It’s 1:17 am early Friday morning. Just finished doing a bunch of internet marketing stuff for my side business, and thought I’d end the night with a helpful tip for my fellow chiropractors wanting to inject life into their practices. So here it is, and once again it’s on how to use Yelp.com to get your patients to get your chiropractic clinic noticed.

I made a post about this in July 2009 because I noticed that I was getting quite a few patients from Yelp each week.  Well, about a year later, Yelp is even stronger, and pulling a lot of weight in online searches for local businesses.  I’m finding that Yelp.com is often in the #1 spot for natural search for local chiropractic services.  For example, if you Google the phrase “San Francisco Chiropractors,” Yelp is anchored at the #1 spot and has been for months and months.  Not sure about other big cities; though.  What tends to drive Yelp’s strong SEO ranking is the amount of activity on the site, and in San Francisco, there are many Yelpers posting comments on businesses; perhaps hundreds a day, and such changing activity on a website is seen positively by Google as “fresh, relevant content” which drives up the site’s ranking and makes it very difficult for smaller sites to bump it from its perch.

So what typically happens is that the person Google’s “(their city name) chiropractor” and sees Yelp first; does a search there for a chiropractor in her city, reads the reviews of one chiropractor, then another, and another, and so on, comparing all these chiropractors’ ratings before deciding to pick up the phone to call.  Basically Yelp hijacks her for an hour, and she’d rather not look at the other sites below it on the Google search results page.

So, what does this mean?  It means if you want to capture the part of your market that looks for their services online through the search engines, then you need to get as many Yelp reviews from your patients as possible.  And how do you go about doing it, just asking them nicely?  NO!  You have to push the action.  It’s that important.

First tip to get more Yelp reviews:  Make a business card that says,

“Can We Ask You a Little Favor?”  Many people use Yelp.com to locate businesses they wish to try, including chiropractors.  We would greatly appreciate it if you could write us a Yelp review.  Just go to Yelp.com, sign up, and look up our business.  Thanks!

…or something similar– you get the idea.  Ask patients to do it, and give the card to everyone on their way out.

Second tip to get more Yelp reviews:  Have a laptop computer at your checkout desk, with a small sign in an acrylic stand that says the same thing above.  After you are done treating your patient, ask him to please write a review if they have time, before he leaves.  Say it like this: “Can you do me a favor, Jim…” and ask him to use the laptop at the front desk to write a review.  People generally like doing good deeds, and it should work.  Also, get your chiropractic assistant to reinforce it by having her request it, too as she makes the patient’s next appointment.  If you let them say, “I’ll do it at work/home” chances of him doing it fall to 10% or less, as life gets in the way.  If the patient doesn’t have time, that’s when you give him the business card in Tip 1 as back up.

Third tip:  Make one of your autoresponder messages in your chiropractic email marketing campaign ask the patient to write a Yelp review.  Put a link in the message that connects to Yelp.

Fourth tip:  Use incentives.  Offer a half-hour massage to all patients who write a raving review of the practice.  Or, hold a contest:  whoever writes the best review, as judged by your staff, wins six months of maintenance care, a TempurPedic pillow, customized orthotics, or other prize.

Fifth tip:  This works if you use a sliding fee schedule in your office.  Basically, you very nicely, and not in a condescending way, say “We never want to let cost get in the way of someone getting chiropractic care, which is why we offer a sliding fee schedule, but we do ask that, if you like our service, write a Yelp review for our clinic as it will help with our business.”

Those are my recommendations.  You’ve got to lead them to “Yes” when it comes to Yelp, just like the old-school report of findings methods.  If your website isn’t even on the first page of Google for your main keyword, and Yelp is, then you should be even more motivated to set these strategies into action.  Don’t underestimate the power of social media sites like Yelp.com; many people use it to find businesses to patronize.  If it’s not that big in your city, it may be in the near future, so start building up your reviews.

Dan Perez DC