fear of the unknown and the resulting lack of trust that may prevent them from selecting you as their urgent care provider. The best way to eliminate apprehension and instill confidence and trust among your prospective patients is to let them hear your happy patients’ stories about their great experiences. That’s where patient testimonials come into the picture. In this blog, we’ll tell you all about patient testimonials—what they are, their importance, and how you can use them to drive new patients to your urgent care center. Keep reading!

What Are Patient Testimonials?

Patient testimonials are the written or spoken statement of recommendation from happy patients about the quality, character, and competence of a healthcare service and/or provider. Effective patient testimonials aren’t just about praises and appreciation, but they also try to conclude stories that inspire and motivate prospective patients reading them. Different studies have already shown how these positive remarks and comments can help your healthcare business prosper. According to a Software Advice report, 48% of patients would go out of their insurance network for a provider who has a better review history. The search engine giant Google also stated in one of its partner’s presentation videos that patients prefer to watch testimonial videos to hear other patients’ stories before reaching out to any provider. Here’s how urgent care providers like you can grow their practice using patient testimonials.

Use Testimonials to Improve Patient Acquisition Opportunities

Patient testimonials have a crucial role to play in turning your prospective patients’ decision making in your favor. Including testimonials on your site can raise its personality and trust-worthiness; therefore, boosting your site’s conversion rate. This helps in improving patient acquisition opportunities for your urgent care practice. Let’s see how a patient testimonial page can help you boost acquisition for your urgent care:

• • Boosts search engine ranking

    Google loves content and a testimonial page is a great opportunity to feed Google with relevant and updated content that can get indexed regularly. Selecting the right testimonials will allow you to get specific value points included on the page. Those words are added up to the weighted pages that help you with your search engine rankings.

  • Increases trust

    Prospective patients looking for an urgent care center may come to your site via Google searches, or through some reference channels. If they find compelling stories of experience from happy patients, it will help in alleviating their fear and anxiety of choosing a new provider for the first time.

How to Keep Your Testimonials Page Up-to-Date

Having a separate testimonials page on your site is great. However, to leverage it for driving new patients to your practice, you should keep it up-to-date with your newest reviews. You cannot expect your prospective patients to trust you by showing them reviews from months or even years ago. Sending flowers or arranging a thank you event are not practical (or even affordable) ways for urgent cares to collect new patient testimonials. It’s better to develop a process where you systematically request, collect, and utilize testimonials. You can use an online reputation management software like RepuGen to ask your patients for feedback through text and email. As the feedback comes in, it will be easy for your urgent care marketing team to keep selecting and adding the positive ones to your testimonial page on a regular basis. If you want a more automated solution where you don’t have to manually update your testimonial page, RepuGen also provides a solution for that. You can generate a free testimonials page on your website that will automatically fetch positive reviews from your Facebook, Yelp, and Google My Business accounts.

The original blog was posted on UCA titled - Patient Testimonials: How Urgent Cares Can Benefit from Them