Search
Importance of Google Reviews
It’s a given these days that consumers (or clients) turn to a search engine such as Google to find out about a product or service they are after. However once this consumer has short listed what they want (or who they want to use) the next step is they usually turn to online reviews.
In recent research : Just under 90% of consumers have been influenced by an online review when making a buying decision. Regardless of whether you are actively trying to get good reviews or not, there are three major reasons why you should start (or continue the good work you are already doing):
- Positive Google Reviews have an impact on Search Engine Optimisation. If your company has a good “average” rating, this is a positive signal to Google and will boost your chance of appearing higher up within the Natural Search results.
- A good “star” rating will encourage more users to actually click on your listing within the search results.
- Purchasing decisions – good reviews will encourage users to contact / purchase from you.
How to go about getting Google Reviews - Tracking
What we do internally at TMD is keep an excel spreadsheet of clients who we’ve reached out to, whether the client has responded (yes or no), and number of times we’ve reminded them.
We then check this spreadsheet once a week, and update with our progress. This is critical so we can remind people who’ve agreed to lodge a review but haven’t yet done it.
Sending an email
When requesting someone to lodge a review, sending some details via email works best. A good template is as follows
Hi John Smith,
Just wondering if you would be keen to lodge a Google review about us? If you can that would really help us out.
To do this:
a. Go to www.google.com
b. Do a search on our company “Acme Industries”
c. On the right hand side, you will see our company name / profile. Under “reviews”, there is button called “write review”. Click this and follow the prompts
Following up
A lot of people say they will lodge a review, but invariably they forget. Using something like Excel to track your progress (see above) is critical.