Each and every business understands the key to success is referrals, and the best way to get referrals is to have people testify to your business’s ability to do great work. The easiest way to find out how good (or bad) a business does their job is to check their Google reviews. These reviews are extremely easy to access because you simply search a business and their rating pops up, once the rating pops up, clicking on the reviews helps you determine if this is a company you would like to do business with.
Besides searching for a specific business, you can search for specific services, for example, if you need a roofer to fix a leaky roof, typing “Fix a leaky roof” exposes an cluster of local businesses. Checking out these businesses helps potential customers review companies and make their choice.
Now, what if you’re a company seeking to expand your footprint in a local territory? The best way to do so is with getting your customers to review your work. The more testimonials you have, the better your business rates with new customers. People trust the words of others in their position, therefore you need good reviews to secure lucrative opportunities.
Understanding Google Reviews
Google Reviews are done on a 1-5-star scale. This scale informs customer understanding of your company’s ability to perform a specific task. It’s easy for customers to put in reviews – they just click on your business and click on the “Write a Review” option. The more detailed review, the better. Especially if your customer gives you a 5-star review! As your business earns more reviews, it appears higher on the Google search rankings. This is also an advantage for your business.
Getting Good Google Reviews
There are many ways to get good Google reviews. The simplest way is to do great work. If your company routinely performs well, people will give you positive feedback. Understand that if you do a poor job, a customer is more likely to give you a bad review. They will go not just to Google, but Yelp and many other review guides. Performing good work is the secret sauce to ensuring that you get the reviews you need to instill confidence in new customers.
Make sure that you perform all the customer service best practices in your industry so that you consistently secure high marks from your clients. Be on time, courteous, polite and respectful to your customers. Doing these basic tenets of customer service will ensure that your customers consistently give you high marks for professionalism, even if the job somehow doesn’t meet their approval. Being professional – even when responding to negative Google reviews – means much to prospective customers.
Tips for Getting Good Google Reviews
There are multiple ways you can get good Google reviews. Following these tips and using an integrated customer acquisition and retention strategy utilizes these reviews most effectively. Not to mention, when you have a strategy making it easy for customers to provide reviews, you are more likely to get great reviews. All the tips listed below are ways that you can attract great Google reviews to grow your customer base.
1.Asking Customers to Provide Google Reviews
Spending time seeking out each customer to get reviews is tedious and takes away from the work you do. However, you must have processes in place where you seek out reviews from your customers. There are several ways you can ask customers to provide reviews:
- When a Job is Completed: If a customer is asked to give you a review after you complete a job to their satisfaction, often you will get a fantastic review! Take the time to leverage the good vibes so that their positive energy helps you acquire new customers.
- The Last Customer Interaction: Every time you interact with a customer, you should ask them for reviews. On e-mails, phone calls, and even face-to-face interactions, these are the best times to bring up reviews. You are speaking to the customer, why not ask them to rate your performance – especially if they are happy!
- Use E-Mail Response Programs: These are passive ways to generate reviews. When you e-mail a customer, include a link in the signature that takes a customer directly to where they can leave a review. Doing this will increase the number of reviews you get without you having to do any of the legwork to ask.
- Include a Review Link with a Bill: When customers go to pay – especially if the bill is online – this is a great way to use funnels to take them straight to a review. Happy customers pay their bills with little fuss, and when you include a review at the end they are more likely to give you a good review. Even if a customer doesn’t wish to be effusive with praise, the 5 stars alone is worth the investment.
- The conclusion of Phone Conversations: These are times when customers are happy because you have generally solved a problem they have. At this point in the phone call, ask them for a review. A great thing to do is direct them to your website where you have a link ready for them to send you a good review!
Take any and every opportunity you can to ask a customer to review you. Don’t be annoying about asking for reviews. The rule here is making sure that you are courteous. Don’t follow up more than once and if the customer still has not provided a review, move on to the next customer. Having procedures in place that help ask for reviews is a great way to avoid the in-person haranguing but still express interest in feedback.
2. Make the Review Experience Personal
For customers to leave a review, they must feel impacted. If the impact is a negative impact, they will leave a negative review. This is a problem. You want your customers to feel like what you did for them was over the top in terms of service. Forging a personal connection is the best way to make your customer feel like they had a unique experience. When they feel like you invested in them, they are more likely to invest in you with the submission of a review.
3. Simplify the Process of Writing Reviews
When it is easier for someone to submit a review, they are more inclined to write a review. This is where linking really helps. Copy-paste instructions include links, and basically, do anything necessary to make the step to submitting a review a simple click. When your customers have simplicity, they will oblige with a positive review!
4. Multiple Points of Contact
Your customers come from many different types of places. For example, you could be getting customers from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and your regular website. Wherever you are getting your customers from, make sure they can give you a review from them. If you have social media profiles, linking to where one can leave a review is a great way to ensure that your customers will give you the positive feedback that’s so essential to the health of your business.
5. Use Incentives to Generate More Reviews
Restaurants are great at doing this! A Chinese food restaurant that offers a free egg roll whenever you leave a Google review is more likely to get reviews. Who doesn’t like free egg rolls?! The best part for the restaurant is the egg roll is a very low-cost product. For other businesses, you can offer discounts or extra work. Think about the parts of your profession that are in demand and have low cost. Those are the best items or services to offer for free. Customers feel like they’re getting something for nothing! The truth is the review is more valuable to you than whatever you are giving away.
6. Review Responses
Want to show new customers that you are engaged? Simply respond to the reviews of your old customers! These are perfect for when you have bad reviews. When you respond to a review apologizing for the customer being unhappy and offer constructive ways to solve problems, the prospective customer has it in their mind that your business is responsive to their needs. A bad review is hard to work around, but when you use good customer service practices on a bad review, that’s a great way to arrest any negative fallout.
7. Make it as easy as possible
The easiest way to get customers to review you on Google is to make it easy, as we have established. The e-mail signature is the easiest way! All you do is create a signature and then every e-mail you send has a Google review link. How easy is that? What took you two minutes to create is now giving you gobs of leads! Using e-mail signatures and other automated review processes allow you to passively generate reviews, which are essentially income because they create new leads.
8. Get Reviews from your Vendors
Your vendors are a fantastic source of reviews. They know your business and your professionalism first hand, so having them review your business and in turn, you provide reviews for them is a great way to make that partnership more meaningful. Fortunately, most vendors are very happy to oblige! Make the process easy for your vendors the same way you would for your customers. These are the best ways to build your network as well.
The Benefits of Reviews
Google reviews provide tons of benefits. Your website immediately gets greater prominence and this prominence manifests itself through increased rankings in Google. Here are some ways that pursuing customer reviews will benefit your business:
- Better Rankings Within Local Search Environments: Trustworthiness is one of the most important ways that Google figures out how to rank searches. The better your business’s reputation is on Google means that your business gets ranked higher in search results. The more positive reviews, the better. If a business has a slew of terrible reviews, Google is not going to rank them high. Therefore, when you search hotels the prominent hotels rank highly while the fleabag inns are barely red dots on the Google map.
- Increased Click-Through Rate: The star rating is essential and when you have a greater number of stars on your rankings, then you are guaranteed to get more customers. There are many customers who view the star rating and then click the link. Searchers must click your listing to get more detailed information. Doing this only enhances your reputation. The greater the click-through rate, the more customers you end up having. Your star rating is the key to unlocking click-throughs. Make sure that at the very least your customers give you 5 stars.
- More Organic Search Traffic: Using proper SEO techniques means that you have a greater chance of being on Google’s Page 1 thanks to great Google reviews. When you have good Google reviews, you have an easy time attracting new business because of your business’s presence on Google’s search engine. The algorithm is very complex, but the way to make it easy is to have great reviews so your business is constantly moving in the right direction on Google searches.
There are many different reasons for businesses to get great reviews. Word of mouth is perhaps the best way to attract new business. Your clients trust reviews from customers just like them, and that’s why it is very important to use different methods to get customer reviews. Use all the different methods above to get your customers to give you positive reviews. As with anything in business, the key is making sure that you have good customer service backing up every action in your business. Good customer service has the potential to turn even the most negative experience a customer has into a net positive.
Whether it is through active or passive measures, getting lots of positive reviews for your business can lead to higher rankings. This means you’ll show up more often in the Local Map section of the Google results page when potential customers are searching for the products or services your business provides.
