Google reviews 101
Overview
Why Google Reviews?
Good for your SEO
Getting reviews isn’t just good for your ego, it also helps with your search engine optimization. It makes sense: lots of reviews, and specifically positive reviews, show that your company is trustworthy. If you deliver a good product or service, it’s to your advantage to gather more reviews.
Good for your conversions
Google Reviews get seen and get read. Nobody likes to go into an empty bar. The more reviews, the more people will discover you and your company.
How to get more Google reviews?
1. Ask and you will receive
Remind your clients about your successful collaboration and ask them for feedback. This may be the simplest tip out there, but too often, it’s forgotten. You can very easily receive reviews if you incorporate it into your workflow. To be clear, don’t ask for “a good review”, as that’s not permitted by Google. Reviews have to be given without any expectation of a reward or punishment.
2. Send a direct link
Don’t make your client look for where to put the review, give them a direct link that takes them to the input field. Click it and done. Writing a review is a speed bump as it is, let alone if your clients need to search for 5 minutes before they actually find the place where they can start writing.
3. Always reply to a review
“Thank you for your reaction Tom. We experienced the collaboration as very positive from our side as well. You went straight to work with the tips we gave you, which we think is amazing!”
People are more likely to leave a review if they can see that previous ones got a reply. Thank people in a personal manner. That way, their review doesn’t dissapear into the void of the internet. Clients take their time to spend a few minutes on writing a review, thank them with a few minutes of your time, to make it personal.
Replying to reviews can easily be done through the Google My Business app or through Google Business.
4. Help clients, give them inspiration
Writing a review is not easy. That’s why you can give your clients some guidance in your review request. Ask them specifically for their opinion about the communication, whether they were satisfied with the quality of the delivered goods. In this way, you are already guiding some reviews towards a positive note and you’ll make it easier for people who are not that creative when writing, to easily make a valuable review.
But what if…
The client doesn’t have a Google account?
As soon as people have a YouTube account, an Android phone, an Analytics or Adwords account, they have a Google account. You may still have Google-less clients, but you can give these clients an alternative. Facebook reviews or reviews on your own website are very useful as well.
You get negative reviews.
Good reviews should be earned. Any good review is based on a good product or service. Have you still gotten a bad review? Make sure you know how to deal wit these. Try to stear discussions away from the reviews in an empathical way:
“Hi John, we are so sorry you had to wait for such a long time at the reception before you were assisted. That is not the way we want to operate. Could you please contact us on xxx@xxx with your story? We will look into how we can avoid such situations in the future.”
If you can’t keep your cool, then it’s best to just not react.
You get fake reviews
On Google, you can indicitate something is off about a review by clicking on the little flag next to the rating. This will take you to another window where you can mark the review as fake. After some time, the review will be looked at by Google, and will be deleted if not relevant.
Do you feel that the review is problematic? Then you should contact Google business support, they will guide you through the next steps.
You can’t react
That’s probably because you have not yet claimed your company on Google. Go to Google Business and claim your company.
