My Clinic Audit Was Going Fine Until I Reached the Stars
91.9% of the clinics I audited hold a Google review, better than most trades I check, and the average rating is 4.3 stars, 44 of 47. Only 16.4% give an unhappy patient a box to type in instead.
How many of your clinic’s patients do you figure have seen your star rating without ever once seeing your website?
Most of them, I’d say. I’ve spent two weeks reading this trade’s Google listings, and I’m fairly confident about it.
What I ran is the audit I sell, pointed at a long list of clinics, practices and health services instead of at one business. Ten checks, always in the same order.
The order matters to me more than it probably should. I’ve walked it so many times that going out of sequence feels like leaving the house without checking for my keys.
Most of the run was a pleasant surprise. Two stops weren’t, and I sat on one of them for a day before I trusted myself to say anything.
Stop one: the map listing
The website comes fourth or fifth for me these days. I open the map listing first, because a woman with a shoulder that’s been hurting since Tuesday meets that before she meets anything you built.
Stars, hours, photos, phone number. On my screen it arrives as a long list of ratings, one number to a business, and you can read a thousand of them in the time it takes a kettle to boil.
The good news came first. 91.9% of the businesses I sampled in this trade hold at least one Google review, which is better than the 88% I find across everything I count.
Nobody here is invisible. Your listing has stars on it, your competitor’s listing has stars on it, and the daughter doing the comparing at midnight has plenty to compare.
Heating companies finish first of 47 on that same check, and not one of the habits behind it touches a website.
Then I looked properly at the ratings and stopped enjoying myself.
The average across this trade is 4.3 stars.
I read that average twice, because a trade that lands 44 of 47 on it isn’t a trade nobody talks about. It’s a trade being graded by people having the worst morning of their month.
Why that number is so hard to move
Nobody rates a doctor the way they rate a barber, and I say that as a man who has rated both in the same week.
Your rating gets written by a woman who waited fifty minutes past her appointment time, or by a man who opened a bill three weeks later from a company you don’t own and can’t argue with.
Then it lands on your listing. Not theirs.
Meanwhile the patient whose test came back clear says nothing to anyone, because relief doesn’t send people to their phones the way irritation does.
A shop owner in Indianapolis had years of that piling up and had stopped looking at his rating at all. What finally moved it was a text message, and nothing on his website changed.
My check has its limits here, and I’d rather admit them than have you discover them yourself. It reads the number printed on the listing and nothing else, so it can’t separate a busy practice carrying hundreds of reviews with a few furious ones in the pile from a quiet one carrying eleven reviews and a memorable argument about a parking space.
So the number is unfair. It’s also the first thing a stranger reads about you, and unfair things get read all the same. What did yours say last time you looked?
Open one tab on a laptop and one on your phone and you can read your own listing tonight the way she reads it.
Stop two: how the page behaves on a phone
Next I check whether the page works on a phone, and whether it turns up quickly on one.
Nearly all of these sites fold themselves into a small screen without complaining, a shade better than the national rate, which made for a dull half hour and a happy one.
The speed check doesn’t run on the fast machine on my desk. It runs on a pretend phone with a deliberately poor connection, and it hands me back one score out of 100 for each site.
These sites average 61 out of 100 there, against 58 across every business I put through it.
Your trade builds good websites. I don’t get to write that sentence about many of the industries I grade, and I’d like you to hold on to that while you read the rest.
Stop three: the plumbing
The long boring stretch. Tags, headings, the locked address, the lines that tell a search engine which page is the real one.
An hour of scrolling and almost nothing worth telling you about, which is the highest compliment I have available. Whoever built these sites did the job.
Is your web designer the problem here? On this evidence, no. I was fully expecting him to be.
Stop four: can she reach you
Then I read the page the way a patient with a problem reads it, which is fast, one handed, and looking for one thing. Can she do it there and then, or does the page point her at a phone number and leave the rest to her?
My audit answers that one with a yes or a no for every site, and I scrolled a long way down the list before I hit a yes.
When did you last try to send yourself a message from your own front page, using nothing but a thumb and no menu?
16.4% of these homepages carry a contact form, against 28% of the small businesses I audit in general.
That one stopped me longer than the stars did, because a trade sitting 43 of 47 on it has quietly decided that the telephone, during office hours, is the only door into the building.
The two stops are the same stop
I don’t think those two numbers are strangers to each other.
Picture the woman who waited fifty minutes. She gets home, she’s still annoyed about it, and she wants to tell someone who works there.
There’s no box on your homepage. The phone line is closed until eight thirty tomorrow, and by then she’ll be at work herself.
So she opens the one place that will take her sentence at nine at night and publish it in front of everybody. Where else did you leave her to go?
A form isn’t a complaints department, and I’m not pretending it is. But a person who has been heard privately writes a different review, and often writes no review at all.
A complaint that reaches your receptionist by email on a Tuesday evening usually ends there, apologized for by a person with a name and forgotten inside two weeks. The identical complaint, typed into a public box at nine at night, is still sitting underneath a photograph of your front door in eighteen months.
What the ten checks add up to
Put the ten together, with the weighting I use on every trade I grade, and healthcare comes out at 73 out of 100.
That grade comes off ten checks carrying different weights, so no single one of them decides it, and a trade can be quietly excellent at eight things while losing badly on the two a customer actually meets.
Most trades have that shape, which is why the practices that call me so often need an afternoon of work rather than a rebuild.
Your building is clean. Your website is fine. The path between a stranger’s phone and a member of your staff has a gap in it, and nobody in the building can see the gap from where they’re standing.
Would you rather hear it from her, or read it?
If it were my practice, I’d stop asking for reviews inside the building and start asking a week later, by text, on the evening the thing I fixed was still fixed, the same way I ask for my own. Then I’d put a box on the homepage that same afternoon, so the annoyed ones could reach me before they reached Google.
