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Health care marketing strategist Sara Meyer discusses her article, “First impressions happen online—not in your exam room.” She explains why a physician’s online presence is often the deciding factor for potential patients and highlights the common gap between high-quality clinical care and an outdated digital brand. In an increasingly competitive market, patients are comparison-shopping online, making snap judgments based on search rankings, website appearance, and patient reviews. Sara outlines a simple, three-step plan for physicians who feel overwhelmed but want to improve their online footprint: Google your practice to see what patients see, build out a complete Google Business Profile, and actively prioritize gathering patient reviews. The key takeaway is that providers don’t need to do everything at once; instead, they should focus on high-impact activities to ensure their digital brand accurately reflects the quality of care they provide, ultimately building trust and connecting them with the patients they are meant to serve.

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Transcript

Kevin Pho: Hi, and welcome to the show. Subscribe at KevinMD.com/podcast. Today we welcome Sara Meyer. She’s a health care marketing strategist. Today’s KevinMD article is, “First impressions happen online, not in your exam room.” Sara, welcome to the show.

Sara Meyer: Thank you. It’s great to be here.

Kevin Pho: All right, so just briefly tell us a little bit about your story and why you decided to write this article on KevinMD.

Sara Meyer: Well, I have been in health care marketing for almost a decade now. I can’t believe it. I work with rural hospitals and health care providers, and we work within small teams and small budgets, so we have to be very strategic about the areas that we focus on. I think some of the biggest things that stand out to me are areas where physicians may fall short when it’s something that can be really doable.

But it is just extremely important to be able to show up online nowadays. Patients are going to find you first online. It’s not even just the referrals. Now they’re going to Google you, and if you’re not showing up there how you want to be seen, then you could lose your patient before they even give you a phone call. So things have really changed.

Kevin Pho: So I’ve been talking about online reputation for many, many years now. Even back 10 years ago, I think patients began looking for their doctors online. What are some of the current trends in terms of how patients are finding their doctors?

Sara Meyer: So I think it’s evolved from websites not being as important as they used to be. Google really serves as that first point. We have found that with the providers, if we focus there, that’s going to be even more important than spending a lot of time on SEO for your website or even the look of your website.

If you have a nice logo and you show up well on your Google profile, then you have as much of a shot of getting someone to give you a phone call as maybe a bigger location or someone who spends a lot of money on marketing.

Kevin Pho: And in general, what are the major ways patients are finding doctors online? Are they simply Googling specific physicians’ names? Are they Googling keywords? Now with ChatGPT and artificial intelligence, how does that play a role? What are some of the current trends in terms of how patients are finding doctors online? What are some of the ways they’re doing it?

Sara Meyer: So keywords for sure. The interesting thing about that is it may not be exactly what you might think they would be searching. Their thought on a specialist and what they might be called might be different than what the specialist is actually called. So I think there’s a little bit of a gap there, and that’s the importance of the keywords and thinking about what your patients maybe—what they refer to, not so much what you refer to.

So the terminology and words that a provider may use may not match what people are searching. I think understanding that gap and how to bridge that, being able to work that into the strategy. When it comes to searching online, there’s a lot of digital options out there, a lot of places to show up. Everything from ads to your listing to a variety of things, but a combination of all of those is what’s going to get you found. It’s just the easiest way to actually show up well online that I have found, and to be able to make the biggest impact quickly would be through your Google profile and making sure that you’re where you need to be there.

Kevin Pho: And specifically with the Google profile, why is that one specifically so important?

Sara Meyer: Because everyone uses Google. It’s just the common way of going to find a restaurant, going to find a provider, going to find a store. It’s what everyone is using, and it changes all the time. That’s the interesting thing. The target changes all the time when it comes to what you need to have on your profile or what it’s even called. It wasn’t long ago it wasn’t a Google profile; it was a Google Business Location or things like that.

So that’s always changing. But it’s most important because it’s commonly where everyone goes, and it’s not just the tech-savvy patients that are going there. It’s older populations. It’s rural populations. Everyone uses it.

Kevin Pho: And one of the reasons why it’s so important to have a Google profile is that it permeates throughout the Google ecosystem, right? So Google Maps, for instance. I think that it connects with your Google profile there.

Sara Meyer: Absolutely. And having your location specifically in your profile is important because if someone is near you, it’s going to help you show up higher than someone who’s a little further away. So making sure that’s accurate.

Kevin Pho: So before we get into the nuts and bolts in terms of steps physicians can take in managing how they appear online, doctors who don’t do anything, they already have some type of footprint online by default, right? So tell us about that. For doctors who just haven’t done anything, how do they appear online?

Sara Meyer: So I think it surprises people when they realize that if you go out there and Google yourself, even if you have not set up a profile, someone may have set up a profile for you, which is a really interesting concept. The information may not be right. I’ve run into problems where the location is wrong or the phone number is wrong or things like that.

And that requires a lot of time to get all of that fixed. But if you don’t show up, someone will show up for you. You can submit a location, you can submit a provider, you can submit any information you want to Google, and as long as AI thinks that it’s valid, then it’ll get posted, and that can cause an issue. So you want to be there first. You want to make sure your information’s accurate before you let some random bot or someone post for you.

Kevin Pho: And we’re talking primarily about smaller independent private practices, right? Because most hospitals have marketing budgets, they have marketing teams that do a lot of this for physicians who may not have the time for this. So are we primarily talking about these smaller independent practices that may not have that marketing team behind them?

Sara Meyer: Yes, but not completely. The interesting thing is the hospital that I work for, yes, it’s a smaller rural hospital, but I was just running some reports looking at our bigger counterparts in the area. And we have more reviews. We have a higher star rating. We show up higher in the rank. We have a small team; there are three of us working on this, and they have teams of 50. So just because an organization is bigger doesn’t always mean that they’re just going to automatically be higher ranked or show up first. It’s all about the quality, not so much just having the team to spend the time on it.

Reviews, I think, is a really important piece of it too, that people might overlook. You can set up your profile, you can have everything correct and all of the information there, the right keywords, but unless you have current and positive reviews, that affects your ranking in a huge way. A lot of times, unless you’re asking people to give you a review, you’re going to likely get mostly the negatives because if someone has a bad experience, the first thing they want to do is go out there and post it. Someone who has a good experience, maybe not exceptional, but really good, may not think to go out and put a Google review out there.

So that’s why you actively have to look for Google reviews and ask your patients for those because that impacts your ranking as well.

Kevin Pho: So I want to get back to patient reviews a little later on. So let’s say for those physicians who may be listening to you and think to themselves, “Oh my gosh, I’m 10 years behind. I need to get started, and I don’t want to delegate this to a marketing team. I want to do it myself and have some semblance of control.” Tell me what your first step would be.

Sara Meyer: So I think one of the biggest surprises with going in and setting up a profile and taking this on yourself is the fact that AI can be used to actually help personalize your message and help you with clarity. It’s not just a canned response now because the inputs that you put in are going to be used to create something personal to you. So I was able to create an AI tool that goes through a number of different questions, takes less than 15 minutes, and can generate a really personal profile bio as well as some different posts and things like that that you can use to set up your profile.

So I think the biggest thing is not to get overwhelmed when it comes to setting up your profile. You need to basically be able to explain what you do, know what keywords to include in that. You want to make sure that you have photos that are well lit. They don’t have to be professional. You can use your phone to take the pictures, but you want to make sure that there’s no clutter, that they show you in a professional manner because photos really say a lot. So making sure that your photos are up-to-date as well as something as simple as hours for holidays and things like that, staying on top of that, Google makes it really easy to do that.

It’s all within a form. You’re actually answering each of these different sections, and once you fill all of those out, then it’s created for you. So it’s not a very difficult process; it’s just a matter of answering those questions and making sure you’re hitting those key topics.

Another piece of it, I think that we all think about showing up on social media: Facebook, Instagram, things like that. Well, Google serves the same purpose as well, and having just a post once a week, something having to do with a health trend or something having to do with a new employee that you might have that you can feature. Those types of things keep you relevant as well, in addition to making sure you have the most current and up-to-date reviews. So I think those, it may look scary, but it’s not scary.

Kevin Pho: And speaking of AI, for those physicians who may not be comfortable with search engine optimization and may not know what specific keywords to use, AI can be helpful with that, right?

Sara Meyer: Absolutely. So, something as simple as ChatGPT, you can go out there and ask, “OK, so in my area”—and you can enter your area—”what are the search terms being used for my specialty?” And it is a great way to start. Also, Google has a tool where you can see what’s being searched in your area as well. So there are different ways you can just go out and do a little bit of research to find out what people are using when it comes to keywords and being able to work those into your profile.

Kevin Pho: Your profile. So once a physician creates a profile, all the keywords, bio, story, pictures, periodic articles, are they done? Is there anything more that they can do to expand? You did mention social media. Is it essential for physicians to get on these platforms like LinkedIn and whatnot to expand that footprint?

Sara Meyer: You can. I think the biggest thing is not to overwhelm yourself, because when you get overwhelmed, then you don’t show up to anything. So I think doing one thing 100 percent or two things 100 percent is better than doing 10 things at 20 percent. You want to kind of pick your focus and, once you have that down and feel pretty confident in what you’re doing, you can always work something else in. You can always work in Facebook or Instagram or LinkedIn. But I think I see a lot of physicians that get a little overwhelmed when it comes to all of the different things that you can do.

You don’t have to be a marketer; you still have to focus on the patient. And that’s one of the reasons this is so important to me is because I hate to see providers being torn in so many different directions and feeling like they have to be all of the things, when really we want them to show up for the patients. So that really is the biggest focus. That’s kind of why I picked Google as the focus for this because it’s fairly easy. You can keep up with it with just a post or two a week, and it’s not something that’s quite as overwhelming, and it shows up for you and gets your name out there so that you can spend time with patients.

Another piece of it, which is a recommendation, is the physician doesn’t have to be the only one that handles these different outlets. So once you establish a voice and a tone and are able to convey the things that are important to you as a physician, you could have an office manager help you with this. So you don’t have to do it all yourself. It doesn’t have to just rely on you to show up on your social media platform.

Kevin Pho: Now, I know a lot of hospital marketing teams want to take over all of their physicians’ Google Pages. Now, from the physician point of view, should they delegate that out to their marketing teams or should they do it themselves and maintain that control just in case they move on to a different organization? What’s the decision point there?

Sara Meyer: So our standard process is that marketing does handle that. I handle the Google profiles for our providers. Now, the one thing to consider is the fact that you can move the profile. So if there are two different profiles I recommend: you have a provider profile and you have an office profile, so you’re going to have two.

The office profile would remain with whatever the location is, and then your provider profile could go with you, so you can transfer that to either the next location you go to or you can take that over yourself. But from my standpoint, I work really closely with the provider to make sure that the content that’s out there is accurate and represents them well. So I think part of it might rely on the team and how closely the team works with the provider. I don’t know that I would blindly just, but also it depends on the policy of the location as well.

Kevin Pho: Now let’s talk about patient reviews, because you mentioned that patient reviews are a significant factor in the visibility of these Google profiles. So what’s your approach in terms of soliciting or asking about patient reviews?

Sara Meyer: So yes, that’s what we do. We ask. We text patients after a visit and ask them to give a review for us. We also have something as simple as a business card that you can hand out to patients that gives them something to take with them, and it has a QR code or it just says, “Google the name of our office and leave us a review.”

Once we started actively asking for the reviews, our rating went up significantly, and the number of reviews that we get has gone up significantly. So I think truly just having that conversation when it comes to the office staff, when it comes to handing something out to remind them, or even sending text messages after the appointment, really can make a big impact on your reviews.

Kevin Pho: Now tell me a story of how this visibility made a difference to perhaps one of your clients or a physician, kind of a before and after in terms of the clinical impact on their practice. So just to kind of tie everything together in a practical story.

Sara Meyer: So I think a good example of this is with a cancer center that I worked with. They weren’t getting reviews. They would get thank you notes. They would get cards, they would get flowers sent to them. They had extremely grateful patients that would come and stop in and just see the staff. But one of the things that they weren’t getting were reviews. Because of that and not actually showing up in their profile, not having posts, and just not showing up, they weren’t showing up in the ranking. So if someone were to go out and say, “OK, I’m looking for cancer care in my area,” they were not showing up where they needed to. The level of care that they provided was not well represented digitally online.

Because of that, it was challenging when it came to even the number of patients that they were getting once we implemented a program where, because it’s a very personal interaction with the patients between the provider and the patients, that’s a situation where they would have conversations and just say, “Hey, here’s a card, if you feel moved to leave us a review, we’d love to have it.” It started out really slow, so it was a little bit challenging at first and finding that time that would be a good time to ask for the review, knowing that, depending on where they’re at in their journey.

But once we figured out where the time in the process was to give that card and to have that conversation, the review numbers started going up, and with those review numbers going up, then the ranking went up. When you Google this particular cancer center, it has gone up in the rankings and it’s in the top three, which is great because we have a lot of competition when it comes to cancer centers in the area.

I think the best part from a number standpoint, from a financial standpoint, is they got more patients. That’s fantastic. From the other side of it, from my side of it, I love to see that an office that provides such an important experience and such a high level of care is actually being seen now and people are finding this office. So I think there are two different sides to it. Providers out there are amazing, and just because maybe their Google profile isn’t what it needs to be, they’re not seeing the patients who really need to find them.

Kevin Pho: We’re talking to Sara Meyer. She’s a health care marketing strategist. Today’s KevinMD article is, “First impressions happen online, not in your exam room.” Sara, let’s end with some take-home messages that you want to leave with the KevinMD audience.

Sara Meyer: OK. I think the biggest thing is patients are making their decision before they even call you. So remember that when you’re thinking about the priorities and where you want to show up online. Clarity and your voice matter. So you as a provider, you’re different than all the other providers. So you want your potential patients to know that. And being able to make sure that your messaging online matches that is really important to get you the patients that need to see you.

And you don’t have to do everything. You just have to do the right things. So go out, Google yourself, see what shows up and decide from there, “OK, this needs work,” or, “We’re in good shape.” And I think if you can focus what little extra time you have on the right areas, you’re going to see a big impact.

Kevin Pho: Sara, thank you so much for sharing your perspective and insight. Thanks again for coming on the show.

Sara Meyer: Thank you.