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What your customers think of your business says a lot about it. That means a good review can drive your customer’s decision in visiting your business and help you in conversions and sales.
In simple words, a good review about your product and services can sell better than an advertised sales copy of what your products can do.
That is,
Good review = Gaining Trust = Potential Sales
Now, the statistics by SearchEngineLand highlight the need of building trust through good reviews below,
“88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations and 72% of consumers say that positive reviews make them trust a local business more.”
The credibility can also lead to more conversions and sales in the future as reported by Oberlo,
This was a report by Trustpilot stating that 89 percent of consumers worldwide put effort to read reviews before buying products to get a personalized knowledge of the products and services via word-of-mouth of other users.
So, if you want to know how to get more of these reviews on Google and expand yourself on digital platforms through them, You have come to the right place!!
In this article, you’ll discover tips on how to get more Google reviews and increase your local business’ presence online, but before that, let’s look at how Google reviews benefit your brand.
Let’s get started.
How Do Google Reviews Impacts Your Brand?
One of the most important ranking factors for local SEO of your business is the quality and number of local SEO reviews on Google.
So that when a user searches for a local product or service on Google, your company listings with customer reviews appear because as discussed before they seem to have more trustworthiness and, therefore earn more visits from potential “future” users.
Here given below is a statistics that suggest that Google reviews influence at least 93% of online customers’ decisions
And of course, sales of products and services and earning revenue are the end goal of every business online.
How To Get Google Reviews For Your Local Business
To get Google reviews online for your local business, you should have your business profile on Google.
If you don’t have an online business profile, start by either entering GMB in the search bar of the Google search engine or clicking Google Business Profile
If you are eager to know how you can create a business profile on Google My Business, you can just go through the blog mentioned below.
Complete Google My Business Guide
This blog contains a full tutorial about how to create a profile on Google My Business. So, do read this blog. It is worth going through.
How To Get More Reviews On Google
Now you know you can easily build a GMB profile online, the question is how to get those reviews on Google to enhance your customer’s buying decisions and boost your local business with them.
Don’t worry!
You don’t have to go any further, here I have provided you with 9 techniques for you to get local and global customers to leave more reviews on google.
Claim Ownership Of Business
When you build your GMB profile, you provide your business information to Google to publish your business locally as well as globally.
Now, the problem is that your business profile is not verified, and you cannot respond to any reviews made by your customers.
This creates a sense of non-communication between customers that posted about your business and those who were trying to assess your business’ authenticity through these online reviews.
According to Brightlocal, “89% of consumers are ‘highly’ or ‘fairly’ likely to use a business that responds to all of its online reviews.”
So, if you are not responding to your online reviews you are losing your business’ reputation online.
Now, the second problem is that the presence of the “Claim your business” button on Google Maps listings indicates that your business is not yet verified, which makes your customers doubt your physical presence and ruins your online reputation.
That is why you need to have a verified Google business profile and after verification, you need to claim your business on the Google Business listing.
So, you become the owner of the business which allows you to put correct information on your profile, update it, and manage it according to your desire.
If you don’t manage the GMB or somebody else manages your business profile, you can ask them to Transfer Ownership of the business with you.
Your Listing Should Stand Out
Once you have claimed and understood how to manage your business listings online, you should put elements attractive but relevant elements on your Google Business Profile such as regular updates, putting photos on your profile.
This way your listing stands out and looks good to the customers who are compelled to give you reviews when you ask them or themselves.
Keep in check that:
1. Your business profile on Google is verified.
2. Fill in information such as Name, Address, and Phone Number that are the most needed details about your company.
It must be correct because this information informs your customers exactly where to find your business.
3. Adding correct business hours helps your customers be informed when you would be available at the place of your business and when your business is closed
4. Your photos and other media should be high-definition and compressed so that users can see them and they are loaded under the limit of 1-3 seconds.
Also keep in check if your content is relevant to your industry and not just for getting users’ attention because Google, otherwise it would be considered spam.
5. Asking for reviews and responding to them accordingly helps your business build a social presence online.
These are some of the measures that you can take to make your business listing stand out and you get better reviews from active users of your business.
Set A Review Collecting System In Place
After claiming your business on Google, another measure you can take is: set up a review collection system by asking your customers to provide their individual opinion of how they liked your product and services in the form of reviews and ratings.
According to Vanbrunt, “77% of consumers say they are willing to leave a business review and 85% of consumers leave online reviews to help consumers or businesses”
So, as you can understand that your customers are ready to place some reviews online, what you can do is simply ask them to do so.
Trustpilot and Reviews.io are two of the online review management platforms that save time and make the process of inviting Google reviews to be much easier by:
1. Collect data of your business customers.
2. Sending the customers an automated personalized message (such as “Please Review” “Want to Help Us grow, review us on Google”) at the same time, making it easy for your customers to post reviews.
Also, these platforms eliminate the barrier of difficulty for users by making the whole process a lot simpler.
Encourage Honest Feedback
Feedbacks are an important part of local SEO and when you ask for the opinions of your customers through surveys and phone calls you are considering their true opinion to be your priority.
Well, nobody prefers fraud reviews of a business that are believed to be low-quality, fake reviews that should be removed immediately as in the data given below.
The data given below by Oberlo, should be enough to tell you that why honest reviews are important.
So, feedback must be genuine opinions and advice from your customers that can help your business with new ideas while providing you with an honest rating and review
To obtain feedback follow these measures:
1. Ask customers about their opinion, don’t prompt them by saying “Give honest feedback” rather keep your conversations casual, and friendly.
2. Ask if they need something else from your products and services that they think you may have lacked. This is like asking them “What do you need?” and customers would spell out their expectation
3. Listen to what they have to say and don’t argue, explain or try to rationalize their reviews and opinions about your company
4. Don’t talk about yourself, let them do the talking about the product and services of your company.
5. Try to get details of their opinion and close your conversation with a “thank you” and such a gratuitous line.
These measures help you obtain honest feedback and show that organic reviews that came from a customer’s use of your company’s products and services are true feedback that increases your rating as well as gives you ideas to promote your business. (as shown in the illustration below)
So, instead of creating and paying for 100s of fake reviews, you can ask for genuine feedback.
These feedbacks are from old and new customers which makes them authentic and are displayed on your business profile to promote ranking and provide genuine business ideas directly from the sources, your customers who would use them.
Reminding Customers Again
Customers are always right and you have to know that if they haven’t left any reviews on Google, you have to try again to pursue their reviews at a later date.
You would be curious about how you can remember to ask an old customer to leave a review?
You can set up an online review management system.
Look at the data given in the picture below about the benefits of using a review management system that increases sales, helps your business rank higher, and is a social proof of your engagement with your customers.
The online review management system helps your business by collecting data about your customers and sending messages to your customers for reviews
But for those customers that haven’t posted a review yet (even after receiving the auto-generated message), then this system:
1. Sends a message again after a period of time that helps your company collect testimonials and reviews
2. Respond to reviews
Your satisfied customers took time out of their busy life to post a review on Google, so you must respond to these almost immediately as this assures your online reputation.
And an online review management system sends automated responses to such reviews.
Now, responding to a negative review is as important as positive ones and so, the review management system alerts you about such reviews.
You can respond to these by understanding the needs of your customers and according to their needs providing them with a better solution if necessary.
According to inverpo “86% of people will hesitate to purchase from a business that has negative online reviews.”
So, admit your mistake, if there was any from your products and services, as a person, and ask them how you can improve them and help them to achieve their solutions.
3. Ask customers to complete surveys that assess your products and services.
This helps you understand the error or fault in your products and services so that you can improve them and when used by customers, you get improved opinions of customers regarding the same.
This also sets your reputation as a responding company and a company that pays attention to what customers have to say. This builds trust and you gain loyal conversions.
Now, with the knowledge that “we all get busy sometimes”, your customers are no different.
So, you have to set a timeline that would help your business to collect valuable feedback from them and you can profit from asking your customers again to leave a review.
Encourage Users By Providing A Link
You can provide a Google review link shortcut on your website and other platforms such as your Facebook business page, Whatsapp, and Twitter handle.
Any of the places that you know your user engages in with your brand’s platforms can work as a reminder to put a review for other customers and help your business.
To access your Google Review Link you can,
1. Go to your GMB account
2. Click home tab
3. On the right side of the screen search “Get Your First Review” or “Get More Reviews”
4. A pop-up window will appear with a URL, you can copy that URL and use it on your website, or in posts and statuses on Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, and Email as a direct link to be used by customers for giving their reviews.
A Google Review CTA
CTA is an important thing and so it is used in how to request google reviews because where the direct message and impersonal links fail.
You can expect a customized and personalized Call to action phrase or button that would surely help you to get the reviews that you desire.
Look at the picture below that shows Google review CTA “Click here to leave us a review on Google”
So, you can provide CTAs on your website’s homepage, testimonials, and reviews webpage; on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and any other social media platform; and in personalized emails to compel your customers to review their experience online.
Verbal Or Message Review Works
When you are talking (on-call or in messages) with your potential customer you can understand the customer that would leave a positive review.
Now, the thing is the call or message is indeed not scheduled, you can ask your customers to answer some of the questions that are for the survey of your business which is going to be used for Google reviews.
The picture below shows an example of how verbal review can help your business encourage your customers to leave a review on Google Review.
These lines from Wordstream can also send via text or Whatsapp message to firstly fill a survey and then, later when a flow of conversations is made you can ask them to make a video testimonial that could work as a review on your website’s page of testimonials.
Make The Process Easy And Helpful
Well as I already told you, your customers are ready to help your business and so the situation could be that your customers may not know how to post a review on Google.
What you can do is give them a choice of what they can tell about their experience with your company.
Take for example you can provide them options such as
“How was the service of the salesperson?”
“How does the company help you with getting the solution to the problem?”
“How did the company tackle when some kind of problems that came during the deal?”
These types of questions would arise the exact feeling they got that your business satisfactorily provided.
Bonus Tip
How To Remove Or Flag A Fake Review On Google?
Google reviews of any type – positive, negative, or fake – present your business online in their highlights, so it is important to give timely feedback, proper solutions to the problem, or remove the review to deal with each one individually.
Now, to remove Or flag a fake review on Google you should know the review policy for asking Google to remove the fake content of the review.
1. Sign in to your browser with the Id used for your Google business profile.
2. Open Google Maps and search for your business and click your profile picture or ‘Your Business Profile’
Or, open your Google business profile
3. Now, tap on reviews
4. Find the review you would like to report or ‘flag’ and tap more on hamburger dots
A. Select Report review or Flag as inappropriate for review
B. Select Report profile for User
From there on it’s up to the Google review guidelines whether a review or a user (according to his review) is removed or flagged.
Conclusion
Generating Google reviews is one of the best ways of promoting the local SEO and the reviews posted by customers online are considered just as trustworthy as personal recommendations by family and friends.
The 4.2 to 5-star ratings can get local customers influenced, as they consider your business for engagement and use the encouragement of CTAs, messages, and texts to remind them to post original and honest reviews.
Now, reviews whether negative or positive provide opportunities when provided with an essential solution and immediate feedback. This makes an impression on customers of the presence of your business to help them and say a thank you when they post a review.
For more marketing tips and services, you can schedule a free-of-cost 30-Minute Strategy session with our experts. In this call, our experts would discuss your business and provide you with the free strategies that you can use to boost your sales and revenue.