Five Tips and Tricks for Managing Google Reviews
This is a guest post from our friend Cynthia Ord at YellowDog Printing.
Do these five things to see more five-star reviews from your best customers
How important are Google Reviews to your business? Short answer: very.
For most local businesses with a brick-and-mortar storefront, your Google business listing may be even more visible than your website. Chances are, it brings more searchers to your brand, and it may even be their first impression.
More than Yelp, Facebook, or any other peer review platform out there, Google reviews matter not only for your brand’s reputation, but also for how well your business listing ranks in Google searches.
So that’s the “why” to care about your Google reviews. Here are a few tips on “how”.
Make it ridiculously easy to review your business
The first step in acquiring more reviews is to make it easy and foolproof for your customers. Take them there directly. Inside your business listing dashboard (business.google.com) and find the “Share review form” button under “Get More Reviews”. This will generate a link to a form with five empty stars just waiting for your customer to fill them. Trust me, it needs to be that easy (i.e. zero navigation required) for people to actually do it.
The first step in acquiring more reviews is to make it easy and foolproof for your customers.
Secondly, make sure your review link is in as many brand touchpoints as possible. If you think you have it in too many places, you probably need it in about three more. Repetition is key. Think about placing this link on
a point-of-purchase sign
your business card
your email signature
any auto-generated purchase invoices, confirmation emails, and receipts
the footer of your website
your email marketing campaigns.
Incentivize your staff to get mentioned
Technically, it’s against Google’s contribution policy for businesses to incentive their customers to leave them reviews. However, what you CAN do is incentivize your staff to get mentioned by name in positive reviews. This works especially well in the service industry, but anyone with customer-facing employees can try it.
If an employee receives a small bonus for each review that mentions his or her name, then that employee is more likely to go above and beyond on customer service, AND do the heavy lifting of directly and repeatedly asking their best customers to leave reviews. Way to delegate like a boss.
Reply to ALL reviews
Your review link is in at least three places, your staff is fired up about asking for reviews, and now the glowing reviews start rolling in. Congrats! The job isn’t done. Be sure to respond to each and every review in your best, most sincere brand voice. That’s right. ALL of them. Even the not-so-good ones.
Why respond to all of them? First of all, it’s just good etiquette. If someone pays you a compliment in person, do you just turn around and walk away? No! You reply, of course. Treat each review like the conversation that it is. Secondly, your replies signal strong owner engagement with your listing, which Google rewards with search visibility. Try to respond to every reply in a timely manner. I recommend two weeks or less.
Need help responding to a negative review? Check out Google’s best practices for how to reply.
Share share share your positive reviews
When it comes to glowing Google reviews, there’s no such thing as oversharing. You’ll want to leverage your best reviews in a variety of ways, to make sure prospective customers see them. A standout review is like marketing gold -- don’t let it get buried somewhere in your business listing.
One of my favorite tools for this is the Google Marketing Kit. Free for all listing owners, this tool uses Google’s powerful AI technology to pick the strongest snippets of posts and render them into artful reviews graphics. From there, you can share these graphics across your website, social media and email marketing campaigns. Give it a try!
Use the Google Marketing Kit to automatically pick snippets from posts and create artful review graphics.
Become a reviewer yourself
What’s the best way to understand Google’s reviewing experience from the customer’s point of view? Leave a few reviews yourself. After several years as a Google reviewer, here are some of my favorite things about leaving reviews:
Embrace your inner cheerleader and support small businesses you love
Contribute sanity, positivity, and balance to the reviews ecosystem
Understand the “ask” you are making to you own customers
Earn points and badges, and work your way up the reviewer levels
If stringing words together is harder for you than snapping photos, you can also post photos to reviews along with a star rating. Images are another great way to spread the local business love.
Thank you YellowDog
Thanks Cynthia and YellowDog for contributing this great post! YellowDog is a Denver Based print, web, and marketing company. They’ve done print jobs for local artists like Kelsey Shields and Mallory McCamy and can print just about anything. Go check them out for any print needs!
