Reviews the Good the Bad The Ugly
There is an ongoing debate about the value of reviews to your Google My Business entity.
I am here to tell that reviews have tremendous value.
But not to Google so much, mostly to humans.
Remember the testimonial? That is what a review is. A testament to your services.
I know of many people who shall remain nameless 😉 Who believe that he with the must abundant by ten fold amount wins.
No. Just the one with a footprint that looks real. Usually the profiles I audit are obviously faux.
Machine
And Google knows it too.
Usually, these are just someone behind a computer making up false accounts. On the same ip, and browser footprint.
Unless, you are flushing your footprint and ip and more. Google knows someone is putting up fives on your behalf.
The Value of a GMB to Google
A GMB review at best is a page (link) with a map. And it can produce relevant clicks to your main pages.
As I wrote in my now unpublished Google My Business book, your GMB is like a website deep within Google itself. So each relevant page helps the bigger GMB site.
But in order to make that review page help the rest of your GMB website. Then you must promote that review.
The Person
Of course, sometimes we get so obsessed with Google rankings and traffic, it is easy to forget that you want leads and sales.
When your prospects are met with a big decision, we like to look to others for some sort of validation and leadership on the big decision that your prospect is about to make.
Why a book of testimonials at the aesthetics studio, or dental office is so powerful.
I know of a HVAC company that does a Quality rating survey after each install. And they show this book of perfect scores on each sales presentation.
Online reviews are another layer of potential validations for you.
And you can cross promote.
You can take your reviews on an industry directory or Alignable, and place them on your socials, and your primary or secondary blog or website review section.
You cannot put your reviews from other sites onto your Google reviews, but you can put them into your Google My Business posts textually or graphically.
You can copy them all into a brag book in the real world.
I have even taken a mp3 from a voice message of gratitude and made it embeddable.
How To Get Reviews
We all know getting reviews is a pain. Most haters are motivated to give one stars or thumbs down. Its what they live for lol
Here are a couple tried and true sources to get some.
- Past clients
- Friends-Even if they have never done business with you. They can say I have known Mary for 10 years and have always been impressed by her obvious xyz knowledge.
- Referral swaps-The trick is given to me by a client of mine who has a healthy amount of reviews. Too many in my opinion. But it if is working why break it?
During Covid many local yocals are suffering towards recovery. He rents many apartment units in their area.
And he asked the local eateries if they would mind giving him coupons that he can hand out to brand new neighbors of the business.
They are more than happy for the new customers.
So my client hands over the rental, with keys, and with the generous coupon. And then after the value of the coupon has been recognized. He then asks for a Google review.
They readily give him five star reviews.
This is another concept called reciprocation that is on the chart.
Stay tuned as I will be making my rewritten Google book made available soon with all kinds of baked in goodies for you.
Bonus: See below the graphic
Bonus: This is from a client reminding me that you must reply to the reviews. Even the bad ones. It not only is polite, it shows Google that you are active with your Google My Business Account.