I think any small business can testify that getting customers to actually leave us reviews is like pulling teeth. It feels like we are always asking, but rarely do our clients actually follow through.
Well, you’re not wrong. And the data says so: only 12 percent of customers always leave a review. But don’t let that discourage you from making review generation a strategic part of your small business growth.
Why Google Reviews Are Important
Reviews are one of the most important factors for the success of your business. Reviews and customer trust go hand in hand and reviews serve as a vital part of the buyer’s journey.
In fact, 97 percent of customers read reviews for local businesses, and nearly half of all customers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. That is powerful.
Do Google Reviews Help SEO?
If you’re wondering if reviews help with your SEO, the answer is “Yes!” Reviews are actually one of the most influential rank signals when it comes to search engine optimization. Getting positive reviews can actually help your business show up higher when your customers are making a search, when they’re looking in Google Maps, and when they are browsing your competition.
Reviews can actually help you show up before them and make sure that you are getting that visibility where people are looking. Reviews are one of the most powerful factors that Google uses to determine whether or not to show you or your competition on their search engine results page. This is because reviews are one of the only chances to validate that you are who you say you are and that you do work with quality and integrity.
Google is a machine, and it looks at everything else on the internet to try and get a sense of who you are. Well, most everything can be manipulated. Businesses can have a beautifully optimized website. They can have great-quality content, have great backlinks, and a solid online presence. But at the end of the day, if that business is constantly getting one-star reviews, Google will listen to that.
Google will weigh reviews more heavily than anything else in that specific scenario. Meaning that if humans are saying this business is a scam, they don’t know what they’re doing, they won’t be rewarded when it comes down to search engine optimization.
Google is a machine, and it needs ways to validate that they are making quality businesses show up in their search results. And reviews are one of the best ways to do this.
But if you are a small business owner, you already know the importance of reviews. Getting them, however, is a different story. So here are 8 untapped ways to get more reviews for your small business.
These tips are tactical and backed by data, helping you cut through the noise of surface-level advice to help you skyrocket your Google reviews and get you one step closer to success.
Are you seeing five stars yet?
Let’s get into it.
Getting Google Reviews: Best Practices
Before we get started, let’s go over some important guidelines when it comes to Google Reviews.
Get a Google Business Profile
First and foremost, you need to have something called a Google Business Profile to start receiving Google Reviews. If you don’t have one or want some more information on GBPs, you can download our free guide on how to set it up, verify it, and optimize your profile.
You can get that online on our site at succeedingsmall.co/GBPguide.
Do Not Incentivise Customers to Leave Reviews
This next guideline is a big one, and it’s most often violated. Google specifically states that you cannot incentivize customers to leave reviews. I know a lot of businesses do this, and they get a lot of advice from marketers telling them to do this, but it’s actually against Google’s policies when it comes to quality reviews and making sure that they get and filter out spam.
So, this means that if you are running contests for reviews, if you are giving discounts, or if you’re offering free products or services, this is actually not okay when you are doing that in exchange for a positive review. Google wants reviews to be unsolicited and untainted. They want reviews to accumulate naturally, and they want people to be able to give them honestly, whether that’s positive or negative.
That’s what Google wants. So whenever businesses are incentivizing people, that just kind of skews the data a little bit. So we’re not going to go over any of those recommendations or tips to generate reviews in this podcast episode today.
In fact, it’s not allowed on a lot of other review generation platforms as well, like Yelp and TripAdvisor. In fact, if any of these profiles find out that you have been soliciting reviews and incentivizing them, they will actually get rid of the reviews or potentially get rid of your profile, which could be bad news for you.
Negative Reviews are Okay: Customers Want an Average of 4 Star Rating
My last guideline before we dive into our tips is that perfection should not be the goal. Negative reviews are okay. In fact, 68 percent of customers actually don’t trust a five-star rating, especially if a business has under 20 reviews.
On average, customers require a minimum of a four-star rating to consider doing business.
They consider this real and authentic. They know that businesses are not perfect and that people aren’t always happy. You can’t make every single customer happy. Again, I speak with a lot of small business owners who have this pit in their stomach that if they start a review campaign, if they start asking people for reviews, that they’re going to start getting negative feedback.
Customers consider this real and authentic. They know that you’re not going to make every customer happy, and that’s okay. They want to see a real, genuine business doing real, genuine work, and reviews are a part of that process. Just like when it comes to what Google considers real and genuine, so do customers.
So it’s okay if you don’t get a positive five-star review every single time. In fact, it’s a lot better if you’re able to respond to negative reviews in a positive, constructive way. That way, customers can actually see how you deal with negative feedback and that you are this kind of involved business owner who’s going to take things to heart or defend themselves when a customer was clearly wrong.
Now that we have covered the most important things, let’s dive into our eight strategies to get more Google reviews.
1. Generate a short link directly to Google Reviews.
Now that you have a GBP, you can actually generate a URL that will bring customers directly to the review prompt section of your profile. Once you have this URL, once you have this link, put it everywhere:
- Add it to your email signature.
- Add it to QR codes and put those QR codes on flyers or cards.
- Send it in all your communication to make leaving a review simple and easy.
- Add that URL to your website. If you have a testimonial page, have a little section that says, “Leave us a review” and send them to that link.
This link is given to you directly by Google, and it’s totally fine and appropriate to use it. So go ahead and make that present and make it simple. This link allows people to just go straight where they need to be instead of having to follow a 10-step instruction guide.
How to Get a Google Review Link
To generate your Google Review link:
- Log into your Google account associated with your Google Business Profile
- Search your business name on Google OR go to Business Profile Manager.
- Click on Ask for Reviews on your profile manager dashboard
- Copy the URL
2. Have your employees request reviews.
If you have a team, if you have techs on the job, if you have people delivering your service, if you have those people who are dealing with your customers, have that person request a review from them versus you or your office admin people or some sort of nameless, faceless customer service rep.
If your service providers are the ones engaging in the relationship with that customer, people are more likely to support that person, to support that employee, and they want to let the boss know or the business know that this service provider was doing a really great job. Customers will be more likely to leave people a review, especially if it does things like help their career.
They will have this genuine feel-good esque goodness about them whenever they go and leave a review on behalf of that service provider. To help with this, remember what I said earlier about not incentivizing customers to leave reviews? Well, there’s nothing wrong with incentivizing your employees to ask for reviews.
Run an internal competition in your team each quarter, where the person with the most reviews with their name mentioned wins a gift card, wins some PTO, or gets to pick a company dinner. Whatever it is, make it something fun and engaging and make this a part of your culture. Make it a point to talk about reviews during your staff meetings, and highlight excellent reviews that recognize your team members.
Just really make this a positive, exciting experience. That way, your employees feel more empowered to go out and ask their customers, “Hey, would you do me a great favor and leave me a review? It’ll help me look good, it’ll help me win a contest,” whatever it may be. And people will be much more likely to actually follow through with that.
3: Vary How You Ask for Reviews (In-Person, Email, SMS)
I’m talking email, in person, SMS text messaging, whatever it is, go ahead and mix it up and use a variety in how you do it because the data has a lot of spread when it comes down to how businesses ask for reviews and what people are more likely to respond to.
The most common way that people actually respond to a review request is through email. Thirty-two percent of customers say they are more likely to respond to review requests in email. Text messages, however, are a really effective alternative because SMS messages actually have a higher open rate than emails.
They have a 98% chance of being opened and a 45% chance of actually responding to you. So if you have that kind of relationship with your customer to text them directly, or if you have some sort of reputation management software where you can send a text after a job, we’re going to talk about this more in a little bit, that can actually help incline and increase the chances for reviews to actually get people to leave reviews for your business.
When to Ask For Reviews
Now, another data back tip for you regarding how and when you ask for reviews. Most people who deal with professional service businesses expect those businesses to ask for a review anytime in three days after their service is completed. So, that’s some good data for you, a good benchmark to know that’s your window.
Any later, and it becomes much, much harder for people to actually leave reviews. They’ve forgotten the details. They don’t get around to it. It’s not as important to them. So if you can get that window within three days, that is your sweet spot. I also recommend asking for reviews when it feels right and natural.
So if a customer is saying thank you so much to you in person, ask them for that review when they are saying that. If they send you this great thank you email saying, “Oh, your tip helped me so much, I was able to do X, Y, Z,” ask them then. Don’t wait for this magic number, this magic piece of inspiration of yes, this feels like the right moment.
Asking is key.
4. Sending a follow up.
Remember how we said that 12% of people actually leave reviews when they are asked?
Well, you can get this number a little higher if you send them a follow up. People are busy, they have lives that they need to get to and a gentle email follow up reminder can help them actually take the move and go ahead and leave you that review.
It is not pushy. In fact, 80 percent of all my reviews actually originate from follow up emails. This is crazy. So not just the first time you ask, but actually through the follow up. So, make sure that you are sending that.
Keep track of when, of who you ask for a review, and make sure you’re able to follow up with them accordingly.
If you don’t want to do email, you can do something a little bit more special and thoughtful, like sending a thank you note in the mail. You can thank them for being a customer and you can include that nice little QR code that you built earlier with a link that goes directly to your Google business profile.
5: Use Your Tools to Build Review Generation Systems
Do you have a booking software?
Well, some of them actually have a direct setting that you can turn on, where you can request a review upon payment or job completion. Most booking softwares have some sort of email follow up system as well.
So that way, after the date of your appointment has passed, you can actually send them email communication and actually edit it to include custom messages like, “Thanks so much for your time. Would you be willing to leave us a review here? And include that link that we talked about building. Other tools that you can actually do to do this are reputation management tools.
These tools have review generation DOWN. The majority of my clients use something called BirdEye. That’s a very popular one. It’s quite expensive, just as a caveat, but it supercharges review generation. It makes it so automated, such a part of your business systems and how it operates, that it can generate your reviews quickly.
This is because tools and systems remove human error. Instead of getting paralyzed by emotion or thoughts like, I don’t want to be pushy, or it’s not the right time to ask for the review, or simply just forgetting, your tools are solid systems that function without those human discrepancies.
So, think about what is working in your business, what tools do you use, and how are you able to set settings inside of those things to help you get more reviews.
6. Set Up Social Media Brand Monitoring
Another really popular way that businesses send review requests is via social media. In fact, 28 percent of businesses use this method. What I recommend is tracking whenever your company is mentioned on social media. That could be a hashtag, that could be an app mention, or just paying attention to your notification when people are talking about your company, and reaching out specifically to those people to leave a review.
To give you an example of how this works, I spend a lot of time in Facebook groups. That’s a really great place for service based businesses to market their businesses. For example, somebody will ask for a recommendation for a local HVAC company, or their local veterinarian. And businesses will get tagged there all the time from people who love those businesses, who want to share them with other people looking for them.
This is a great opportunity to swoop in and be able to get some good reviews from people who already are recommending your business. So, if you get mentioned in that comment thread, and they are giving this great, excellent testimony about how you took care of their dog in an emergency, and you should never go to any other vet that this is the one for you.
You can go and reach out to that person and say, “Hey, thank you so much. I appreciate you. Would you mind going and taking that and leaving that on Google for me? “I guarantee you, people will be so happy to be able to do that for you because they already spent the time thinking about what they were going to say and it was able to come about naturally.
So, if you’re able to actually use tools to help you monitor social media, you can get one step closer to automating how you do business and building that solid system. That way you are not physically having to stay on Facebook or stay on Instagram paying attention to these things.
These tools will actually do it for you.
So, you can use tools like MetaBusiness Suite, where you can view your analytics and see when your pages have been mentioned or when there is any comment activity. Or you can use a paid tool like Sprout Social or Hootsuite. Those are both popular options to be able to set up this social media monitoring tool to alert you across all the other different profiles as well.
Meta Business Suite only does Facebook and Instagram, so if you want things like LinkedIn or Alignable or Pinterest or YouTube, those are really good platforms to be able to have that social media tool to have that kind of premium option.
7. Plan for a Review Campaign
If you miss that tiny window of three days after service, or you want to do a big push for reviews, plan a strategic campaign where you ask your customer database to leave you a review.
A good time to do this is around any company milestones. If you are approaching your business anniversary, for example, you can run a big campaign that says, “We are seven years old. Thank you so much for helping us grow and get to this point. We’re so grateful for you. If we have done service for you in the past seven years, would you mind leaving us a review so we can continue to celebrate and grow?”
Then, attach the link that shows how to do so. That would be a really great time to be able to ask for reviews.
You can also do customer anniversaries. So, if they have been a loyal customer for a year, for however long of a period of time, you can send them a special gift and have a note with a QR code asking them to leave you a review.
Now, this is not incentivizing, right? This is separate. This is thanking them for being a loyal customer and you really want their feedback after you’ve been serving them for such a long period of time.
Another campaign you can include reviews on is when you do customer satisfaction surveys. You can send out a survey saying that you are collecting customer feedback, which should be good practice for your business to do at least once in a while to be able to get some genuine feedback on how people feel about your business.
And then at the end of that survey, you can include, “Thank you so much for submitting. Here’s a link to review us. Would you mind giving us a review?” Now, keep in mind that you cannot selectively give that review link to people. You can’t just give that review link to the people who give you five stars or rate you positively.
This is called review gating. And it’s actually against Google’s guidelines. So if you’re using this route or sending any sort of survey, make sure that it’s just built in straight in the survey at the very end.
That way there’s no selectivity. There’s no gating where you’re passing certain people through and keeping others behind.
8. Always Respond to Your Reviews
If you are responding to each and every one of your reviews, you will not only get more reviews, but it can actually help you get more customers. This is because if you are going through saying thank you so much for your review, we had such a great time serving you and your family, and we did this job and we were so happy to do so, this shows to people that you care.
You care about people’s feedback.
You care about doing a good job.
You take people’s comments into consideration.
You are a real business on the other side of that screen.
Therefore, people will actually trust you more and be more likely to give you a review. If they are looking through the reviews, they get the service done, and then they can come back and add their voice to the mix.
If you do not respond to reviews, you are actually closing the door on more business. In fact, 57 percent of customers say that they would be very unlikely to use a business that doesn’t respond to reviews. Are you willing to say goodbye to half of your potential customer base just from a lack of responding to your reviews?
I think that it does not have to be anything fancy. Just go ahead and respond. Let people know that you’re there, that sort of thing. And make sure that you are always engaging with people when they are giving you that feedback because it matters. It is so valuable. Their words matter to your business.
8 Tips to Get More Google Reviews
There you have it: 8 tips to supercharge review generation:
- Generate a short link directly to Google reviews
- Have your employees request reviews
- Vary how you ask for reviews
- Send a follow up
- Use your tools to build review generation systems
- Set up Social Media brand monitoring
- Plan for a review campaign
- Always respond to your reviews
Make Review Generation a Strategy, Not an Afterthought
My last sentiment that I want to leave you with is to make review generation an active part of your growth strategies. Build systems around asking for reviews. Make it a habit, a constant in your business. Don’t rely on your brain to remember every once in a while you should ask for reviews or do it once a year when you have some downtime.
You should be constantly acquiring reviews. Your SEO and your bottom line will thank you.
Until next time,
Keep Succeeding Small
