In this week’s episode, we’re back to my mini-series about the signals that influence Local SEO, and we’re talking about reviews. Learn how they influence your visibility and get connected to past LST videos with even more details about reviews.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Welcome back to another episode of Local Search Tuesdays! This week, I’m back to my little micro-series about signals that influence Local SEO. Today, we’ll be talking about reviews.
Obviously, reviews are important for attracting new customers, but they’re also an important element in Google’s local algorithm. In fact, over the past few years, they’ve continued to gain more weight and be more influential in how Google assigns local visibility.
It makes sense that Google would give weight to customer reviews – they’re almost like popularity votes. If you’re looking for a local restaurant, for example, it probably doesn’t make sense for Google to show a restaurant that has consistently received horrible reviews, since most people would read those reviews and eat somewhere else.
It’s important to spread your reviews among the important review sites – Google, Facebook, Yelp, and whichever industry review sites matter for your business.
Facebook switched to a simpler yes or no recommendation system a few years ago, but it’s still important to get recommendations there, since so many people use the site.
While we all hate Yelp, it’s still important to get reviews on Yelp because in the US, the stars that show on Apple maps come from Yelp, not from Google. In other countries, several other review sites feed Apple Maps, so pay attention to which ones matter for your business.
Apple recently announced that it’s going to start allowing reviews directly on the Apple Maps platform, so hopefully those will take off and we won’t have to worry about Yelp any more.
And then obviously, you need to pay attention to the review sites that matter for your specific vertical. If you’re a lawyer, you wouldn’t worry about webmd reviews, and if you’re a doctor, you wouldn’t worry about Avvo reviews.
You need to be sure that reviews are an active part of your digital marketing strategy. You want to get as many great reviews as possible, and try to have more than your competitors.
If you’re new to Local Search Tuesdays, I’ve already done quite a few videos about reviews – so to keep this short and sweet, I’ll refer back to the others so you can learn more about what you should be doing with reviews.
If you’re watching this on our blog, the links to other videos are below. Otherwise, just use the custom links I share.
Check out bit.ly/review-process to learn about the ideal review process that will help you get more positive reviews
Then, check out bit.ly/ideal-review-score to learn why you don’t actually want a perfect 5.0 review score.
Did you know that if customers leave important keywords in their reviews, you’ll rank better in searches for those keywords? Check out bit.ly/keywords-in-reviews to learn more, and to learn a jedi mind trick to help influence what customers write.
You definitely need to watch bit.ly/respond-to-reviews to learn how to respond to both positive and negative reviews the right way.
And finally, if you’ve ever gotten a review from someone who you know wasn’t a customer, our video at bit.ly/fake-review-response walks you through the right way to write a response.
And, that’s all the time we’ve got for this week’s video… 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.
