Almost everyone uses Google! It is the most popular search engine on the internet.
Google reviews play an important role in making your business look like a trustworthy source. Many potential customers will choose whether or not to buy from your business after reading reviews online. For a lot of businesses this is your first line of defense to convince a prospective customer to keep going.
The reviews on your Google business page are crucial to your local rating. In addition to getting your name, address, and phone number listed, your google reviews can be the number one way to increase your SEO.
Some advantages of getting Google reviews include:
- Increasing brand trust
- Online exposure
- Converts more customers
- Increased traffic to your web page
How do you get Google reviews that will outpace your competition? It’s actually easier than you think.
The System
The quickest way is to approach it in four waves.
- First wave: Friends and family. Reach out to everyone you know and ask them to review your business. This is one of the easiest ways to increase your reviews from 0 to 30 (or more depending on your number of close friends) in a short period of time.
- Second wave: Vendors, partners, business relationships. Everyone that you have done business with or worked with in some capacity.
Reach out and ask them to review your business. If you want to make the process even smoother, you could find their business on Google, give them a glowing review, then email them and include a link of your review for their company with your “ask”.
They will be very appreciative of the review and much quicker to reciprocate the action on your page.
- Third wave: Your clients. These may be the hardest to get, due to everyone’s short attention span and distractions interrupting their path from your “ask” to an actual done review.
Make a list of all clients you have done business with that you know you had a good relationship with. Create an email asking them directly and personally to follow the link to your page and write a review that matters.You may even want to include a few past client reviews to give them an idea of what you are looking for. Spell it out. It’s less work for them when they don’t have to think. In your email, include a link directly to your Google reviews so they literally just have to click once and they’ll be there.
- Fourth wave: For all your new relationships, this is more of a system you would put in place when you reach the critical point in your relationship to ask for a review on your Google page.
This system includes sending a personal email asking the client to rate your business and leave some comments under their review. The comments should be helpful for prospective clients to learn about the service that they enjoy. You can reuse the email you crafted for past clients with small adjustments so it makes sense for where you are in your relationship timeline with them.
Once you have on-boarded a client, after 60 days of working with them and developing a solid relationship, then you can reach out and put this system to use. Ultimately, this is a great system to build into your existing on boarding process. Then you know it will get done.
This system will allow you to get more quality reviews over time and prevent your page from going stale. If you make this a top priority for 30 days, you’ll be surprised at how easy it is to hit 100 reviews. You may even surpass 100 pretty quickly.
Issues you may run into
Two recurring issues that we’ve seen come about when businesses are trying to grow their reviews on Google are following up and learning how to write a great review.
- Follow Up: Let’s say you email 30 people and ask them to review your business on Google.
Less than half of those 30 will probably do as asked. It’s a great idea to keep a list of those people with a status check next to their names. A simple excel spreadsheet will work or you can include this in their CRM profile. Go back to this list on a weekly basis and mark off the people who have given reviews, and follow up with the people who haven’t, giving them a friendly reminder.
If you’ve reminded them two or more times with no response, it may be best to not pursue that request anymore, for the sake of the relationship. Circle back around in 6 months.
- How to Write a Good Google Review: When you write a Google review, you want it to be longer (1-2 paragraphs rather than 1-2 sentences).
The reader should gather a good sense of the experience you had, so it gives them confidence in buying or investing.
Include as many keywords that would help you rank as much as possible. Keywords have proven to be helpful to increasing rank.
Make sure what you write has value outside of the actual review.
How to Formulate an Email to Clients, Partners, Friends, or Vendors:
- Add the link directly to your Google page so they have no trouble finding it.
- Give them a brief, one sentence instruction on how to leave a review if they’ve never done so.
- Politely ask them at the end of the email to add in two or three keywords into the review to add more value to your ranking.
Sample Review
Here’s an example of a partner/vendor of ours who left a review for our agency on our Google Business page. It has all of the right marks of a great review.
One last thing
As you can see from the review above, we responded immediately when the review was left saying thank you to our reviewer. This is helpful to show other prospects reading it that the company is engaged and cares about the effort put in from the reviewer.
Now it’s your turn.
Take this system and implement it with your team. If you have multiple locations, assign each branch manager or general manager the task to make it a priority to get 100+ reviews in the next 30 days. You could even incentivize them. Make it fun!
After crossing the 100+ mark, you’ll put yourself well ahead of your competition and have a new process built into your way of doing business. This is something relatively simple to do and it doesn’t cost you any money. Why wouldn’t you do it?
