What do Potential Customers and Search Engines Have in Common?

This just in! Potential customers and search engines have something in common: they both want more reviews from your current customers! Reviews will help to improve your local search engine results and help to improve your company growth through an online version of word of mouth marketing. But how can you get more?

For the most part, review websites are okay with you asking your customers for a review, as long as you’re not specifically asking for a positive review. The only review site that definitely does not allow this is Yelp. Other than that, you can ask that customers review you and you should encourage that they do!

When asking for reviews from customers there are some do’s and don’ts that you should know before your pages get flagged and potentially amazing reviews get deleted:

Don’t

• Don’t send out a mass email to customers to ask people to review you – all of the sudden getting a review a day or a few a week is going to look suspicious and probably show they are not legitimate.

Do

• Follow up with satisfied customers via email and let ask them about their experience with you. This is a great opportunity to hear honest feedback from your customers. Once you’ve opened up that communication, let customers know that you’d appreciate their feedback about their experience with your business to help future customers who may be looking for similar services.

Don’t

• Ask for reviews all on one review site, such as Google. Although you may want to encourage more reviews than Google because it may be the most well-known, you don’t want to put all of your eggs in one basket. Also, the more variety of sites you have reviews on the better you’ll be in building search engine results.

Do

• Let customers know which sites you are building your reviews on. Include links to your specific page on a variety of review sites and let customers choose which they would feel most comfortable with. It’s also better to have reviews on a variety of sites so that it’s easier for potential customers to use whichever sites they feel comfortable with and still get accurate reviews.

If you haven’t searched for reviews on your business, it’s definitely a good time to start. If you find that not all of your reviews are as positive as you’d like, you may want to make those pages a priority to improve. Just remember, slow and steady wins the race. It’s better to take time to build reviews than to get a lot at once and lose them in a filter to Google or Yelp! If you have questions, or are looking for more tips, reach out to your Marketing Specialist!