In this week’s episode, we’re talking about reviews again. The easiest way to get more reviews is to ask every customer for a review – and then make it easy for them to leave a review. Watch and learn more, including specific tips for how to follow up that boost your chances of getting more reviews.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Welcome back to another episode of Local Search Tuesdays! This week we’re continuing our mini-series on reviews and reputation management and sharing a simple strategy to help you get more customer reviews.
Reviews are a vital part of today’s shopping experience. Recommendations from friends and family only go so far – most shoppers today make their decisions based on online reviews.
Reviews are a key part of the human side of your business, but they’re important to Google’s algorithm too. Simply put – you need to get customer reviews, and you need to continue to get them on a regular basis.
All you have to do is ask.
I mentioned it in last week’s video – it’s not really human nature to leave a review when you have a great experience. If I’m at a restaurant eating fish tacos, and I take a bite, and there’s a band-aid in my taco, it’s pretty likely that I’m going to leave a bad review.
But if it’s the best fish taco I’ve ever had, I probably won’t even think about leaving a review. But if the waiter walks by and notices that I’m enjoying my food and asks me how I’m doing, I’d say “it’s the best fish taco I’ve ever had” – and if the waiter then says “hey, that’s awesome – and it’d be really cool if you left us a review to tell people that”
Then at that point, I feel obligated to leave that review.
So all you need to do is ask every customer for a review, and then make it easy for them to leave a review.
We like to set up a reviews page on our clients’ websites. Typically, we’re going to put that site at domain.com/reviews. It’s a simple URL that everyone can remember and it makes it easy for every customer-facing employee to know where to send customers to leave reviews.
That /reviews page has a simple message that says something like “thanks for doing business with us today. We’d really appreciate it if you would share your experience with us on one of the following platforms” – and then you display a list of links to your various review sites.
Here’s a cool tactic to use with that list – Ideally, you want to spread your reviews among the different review sites. Customers will be most likely to leave a review at whichever site you list first – so pay attention to your reviews, and list the site with the fewest reviews at the top.
So now you’ve got your reviews page set up, and everyone knows to ask customers to go there to leave reviews. You can also print your URL on your receipts and business cards and even get postcards printed to hand out to customers, so they have something physical to take with them to remind them where to go.
You can also use a tool to turn that URL into a QR code – then all customers have to do is point their phone camera at the QR code, and their phone will automatically pull up your reviews page.
You can also follow up with emails to your customers and include the link in the email.
Asking every customer for a review, making it easy for them to leave a review, and following up with additional reinforcement will help you maximize your chances of getting more customer reviews. You’ll attract more customers and you’ll send a better relevancy signal to Google’s algorithm.
That’s all the time we’ve got for this week, so you know what that means…
Put your hand on the screen right here:
We totally just high-fived ‘cause you learned something awesome. Thanks for watching, and we’ll see you again next week for another episode of Local Search Tuesdays.
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