How online reviews impact revenue for local healthcare and medical centers

It's clearly important for healthcare and medical centers to claim their listings on as many review sites as possible, but they should also focus on engaging with their clients, customers, and patients via reviews.

79% of healthcare and medical centers in our study hadn't responded to even a single review, which goes to show just how few of them are taking advantage of this beneficial practice.

Let's see how responding to reviews impacts revenue for healthcare and medical centers.

As you can see above, healthcare and medical centers who don't respond to reviews earn 6% less than average. Healthcare and medical centers who respond on a more regular basis, up to 25% of the time, earn 24% more than average.

As the reply rate climbs to above 25%, the increase in revenue dips slightly to 17% more than average. This is likely because healthcare and medical centers with larger response rates are either newer or smaller centers with fewer total reviews than centers with a much higher number of total reviews.

This becomes clear when you look at revenue by total number of review responses:

Healthcare and medical centers that respond to at least 1 review respond to a total of 12 reviews on average. But, as you can see, healthcare and medical centers only stand to benefit by engaging with their customers online.

Those businesses who respond to even just one review earn 10% more than average, and you can see the averages climb quickly the more often a healthcare and medical center responds to reviews.

By the time you get to centers who reply to more than 30 reviews, they are earning an impressive $99,000 more each year than average.

When it comes to responding to reviews, it's clear that healthcare and medical centers should focus primarily on giving genuine responses to both negative and positive reviews.

Healthcare and medical centers often stress about their star rating, but as we explain in the section above, chasing a perfect star rating isn't necessarily the best way to increase revenue.

On the other hand, our findings suggest that healthcare and medical centers should perhaps focus on getting more reviews than just about anything else.

Healthcare and medical centers in our analysis average a combined 27 reviews per location across all review sites. So we started by analyzing revenue at healthcare and medical centers whose review counts fall above and below that average 27-review threshold.

As suspected, the total number of reviews a healthcare and medical center has appears to have an impact on revenue. Those who have more than the average 27 reviews earn 28% more in annual revenue than the average healthcare and medical center.

Those with fewer than the average total number of reviews, meanwhile, earn 9% less.

A deeper look into the numbers helps further clarify the relationship between review count and average revenue for healthcare and medical centers.

Healthcare and medical centers with 10 reviews or fewer earn 15% less than average, while those with 10 to 27 earn slightly more than average.

Once healthcare and medical centers get into the 50 to 100-review range is when revenue starts to increase significantly above the average. To emphasize how important a lot of reviews can be for healthcare and medical centers, those with more than 200 reviews earn $110,000 more in annual revenue than average healthcare and medical center in our study.

This strongly suggests that when a customer searches online for healthcare and medical centers such as dentists, chiropractors, clinics, therapy centers, and the like, a large number of reviews may outweigh a high star rating.

Once again Google is clearly the most important review site for healthcare and medical centers, as those with an above-average review count on the site earn 27% more than average.

Either way you look at it, though, healthcare and medical center owners would be wise to get as many reviews on as many sites as possible.

Some healthcare and medical centers might be concerned that pushing for reviews may expose them to getting more bad reviews, but as we'll explain in a section below, bad reviews can actually be a good thing.

It's clearly important to get a steady stream of fresh reviews, but how important is the ratio of positive to negative reviews?

On average, 19% of the reviews posted about a given healthcare and medical center were negative, which is right on par with the average across all industries in our study.

Does this mean revenue at healthcare and medical centers is more or less impacted by a large number of negative reviews? Let's find out.

As the charts above reveal, healthcare and medical centers appear to be slightly more impacted by a large number of negative reviews than other industries.

As is the case with other industries, however, healthcare and medical centers with a healthy mix of good and bad reviews earn the most on average. The ideal spot is a negative review rate between 5 and 20%. Healthcare and medical centers whose reviews are 5 to 10% earn the most, 24% more than average.

Healthcare and medical centers whose reviews were 75 to 100% negative earn 23% less than average, which is a larger drop than similarly rated businesses across all industries.

Those whose reviews were only 0 to 5% negative, meanwhile, earn 3% less than average. When you compare this to the centers whose reviews were more of a mix of positive and negative reviews, it suggests that people searching for healthcare centers likely expect to see some negative reviews. In fact, many people actively seek out negative reviews first, and a center with little or no negative reviews might appear untested or even a little "too good to be true."

Our takeaway: healthcare and medical centers that focus on getting as many real and authentic reviews as possible reap the rewards.

Next we looked at which states' healthcare and medical centers were the best at managing their online presence. We started by analyzing the percentage of healthcare and medical centers in each state that had claimed at least one review site listing.

Alaska's healthcare and medical centers top this list, with 91% of their locations having claimed at least 1 review site listing. Utah and Wyoming centers fall close behind, just shy of the 90% mark.

At the bottom of the list, only 57% of the healthcare and medical centers in our analysis from Delaware have claimed at least one listing.

Finally, we looked at how frequently healthcare and medical centers in each state responded to reviews.

Healthcare and medical centers in Utah were the most engaged, with 41% of the healthcare and medical centers in the Beehive State having responding to at least one review.

Mississippi healthcare and medical centers were the least engaged, as only 9% of the listings in our analysis had responded to at least one review.