Reviews Matter
Reviews are critical to a business for a number of reasons. We have highlighted the most critical / top reasons why reviews matter.
- A pulse on your business. There are a number of absentee owners or owners that are simply too busy to keep an eye on every aspect of a business. Reviews will help you determine how your customers see your business and provide details on areas where you can improve.
- Build trust. Trust with others that are seeking your product or service is critical to gaining more traction in your market.
- Build authority. Authority with Google will help your website and business listing show higher when customers are searching for your brand, product or service in their local market.
- Grow your business. Reviews (good reviews) can help you grow your business – not only will it build trust and authority in your market, it will create opportunities to share good reviews with leads, prospects or on social media. Leverage your reviews to get MORE business.
Build Trust and Authority
We have almost all done it, Googled a business that is close by to see what their rating is… Are we looking at a 3-star business or a 4+ star business – that is a HUGE difference in most consumers eyes.
Trust and Authority are two critical factors that reviews can drive in the market place. Good reviews will create more business; while bad reviews will limit your ability to grow.
We consider the Trust element a human-element. This is the gut reaction we get when we read a review… There are plenty of 1-star reviews that are absurd “Amazing service, food was fantastic… but the portions were too small”… things like this are extremely subjective and don’t offer any real value to most readers – so most readers ignore these. However, the more 4 and 5 star reviews we have – we can remove the knee jerk reaction of readers looking for a business to help them.
Authority is an indicator used by search engines, like Google to place your business higher in the search results and within the local search. Having authority is a mix of high-quality reviews, responding to ALL reviews and a consistent flow of reviews. This authority can help create exposure for your business that you wouldn’t have otherwise.
How to Take Control
To often we see businesses just waiting for more reviews… They typically and very idly sit by and hope that reviews will be posted on Google or other review websites. Some business locations will be a bit more proactive and send an email or text, maybe even include a link (you can link directly to your Google review page), but they fail to follow up or to have any real strategy to ensure they are capturing the most and best reviews.
How do you even start? First off, every review website has different rules about soliciting reviews from customers (ie. Google, Yelp, Facebook, etc.). We focus exclusively on Google reviews for one primary reason. Google drives FAR more traffic that any other review platform in the market by a minimum of 10X the traffic. This means, we simply focus the strategy (initially) into the largest volume of potential customers for your business.
Determine what makes the most sense and this is usually driven by how many customers you serve. Some service businesses only connect with a few customers every quarters, like a contractor. However, a restaurant may connect with 50 or even 75 customers every night. Finding the right strategy first must look at the volume of your business. Then focusing on an approach that makes sense based on the volume and opportunities for interaction.
We are a HUGE fan of the manual model for low-connect businesses, these are companies that only engage with a few clients each month. However, you are wholly responsible for sending the email, tracking the review and follow up. This is easier when you have just a few to manage – but you still need to take a proactive approach.
For larger volume customers, we look at how their customer data is managed and integrated – then we review the existing systems and tools we have to help automate the entire review request transaction. This can even include automated review responses based on the incoming reviews found on Google. This is great for businesses that are seeking to have a mostly hands-off approach and the volume to create some review traffic.
What is NEXT
It’s simple. Contact us and let us know how we can help you grow your online reviews.
Click here to use our contact form.
you can call us at 619-794-6146 or you can use the chat link in the bottom right of this page.
