O.K - after a break for the recent holidays, we're back at it again - helping local business owners!
This is the 6th post in our series about Getting Your Local Business Found in Google Searches. You can see our previous posts on our
Geek Notes blog. Online Reviews are second only to your Google My Business (GMB) listing as a necessary factor to getting found on Google. But as added incentive for you to take this seriously, please know that not only do Online Reviews improve your Google Search Ranking, they are also key to turning online visitors into customers!
This post is dedicated to helping you generate and manage your online reviews yourself. Future posts will deal with incorporating available Online Review Management systems and/or Online Review Managerment services.
To manage your online reviews, you need to become proficient at 4 separate tasks or areas of focus in this process:
1. ASK your customers/clients to review your business. TRAIN your staff to do the same. Do it CONSISTENTLY. Here's some suggestions about how to do this:
- First examine the "customer journey" for your business. Put yourself in their shoes and walk through a typical transaction with your company. Look at every aspect through their eyes, not yours.
- At what point(s) in their experience, is it possible, reasonable, and best to somehow "ask" for them to provide a review?
- For some types of businesses, the best time is immediately after the transaction is concluded - but for others, it may be a few days to a few weeks later. For example, if you're selling a face cream, the moment they bought it isn't the right time because they need to experience using it and seeing the benefits. For them, it's probably a week or two later. But if you're a service business, perhaps the benefits of your service can be seen immediately - for them, strike while the iron is hot - ask for a review right at the end of the transaction.
- Once you've established the best time to ask, examine HOW to ask. Look at your business processes. Do you collect email addresses from your customers? Phone numbers (especially mobile)? If so, you can supplement verbal requests with a follow-up email request or text message. Ask yourself, if there's a way to seamlessly gather this type of information during the normal course of your business transaction. If so, DO IT.
2. Make it
EASY for them to leave a review.
- Don't just ask the question, "Can you please leave a review of our business on Facebook or Google?" The return on that type of ask will likely be very, very low. You need to provide them with the tools, the means, to do so as painlessly as possible.
- First get the URLs that directly link to both your Google My Business (GMB) Reviews page, and your Facebook Reviews Page. If need be, use a URL shortening service to make easier links. We can help you with that if you need it.
- If you can establish a consistent process of emailing or texting these links to your satisfied customers with a review request, do so.
- Generate a QR Code for each of these URLs as well. For example our QR Code for Google Reviews of Doggone Good Technology is shown below.
- We can create a similar one for Facebook reviews.
- Customers can just scan this code with their mobile phone camera and immediately end up at the site to review your business. If you need assistance with generating this code, reach out to us.
- Create a hard copy handout that contains your review URLs and QR codes for customers to take with them.
- Add the review URLs to your email signature on all outgoing email messages from your business.
3.
Follow-Up with each and every customer who does, or doesn't, leave an online review of your business. Make part of your standard operations.
- If someone leaves a positive online review of your business, make sure you thank them!
- If someone leaves a negative online review, we'll show you how to respond to that in a future post.
- If you've already asked someone to leave a review and they haven't, IF you have a reasonable way to contact them to ask again, DO SO. Marketing data tells us that 68% of customers will leave a review if asked - that better than 2 of every 3 customers. ASK THEM AGAIN!
4.
Point your potential customers towards the compilation of your Online Reviews. You can do this two ways. First you can place links on your website to the Reviews section of your Google My Business (GMB) listing and your social media pages. You can also add a "Reviews" or "Testimonials" page on your website that compiles in a single location all customer reviews from both online and in-person sources. This can take some work, but when we address Review Management Systems and Services in a future post, we can show you how to make it much more manageable.
Finally, we would be remiss if we didn't address the question of whether or not you should incentivise customers to leave a review of your business. Discount coupons, added items on a future order, entry into a contest, etc. The bottom line is that, while some businesses do this, we don't ordinarily recommend it. Here's why:
- Asking for "positive" reviews in return for something of value is illegal.
- Asking for ANY review (positive or negative) in return for some value isn't illegal, but the Federal Trade Commission requires that publication of these types of reviews indicate that the reviewer was somehow "compensated" for their review. In our mind, this markedly reduces the value of the review.
- In addition most review sites - Google, Yelp - etc either do not allow for incentivized reviews.
- Further, Google and other review sites do not allow for "gated reviews". We'll deal with this topic in a future post when we review Online Review Systems & Services.
O.K. - so this was a pretty large chunk of information. If it confused or, more likely, overwhelmed you with the thought of this workload, don't dispair! We can help, if need be.
But whatever you do, don't ignore online reviews - they're just
TOO VALUABLE for your business!
