Hi, everyone, and welcome to today's webinar, Online Reviews, Testimonials, and Reputation Management, What Hearing Practices Need to Know. We're so glad that you could be here today to learn more about managing your business's online reputation. Your moderators for today are me, Ted Annis, Senior Marketing Specialist. And me, Fran Vincent, Marketing and Membership Manager. Our expert presenter today is Chris Erickson, Co-Founder of AudSEO and Chief Marketing Officer of HearingTracker.com, a leading review site for hearing aids and hearing care providers. Chris has been in the hearing aid industry for over 15 years as a licensed dispenser, marketing director, and business development specialist. As Co-Founder of AudSEO, a digital marketing firm, Chris specializes in improving the search engine rankings for hearing health care practices. Chris works with small, medium, and large practices to improve their digital presence through web design, search engine optimization, and paid advertising. Chris earned a bachelor's degree in business from Arizona State University, as well as a master's in business administration from the University of Arizona. We're very excited to have Chris as our presenter today, but before we get started, we have just a few housekeeping items. Please note that we're recording today's presentation so that we may offer it on demand through the IHS website in the future. This webinar is available for one continuing education credit through the International Hearing Society. We've uploaded the CE quiz to the handout section of the webinar dashboard, and you may download it at any time. You can also find out more about receiving continuing education credit at our website, ihsinfo.org. Click on the webinar banner on the homepage or choose webinars from the navigation menu. You'll find the CE quiz along with the information on how to submit your quiz to IHS for credit. If you'd like a copy of the slideshow from today's presentation, you can download it from the handout section of the webinar dashboard, or you can access it from the webinar page on the IHS website. Feel free to download the slides now. Tomorrow you will receive an email with a link to a survey on this webinar. It is brief, and your feedback will help us create valuable content for you moving forward. Today we'll be covering the following topics. The power of social proof, the top sites for reviews, online reviews in hearing health care, and how to get more reviews and testimonials. At the end, we'll move on to a Q&A session. You can send us a question for Chris at any time by entering your question in the question box on our dashboard, usually located at the right or the top of your webinar screen. We'll take as many questions as we can in the time we have available. Now I'm going to turn it over to Chris, who will guide you through today's presentation. Take it away, Chris. Thank you, Ted. I appreciate the introduction, and thank you, IHS community, for being here today. Really excited to talk to you about online reviews, testimonials, and reputation management for your hearing health care practice. Before we dive in, I'd like to talk a little bit about, mention some disclosures. I do have financial interest in both the Digital Marketing Agency that specializes in hearing health care, as well as HearingTracker.com, a review site for both products and providers, which we'll be talking about a little bit going forward. So as Ted mentioned, the agenda today and some of the topics that we'll be talking about, the power of social proof, top sites for reviews, where consumers go to both look for reviews and contribute reviews, online reviews and hearing health care, some of the interesting things in that arena, and how to get more reviews and testimonials for your practice. Remember there will also be a Q&A afterwards, so if you have any questions, please enter those in the question box at any time. So first, the power of social proof. Now what is social proof? Essentially social proof is a psychological phenomenon where people are influenced by people like them. So as we go around in our day-to-day life, we look to others as a proxy, and their experience as a proxy to what our experience would be. So we look to others and what they say their experience was with a product or a particular business or service to help gauge how we would feel about that particular product or service. So how does this really apply to us? Well really, online reviews is one. Those would be some, that would be an example of social proof. Testimonials on your website is another example of social proof, and we're going to talk about that. And then also, you know, comments on social media. Really how it applies to your hearing health care practice, social proof is anywhere where anyone is talking to somebody else, where other people can see their comments or feedback on your business. Online reviews are becoming increasingly important today in business. In fact, 92% of consumers right now read online reviews before purchasing a product or visiting a business, and this is a significant increase, you know, just in the last five to six years. One of the big reasons for this is the popularity of a lot of these sites that promote reviews as a big part of what they do. You know, Yelp is one of those sites where people can go, review a business, other people can see the experience other people have had. Amazon's a little bit different, it's, you know, very product related, but they definitely promote the fact that, you know, you can go on there and check out reviews. Angie's List is another one where, you know, you have a lot of service providers who have been, you know, sort of vetted by other people in your area. Another important note is that reviews are, by and large, trusted. In fact, 88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation. So when they see a review at one of these online websites, you know, they take it, you know, they take that very strongly, that recommendation, and 72% of consumers say they won't even take action. So they're not going to buy a product or visit a business until they've read reviews and made sure that, you know, the transaction that they're getting into makes sense for them. I talk to business owners every day about, you know, their digital presence, SEO, and of course online reviews comes up quite a bit. And I hear a lot of business owners, and practice owners especially, who are sort of, you know, a little bit nervous about online reviews. They don't really want to open up that can of worms, so to speak, and they're concerned that, you know, by promoting, you know, people reviewing their practice, that maybe somehow it'll be overwhelmingly negative and actually drive away business. I think there are a couple of things looking at the data that we need to consider. First of all, you know, most online reviews are positive. 80% of Yelp reviews, so it's just one platform, are three stars or higher. The other thing to consider is that people don't expect that you'll be perfect. You know, you want to have a good rating, but they don't expect perfection. In fact, they don't believe perfection, so if your rating is, you know, 100% or 5 stars, whatever it is within that platform, a lot of people don't believe that. I've also had some people mention to me that they were concerned about, you know, particularly with Yelp, you know, are they going to remove my reviews if I pay, but if I don't advertise, they're going to put up all these negative reviews, and there have been a lot of people who have voiced that concern. There have even been people who have taken Yelp to court over this, and by and large, you know, Yelp has been winning these lawsuits. The thing to remember about all these review platforms is the integrity of these platforms is really, you know, the centerpiece of their business, and so maintaining as much integrity with the reviews and making sure that, by and large, they're legitimate, real reviews from real consumers is very important to them. The last thing I'll say is, you know, online reviews are going to happen, you know, with or without you, so you can bury your head in the sand in terms of online reviews. You can avoid the topic if you want, but people are still going to go on Google Plus and review you. They're still going to go on Yelp and review you or Hearing Tracker and review you, so why not be proactive and help drive some of this? And if for no other reason to get involved, think about your SEO. So for those of you who don't know the acronym SEO, that's Search Engine Optimization, you know, essentially what that means is ranking your practice higher for keyword searches in places like the Google search engine, Yahoo, Bing, that sort of thing. Now Moz last year did an SEO ranking factor study. They've done this study, you know, many years for the last few years, and in this they sort of send out a questionnaire to a lot of SEO professionals asking them how much they believe certain components impact an overall SEO score for a business. Now again, Google does not disclose a lot of the details about its algorithm, so we are left as sort of an SEO community to, you know, to sort of guess what those are. But the best guess, if you will, from the SEO community is that review signals off of your website, you know, places like Yelp, Facebook, Google Plus, Angie's List, and all these others, account for around 8.5% of your SEO score. I'll even, you know, show you some stuff that suggests it might even have a larger impact. So for those of you who aren't that familiar with SEO, I'm going to introduce you to the topic of the one box. For us SEO professionals, this is, you know, something we get very excited about. The one box on the screen that you're looking at is the portion to the right, and essentially these are used for what we call branded queries, branded search queries. So if they search for a particular company, then a lot of times you'll get this one box on the right-hand side of the screen, which gives you your Google reviews and, you know, a lot of different information about your practice, really, or your business, and really highlights the business that was in the search query. But occasionally, Google will give a one box for a non-branded query. So one of my SEO colleagues in the industry did a little bit of a study. He lives in Olean, New York, had a favorite dive bar called Third Base. Third Base had no Yelp reviews, had no website, and, you know, when you typed in dive bar in Olean, New York, nothing relevant really came up. So he had a number of his SEO friends, you know, visit the establishment and leave a Yelp review that mentioned dive bar. You can see here that now Google associates that business with the word dive bar, but it's all from the Yelp reviews. The Yelp reviews have told Google, this is what this business is all about, and this is what should be important to you and your query. So it has a significant impact. Google is looking to not only what's on your site, but what's off your site to help rank you. And, you know, Yelp isn't the only one, but this is just one example that they use information off your domain, you know, to make judgments and gather information about your business and practice. So we'll talk a little bit about review sites. You know, one of the big ones is obviously Yelp. They've received over 100 million reviews since their inception. They have a healthy distribution of both people using the desktop app, you know, via a browser and the mobile app on their smartphone. A lot of people say, hey, look, Chris, you know, Yelp's great for restaurants, but come on, nobody is reviewing, you know, health care or hearing aids, hearing aid providers on Yelp. And that actually just isn't true. You know, restaurants make up only, you know, less than a fifth of reviewed businesses on Yelp. There are a lot of people out there both reviewing their health care providers and looking for health care providers on Yelp today. Also a fifth of Yelp users are over the age of 55. So while it is true that the demographics for Yelp, you know, younger folks might use Yelp more actively than some of the folks in the active adult category, you know, the folks that are 55 plus still represent a healthy portion of Yelp users. Also I think it's important to think about, you know, this goes back to my previous mention about, you know, reviews being mostly positive. Now this is just information, but this is very similar across a lot of the platforms. You see two-thirds of the reviews are four and five star. And most of the reviews are negative instead of, I'm sorry, are positive and not negative. So it should help alleviate concerns that, you know, if you do start getting active in terms of, you know, promoting your review profiles, that, you know, it's mostly a positive thing to do. Also I've had people mention to me, you know, like, look, I've had people who left me reviews and they're not showing up, you know, why is that? Well, there's some reasons why, and we'll talk about that on the next slide. But, you know, three-quarters of all the reviews left on the Yelp platform are in what's called the recommended category, meaning everyone can see them. Three percent are removed from terms of service violations. And then around a quarter, the remaining, are in that not recommended category, meaning they are there, they're just sort of buried, not recommended, because they were captured by Yelp's algorithm. The thing to remember about Yelp's algorithm, this goes back to my comment earlier, they're trying to maintain integrity in their review system. They don't want business owners going and setting up accounts and putting up fake reviews about their business. So they use a number of things in their algorithm to determine if somebody is doing that. One of them is IP address. So if you set up, you know, a computer at your office and you say, hey, you know, review me on Yelp while you're here. You might have, you know, great intentions about that, and, you know, on the surface doesn't seem like there's anything wrong, but Yelp doesn't know if you're filling that out or if the consumer is actually filling it out. So if they see a bunch of reviews coming from the same IP address, that's a flag that these potentially are not legitimate reviews. Also frequency. You know, did you have zero reviews yesterday, and then today you got eight Yelp reviews? That's another red flag to Yelp that potentially something's going on, because, you know, that's not natural. If you've been open for three years, you have zero reviews, and then all of a sudden they just come flooding in. And then the biggest reason is that the person who left you a review has no other interaction in the Yelp ecosystem other than the review they left you. So you can see on the screen here, there's a review that somebody left. It was five stars, but it's not recommended. And the reason it's not recommended is this person has left one review, this one business, they have zero friends in Yelp, and they don't have a profile picture. So these are sort of like the three check marks. If you have zero friends, one review, no picture, you're most likely going to get filtered, and you will be in that not recommended category. There's also another thing, and this applies, I say Yelp and Barnacle SEO, but this applies to all directories. Barnacle SEO is really the strategy of ranking as high as you can within those directory sites. So with some of the more recent Google algorithm changes, directories, and large directories in particular, have been given preference over many local businesses in the SERPs, in the search engine ranking positions. So the strategy is, well look, if they're going to take up a certain portion of the front page, then I'm going to try and rank as well as possible within their ecosystem, so that when someone does click on that link, I still might get that business, I still might get that click. It might just be an extra click, but I still might get that. If you're looking for more information on this, I covered Barnacle SEO in one of my blog posts, which there's a link right there. He's also a colleague of mine in the industry, but also works in the auto dealership world. He wrote a great blog as well and also did a video, so I provided a link as well to his information. So the top tier review sites in hearing health care as I see it are Facebook, the Google platform. We'll talk a little bit about the Google platform going forward. Yelp and Hearing Tracker. Obviously Yelp, Google Plus, and Facebook are larger than Hearing Tracker, but Hearing Tracker is very focused on this industry and finding industry-specific directories. Google really looks to these industry-specific directories for information about businesses in that particular industry. And then sort of the rest of the rest, there are others, and for various reasons, I believe they're the top tier for hearing health care today, and that would be ZocDoc, Healthgrades, Engies List, YP, Merchant Circle, and DexNose. Some of the reasons behind why are the barriers to reviewing, the pay-to-play sort of system to get your profile up there so there aren't as many profiles. And then for like YP, Merchant Circle, and DexNose, there's just very little interaction on those platforms. Most listings don't even have a review. But these are other platforms where potentially a review could be left. So online reviews in hearing health care. Hearing Tracker is a very important site for that. We get 30,000-plus unique visitors per month. It has a very healthy directory of hearing health care professionals. Consumers can review both products and hearing health care professionals, which is very, very unique in the industry to have that. There are free and enhanced listings. So like a lot of platforms, you can go and claim your listing, make sure your information is correct. You could also choose to pick an enhanced listing, which adds a few extra things to your profile and gets you better exposure within the system, within that ecosystem, and gets you better exposure with all that traffic that I mentioned earlier. Also reviews factor into the ranking algorithm within Hearing Tracker as well. How many reviews do you have? How good are the reviews? That sort of thing. Testimonials. We've been using testimonials for a long time in hearing health care, and how can we make them work for us in terms of social proof as it relates to our digital presence? First of all, let's talk about the power of testimonials. First of all, they are a powerful form of social proof. They create trust. The most important thing, I think, about testimonials, the most important aspect, is their ability to tell a story. Most people do not leave a testimonial like this. I visited this practice. They're great. You should go there. That's a fine testimonial, but most of the testimonials that you see out there and the reviews out there say something like, I came to ABC Hearing with this problem, and they solved it, and now I can hear my wife again. The powerful thing about that story is there are hundreds, if not thousands, of other people who are potentially viewing that information who have the same story. So it directly relates to them, and it speaks to them on not only a practical but also an emotional level. Also, testimonials can be very powerful as conversion tools. There's been a lot of research done on this, and one particular study showed a 34% increase in conversion just by adding testimonials to the website. Customer feedback. We want to talk about how this benefits us and how this gets us more customers, which is great, but there's also an important aspect in our business just to keeping people happy. Bain Capital did some research many years ago that led to a lot of the net promoter score type information that many of you have probably heard about. But one of the things that they found that just asking a customer if they're happy with your service or product raises their satisfaction. I think that's really interesting because without any changes to personnel, product, process, you can increase the happiness and the satisfaction level of your customers just by asking them and showing that you care. Also, as a business owner in any industry, you want to know what issues you have, what you need to, and that best comes from customer feedback. While it's great to get an online review to have on Yelp, it's great to get a testimonial to put on your website. Let's not forget about the impact of getting the negative feedback, the positive feedback, the indifferent feedback about your practice, about the people who are in your practice. It really helps shape and guide your business going forward. Recommendations. I've got a few recommendations for everybody in terms of how it relates to reputation management, online reviews, and testimonials. Let's get into that. What can you do? First, claim your profiles. All these platforms have, most of these platforms, particularly the top tier that I mentioned, have a way for you to claim your business or claim your profile. That's really important because it allows you to edit the information. You might have incorrect information on there. Make sure that everything's correct. That's really important. Also, you want to complete your profiles. There's a number of research that's been done on this, but we've become a very visual society. We're very image driven through all age demographics now. One person did a study, one organization that showed just adding a picture can triple the amount of page views you get on these review platforms. Customers also spent two and a half times more on these listings and profiles that had at least one photo. Claim the profiles, complete the profiles, add pictures, hours of operation. Everything you can add because not only is that really good for the user, but that signals to the platform that you're on that you're more important, that you're more relevant, and you're more likely to show higher up in their systems. There's stuff you can do offline as well. First of all, talk to your clients and ask for online reviews. How many of us have had the person in our office, the client in our office, maybe they thought their hearing aid was dead, and all it took was a really good cleaning, and now their hearing aid's working again. Then they turn to you and say, hey, this is fantastic, what do I owe you? Depending on the service, maybe you charged them, maybe you didn't, maybe it was already included in their aftercare. They're looking to do something for you. They're very appreciative, they want to do something for you. It's a great opportunity to ask for an online review. To see if they would go to one of these platforms and tell other people what experience they had. I will say, I would go to the URL provided below, thebiz.yelp.com, about review solicitation. You do need to be careful, you do need to stay away from soliciting your customers to review you. So offering them some financial incentive to review you. Not only is it against the terms of service, but there are some legal ramifications. I know of a business that got fined $10,000, was not in this industry, for providing incentive to give people reviews. So it's very important that you follow those and you don't offer them money to leave you a review. Because the potential downside and risk is probably greater than the upside on that one. You can also place logos and URLs of different review platforms on your business cards. You probably have a lot of printed material in the waiting room or the lobby of your practice. You could certainly mention Hearing Tracker or Yelp or Facebook, Google. A lot of you have a testimonial book in your waiting room, which is fantastic that you have that. But as people are flipping through these different testimonials, what would be great to have in that is a mention that these people could go and leave a testimonial on your Facebook page. Or leave a testimonial on Google. Or leave a testimonial on Hearing Tracker. Any number of these platforms, you can mention to these folks and keep it top of mind so that they think to do that. Another thing I strongly recommend, and this is a big one, create a Yelp check-in offer. Yelp will allow you to create a check-in offer. This is not a review solicitation. But what you do is you set up an offer and it could be any number of things. Free hearing aid cleaning, free four pack of batteries. Where if somebody checks in on Yelp, they can flip their smartphone around and show you a screen that says they checked in. You have a check-in offer. It will show sort of like an electronic coupon. And you can mark it used. So there's a very good accountability system in there. But here's the beauty of the Yelp check-in. You check in on Yelp, and then as a consumer, you get a reminder to review a business. So if I go check in at a restaurant today, let's say for lunch, I'm going to go out to lunch later. I check in, and I at some point will get a reminder within Yelp to review the business that I checked in on but did not leave a review. So creating excitement or promoting the fact that people can check in on Yelp will actually lead to more reviews. Displaying review information on your site. So there are people out there, you see a couple of examples on the slide, that have created badges and various things that they can place on their site that, one, link to the different profiles that they have, but also sort of put top of mind the idea that people can review them at these different places. Then lastly, I would recommend a reputation management solution for your practice, which we'll talk about a little bit more in depth later. So the reality is, in hearing health care, if you operate a hearing aid practice, getting reviews is hard business. If you opened up a coffee shop today in a large metropolitan area, in 30 days you'd probably have 30 Yelp reviews without even trying. Just because the types of folks that frequent these establishments, they leave reviews all the time. The reality is, with 55 plus, even though they make up a fifth of Yelp users, they're not quite as active and it's not as top of mind for them to review every business that they visit, as it is for some of the younger folks. Just to sort of point out an example of this and show that you have to ask a lot of people and talk to a lot of people to get reviews, one of my colleagues did a sample with some emails. So the review management solution that we'll be talking about later sends emails like this out. Essentially they sent emails where it said, hey, will you review us online? Or will you rate us? And they sent, for every 100 that they sent, they got 50 people to open. So the open rates, if they know you and know your business, are fairly high. That's great. 50 out of 100 people saw the email, opened it. Only 13% of the people are actually willing to go on Facebook or Yelp or any of these other platforms and review you. It's nothing against you, it's just they're busy, they don't know how, they don't want to, they just aren't going to do it. So that leaves about 13% of people who are actually willing to do this. Then it comes down to how many people are willing to review you. What was their experience like? So on average it's 9%. So you lose a few because you have a few folks that maybe either weren't so happy, maybe they didn't like your product or service, maybe they're just sort of indifferent, and so they're not willing to go that extra mile for you. So that leaves about 9%. And then you have something called review friction. Review friction is essentially the difficulty in leaving reviews. The reality is you can't just go to these sites, say, hey, my name's Chris, give them five star, and here's what I have to say about the business. You have to have an account, you have to register as a user, and that's what we would consider review friction. It's their ability, their either desire to set up these accounts, or their ability to do so. So typically if you sent out 100 emails, you're looking at one to three reviews. And a lot of that is driven on your net promoter score. So the happier people are, the more reviews you're going to get by and large, because that's what drives most of these online reviews. But guess what? There are things you can do to help them out. So what we've started to do for many of our SEO clients is prepare worksheets for people that they can hand out in their offices that show people exactly how to review them on Google. This is especially meaningful for a couple of reasons. One, a lot of the folks that we're working with just wouldn't know how to do that in the first place. And two, Google has changed the way you can review your business. In fact, if many of you go to your Google Plus pages right now for your business, you'll see that you can't even find a place to review. So there are a lot of changes going on within Google Plus right now. There still are ways you can review a business online, but there's only two ways. Through an app on your phone or through Google Maps on the desktop. So knowing that it's a little bit difficult, but also knowing how important these are, you can make it easier on them and give them, let's say, an instruction sheet that's customized, like it says, hey, go to Google, type in this, click here, write a review, and bam. So that certainly can help and I highly recommend it. We'll talk a little bit more about this later. Also, it's important if you're going to be proactive in the review space, you have to respond to reviews. So people leave you a positive review. I'm very passionate about the fact that you need to respond to those as well. If someone went out of their way to review your practice, review your business, they may have had to have set up an account just to do it. It may have taken them quite some time to figure out how. They may have had to get help. They may have had to ask a friend or a family member, hey, how do I set this up? And so it's very important to respond to those people and say thank you, we appreciate your feedback, we're very happy that you're happy, something along those lines. If you get a negative review, there's a few things you need to remember. I would never attack the person who left you a negative review. I also would not go line by line and, you know, start arguing the facts of their case, if you will. I think if you just respond with something like, you know, sorry, we didn't meet your expectations, we'll call you to see if there's anything, you know, we can correct, but more of a tone where you're one, apologetic, but two, that you care. And as other people look at this comment that you leave, they're going to see that you care. So sort of remember, they don't expect perfection. They don't expect that you have five stars. As individuals, as organizations, we're not perfect, and people are okay with that. What they want, they want you to care and they want you to try, and that's what you need to show. Yelp even did an internal study, you know, of all the businesses that are rated different stars, who's clicking on what, and four-star businesses got clicked on at a higher rate, a higher click-through rate than five-star businesses. So, you know, the theory is that maybe these people didn't feel these five-star reviews were legitimate. So it's very important to remember people don't expect perfection. Don't worry too much about a negative review. Show that you care, and then just move on. So testimonials, some recommendations for that. You can, you know, move a lot of those to offline testimonials online. So many of you have these testimonial books. This is all great content for you to put on your website. You can encourage more testimonials through conversations and mentions throughout your practice. It's very important to remember that. And now I want to talk a little bit about ReviewGen. So we have a reputation management solution at OdysseyO called ReviewGen. It gathers testimonials for your website, encourages positive online reviews for sites like Yelp, Google+, Facebook, Hearing Tracker. We can encourage positive online reviews at over 200 plus sites, but those are sort of the ones that we focus on. It also gives you the negative feedback you need to help improve your customer service and discourages negative online reviews. Remember that most people leave you a negative online review because they felt like they didn't have an outlet within your business. So if you give them an outlet by asking them, how did we do, tell us about it, this actually discourages them from going to places like Yelp or your Facebook page or your Google and leaving a negative review. So it's very important that you, you know, cover all these bases, and we have a reputation management solution that helps you do that. Also can help you gather more emails. So if your practice doesn't have a lot of email addresses, it can help you do that. Best thing, it works with any website and platform. So if you don't have a website by OdysseyO or you use somebody else for that, for your SEO, you can also get ReviewGen, and it can have a powerful impact on your practice. A couple other quick things before we get into Q&A, you know, it leaves those great testimonials on your website and then also offers these rich snippets, schema, you maybe have heard of, the markup, which in this scenario are those little stars next to your search engine ranking position. So very good stuff, you want all this stuff, and our platform does that in addition to all the stuff we mentioned earlier. I have a bonus for all of you, if you want to read more about, you know, reviews and testimonials in ReviewGen, you can follow the link on the slide. For IHS members, we're giving away one free year of ReviewGen to one practice. You just need to text REVIEWGEN to 44222. So text REVIEWGEN, one word, be all capitals, all lowercase, doesn't matter, just watch the autocorrect on your phone, REVIEWGEN to 44222. If you text REVIEWGEN to 44222, you'll be entered to win a free year of ReviewGen. And again, it works with any website, and we're going to select one practice to give this away to for the year. And lastly, a second bonus for those of you who want that customized Google review instruction that we do for many of our SEO clients. If you go to Twitter or on Facebook, you'd have to follow our Twitter account or our Facebook account, and you share any one of our posts that we have on there, we will receive, we will customize a Google handout form for you and your practice. So I've left our Twitter handle and our Facebook link up there. You can also just search with us, search us within those platforms. And if you retweet or share any of those posts, we will customize that Google handout form for your practice, so you can hand it out and get more Google reviews for your practice. Got references here. And I think we are ready for questions. Great. Thanks, Chris. Chris, we're so excited that we've had over 150 of your fellow colleagues that have joined us today on this webinar. As Chris said, we do have some time for questions. If you have a question for Chris, please enter it in the question box on your webinar dashboard. Chris, our first question comes from Linda. Linda asks, can I have a negative Yelp review removed? Great question, Linda. You can, but it's very difficult. Yelp will not remove a review because it's just a negative review. There has to be a terms of service violation. So you certainly can write to Yelp and flag the review and say why in there that you feel like this review should be removed. I recommend, before you do that, reading Yelp's terms of service and their review guidelines for their users, so you can find if that review does violate any of their terms of service. So one would be a former employee, right? So they will do a little bit of an investigation. A lot of times these get denied, but you can request. And I have seen some reviews taken off. I've seen a lot of requests denied. Great. Thank you, Chris. Chris, our next question comes from Brian. And Brian asks, there used to be a place to review businesses on Google+, but now I can't find it. What happened to it? Yeah, great question, Brian. And I was pretty brief in covering that in the presentation, but Google has made a lot of changes to the Google+, platform. If you click over to Classic View on Google+, a lot of times you can still see the place to review the business, but most people don't know to click that. In fact, they found that most information from the Google+, profile's been sort of stripped away. So essentially, you need to use the app on the phone or use the Google Maps. If you search for a practice within the Google Maps, there is a link right next to each of the listings to leave a review. So it has become a lot more difficult. There are a lot of changes going on right now with Google+, and the GMB, formerly called Google Local. And, you know, I don't know exactly where that's headed, but you still do want people to review you on Google. It's just become more difficult. So good question. Great, thank you, Chris. Chris, our next question's from John, and John asks, what about Angie's List? Is Angie's List important? Yeah, I hear about this from time to time, people asking this question. Angie's List was different than a lot of the other review platforms out there in that it charged consumers to look at reviews. So I think in many ways, it got a little bit left behind. I think it was earlier this year that they actually changed, and now consumers can look for reviews for free. But there's still a gateway there. You still have to sign up for an account just to look at reviews. Businesses have to pay, so there's a gateway there. And it's not as well utilized. I know some people that have some reviews on Angie's List. I know some practices that have done it. But they seem to be focusing a little bit more on the service industry, so plumbers and people that come to your house. A lot of the new, you know, new innovations that they've come out with are all related to service industry folks. So right now, I would put sort of a big question mark in Angie's List. I don't know where it will be in two or three years. I would not consider that one of the premier areas or most important. I think there are other focuses for your practice. Great. Thanks, Chris. Chris, our next question comes from, I believe it's DeRoche. And they ask, what about LinkedIn? Is LinkedIn a viable place for reviews? You know, I'm not a huge fan of LinkedIn for business to consumer. So just in general, reviews, you know, promoting your content, I'm not a huge fan of LinkedIn for business to consumer. I think it's a fairly healthy platform for B2B. But B2C, the consumers just aren't there. And I think what you have to remember is, what do people go to a platform to do? And most people go to a LinkedIn platform. When they go to the LinkedIn platform, they are not looking to get sold on anything or hear about somebody, you know, really promoting, you know, a product or something. So I think it's important to recognize what a platform is sort of known for and how people interact with it. I'm not a huge fan of LinkedIn for hearing practices. Great. Thanks, Chris. Chris, our next question is from Jack. Jack says, I can easily get a handwritten signed review or a testimonial, but almost none of my customers are online. Can I use these handwritten testimonials to my benefit somehow beyond my website? I think the, you know, what I would do with those is as people leave those, I would, you know, ask their permission to publish that information on your website. And I think that's the best place for it, is on your domain. It adds content to your website, which is great for your SEO. It adds social proof to your webpages, so as people visit your website, they see that, you know, other people like you and have made positive comments about you. So I don't know that you really need to go beyond that. You can't really publish these on other platforms, at least none of the other legitimate platforms. And I would be wary of any platforms that allow you to self-publish. There are a couple out there where you as a business owner can say, oh, so-and-so said this, and so-and-so said that. You know, there's a reason that many of these platforms are growing faster than others, and it's because consumers see them as, you know, by and large, legitimate reviews. So I would steer clear of any place that allows you to do self-uploading of testimonials or that sort of thing. Google's unlikely to look at that as being highly important as well, because they're smart enough to know that businesses are going to try and game the system, and they're not likely to give, you know, a lot of weight to those sort of domains. Great. Thanks, Chris. Chris, we seem to be getting a lot of questions about HealthyHearing.com as a review platform. Could you share your thoughts with everybody about HealthyHearing.com? Yeah, HealthyHearing.com is a review platform. You know, you can leave reviews on there for providers. The thing that I think is a little bit different about HealthyHearing is it's obviously tied to a manufacturer, and the providers that it's recommending are based on their relationship with that manufacturer. I think that's the unfortunate part about that particular domain, is that consumers don't realize that the recommendations that are being given have nothing to do with online reputation, reviews, you know, strength of reviews, counter reviews. It has to do with their relationship with one particular manufacturer. So, you know, I think it's important to look at how many people visit a site, but I also think it's important to look at it from the consumer's point of view. What's actually giving them relevant information for them? And, you know, look, the manufacturer, you know, there are a lot of great manufacturers out there. You might have someone looking for a particular product that is not that one particular manufacturer. Is that practice the best place to send them to? I don't know that it is. It would depend on the particular situation. So for those reasons, that's why I sort of left it out of what I would consider the top tier, because the relevancy to the consumer, I think that link is missing. And I think that, you know, consumers are not aware who are going on that site, what the actual algorithm, if you will, is. Great. Thank you, Chris. Chris, we have a question from Christina, and Christina asks, does the ReviewGen program work if I have a website that's created by a different company? Yes. Yes, it does. ReviewGen can work on any platform and with any website. We can even help set it up on your website. So if you have any questions, you could, you know, potentially go to our website, fill out a contact form. Also on our website, you can book a time with me to chat about stuff. If you want to book a time on my calendar, you can do that. We can talk about your particular situation. But yes, you can use ReviewGen for any platform, any website. Great. Thanks, Chris. Chris, we have a question from Bill, and Bill was wondering if you could shed a little bit of light on schema and rich snippets. Awesome. Yeah, so rich snippets are essentially, you know, extra information within what we call the SERPs, the search engine ranking positions. And, you know, one of those rich snippets would be a review snippet. And if you have, this has to do with the code that's on the site, if you have things marked up in such a way, it identifies to Google that this is a particular type of information. So you can run schema on many different things, whether you're a local business and what your address is, a product review, you know, a business review, that sort of thing. But based on the page rank of the site that it's on and the schema markup, Google can then sometimes show these rich snippets. And the beautiful thing about them is the click-through rate is potentially higher, and that can increase your SEO. So just as an example, let's say someone types in hearing aids in your city, and, you know, you're number four. But you have those rich snippets with the stars next to your name. You're more likely to get clicked on. Now Google has you in number four position. They know the average click-through rate of the number four position. And if you outperform the click-through rate of the average number four position, you're likely to move up from three to two to one. So having those rich snippets allows you to outperform the average click-through rate and therefore move up. Hopefully that's the information you were looking for on that. Great. Thank you, Chris. Chris, that does it for our Q&A session. I'd like to thank you for an excellent presentation today, and I'd like to thank all of our attendees for joining us today on the IHS webinar, Online Reviews, Testimonials, and Reputation Management, What Hearing Practices Need to Know. If you'd like to get in contact with Chris, you may email him at chris at aedsco.com. For more information about receiving a continuing education credit for this webinar through IHS, visit the IHS website at ihsinfo.org. Click on the webinar banner or find more information on the webinar tab on the navigation menu. IHS members receive a substantial discount on CE credits. So if you're not already an IHS member, you will find more information at ihsinfo.org. Please keep an eye out for a feedback survey that you will receive tomorrow via email. We ask that you take just a moment to answer questions about today's presentation. Thank you again for being with us today, and we will see you at the next IHS webinar.

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