8 Best Practices To Get Waaaay More Google Reviews For Your Business

One of the most convincing and under-leveraged tactics that can boost your business performance is by obtaining reviews on Google. Let’s suppose that you were searching for a Toronto Marketing Company. You’re on your phone, do a search and the results come back – here’s a screenshot:

We can see that those marketing companies that have reviews stand out more and there is a greater level of trust for the user that they will do a great job. In fact, Reviews actually influence up to 10% of the ranking on local searches. Check out How Online Reviews Helped Our Clients Reach #1 In Google Maps Rankings if you want to know more.

As a Toronto marketing company, we’re fervent about our clients obtaining customer reviews. If you want to know more about the why, check out 3 Reasons Why Online Reviews Are Important For Your Business.

1. Leverage Your Email List
2. Give Them A Reason Why
3. Be Personal
4. Follow Up Email
5. Timing Helps
6. Use A Reputation Management System
7. Create A Landing Page
8. Review Cards

One of the easiest ways to build up reviews is to ask past and present customers or clients. Use your database of emails and craft a well-written message to send out asking for a review. If you are a company that runs annual customer surveys, this is an excellent opportunity to hone in, and further leverage, those that have already ranked your company high on customer service.

The message itself should encourage the reviewer to say what they liked best about your product or service as it helps others guide their decision-making. Also, let them know that any constructive criticism enables your business to listen to customer needs and improve. Another potential reason why is to let them know you will donate to charity with each review received.

Simply put – use language such as “Hello” or “Hi” instead of “Dear”.

If a customer has not reviewed your business within 24 hours of your initial ask, send a reminder email 72 hours after the first send. “Hello Jamie, just wanted to thank you again for the good things you said about our Toronto marketing company. If you haven’t already, just click the link below to leave a review.”

Imagine you’ve just done a great job of delivering your product or service to someone like Jamie. Your business is top of mind, she’s happy – ask for a review! And, as per above, re-request if you haven’t heard from her in 72 hours.

There are lots of review sites if you’d like to give customers more than one choice… but remember that Google is by far the most valuable.

Here at the Marketing Garage, we have a marketing company program called Rave About Me™ that is actually agnostic to the channels in which your business obtains reviews. This means that the program can be implemented to obtain recommendations or reviews within the online channels that make the most sense for your business’s optimal media mix.

Rave About Me™ also takes advantage of your existing email lists to garner reviews and also allows you to respond to reviews from a single platform. This platform also tells you what platforms are receiving reviews and includes full analytics that show average review scores and even review trends.

Another major advantage to moving to a platform is that it makes it easier for you to respond to your customers right away and gives you an opportunity to address any negative comments that may appear.

Here are two examples of a platform back-end dashboard that our Toronto marketing company uses:

The great thing about setting up a landing page for reviews is that it can rank well in Google as so many users search for terms like “company name reviews”, which helps you get found. On the page itself, it’s best to position the Google Link as being prominent, while at the same time providing other options like Facebook in the event that the customer does not have a Gmail account. Consumers research businesses in different channels and you’re still far better off obtaining a Facebook recommendation than nothing at all.

Nothing is more powerful than meeting someone in-person, so this is your opportunity to have pre-printed review cards ready to hand out. For example, as a Toronto marketing company, we only have so many clients to ask for reviews. As such we would most likely forgo the reviews cards and instead opt to send personal emails to ask for reviews. However, for a business like a credit union with high customer traffic and multiple locations, review cards are a good option.

Remember that landing page I mentioned? You can put it right on the review card with a simple URL such as www.yourbusinessname.com/Review.