How to Get Google Reviews For My Business

over 90% of consumers rely on reviews before they'll even consider giving you their money so let's go over the easiest most effective ways to get more google reviews for your business hey guys West McDowell here from the deep end and one thing my clients are always asking me is how to get more Google reviews for my business so today I'm gonna show you my best tactics for getting more of those five-star google reviews this video is going to be comprehensive I'm going to take you through the entire process including who to ask how to ask and when to ask as well as a super effective way to make it as easy on your customers or clients as possible to do it you want and leave a positive review because most people do want to be helpful but only if you make it easy on them so if you make them have to think too much on their own or click and fumble around with it they'll just give up but before we get to the how let's take a quick second to look at why Google reviews are so powerful and why you need them so I want to show you something so I've done a quick search for catering Chicago and showing up in the map listings here is a great way to be found for many local businesses and many factors contribute to who is found here and in what order and ratings and reviews are one of them so even if you show up here the number of reviews you get and the average star rating it's really going to make a difference in if you are going to get the first call or not so take a look at these three right here based on the stars and the number of them who would you pick I know my money would be on a blue plate here up front because they've got a four and four point five star rating which beats out three point nine and four and they've got thirty of them versus seven and four so blue plate is definitely ahead of the game here and just to throw some stats your way for a second you know 90% of people read reviews before they'll visit a business and 84 percent of people actually trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation from a friend and that comes from Forbes so you can see the power of having reviews if you know if people are searching on a category like for the catering example we just show I just showed you the other way it really works well is if you are a business that relies on word-of-mouth the people will then vet online so let's look at this example the acct group it's an accountant in Chicago so let's say someone told me got to hire these guys but I'm gonna go on Google and I'm gonna check them out myself so you know I go here and I see okay 3.9 stars 11 google reviews so at this point it's like okay the reviews are not bad and I would probably actually read some of them but then I probably give them a call quickly after so the first step in getting more Google reviews is to remove as many barriers as possible between your customers and those reviews so before I discovered this trick I'm going to show you I'd ask a client if they'd mind leaving a review and that request would come with you know a set of step-by-step instructions how to do it so some would figure it out but most would just have a hard time making it work so no review for us but luckily for you in 2018 there is a better way so let's make a super simple link you can use over and over again to make it really easy on your customers to help you out in order for you to start getting reviews at all you of course need to Google my business listing so if you don't have one there are a million videos that can show you how to claim yours but for this video I'm assuming that you're already you already have it and are ready to go so let's jump back over to the computer okay so the first thing you're gonna do is go to white sparks EA / Google review link generator and I'll leave that link in the notes below the video so basically you're going to go here you're gonna scroll down and then you're gonna enter the name of your business so I'll do mine and then if you already have a business Google my business listing you should be able to find it here so I'm just gonna click that and then like magic it just gives you a review link so let's click that button there to copy go up here and paste it and it opens my listing with a cool little pop up that allows me to leave a review there used to be a workaround where you could add a little bit of code to the end of this to make it automatically pre-populate as a 5-star review which was very handy but Google has gotten rid of that kind of functionality so you may see in a few other videos on YouTube that'll tell you how to do that but no longer is that possible unfortunately but anyway just copy that link and put it somewhere safe so you have it okay so now that you have your custom review link there are a few places you can use it to your advantage of course you can use it in emails which we'll talk more about in a bit you can also use it in your email signature if you want this works really well if you have a sales staff and they can all be using that link in every email with their customers you can use it on your website but here's the caveat to that if you're gonna publish that link and make it very easy for people to review your business I only recommend you do that if you know that you have an extremely high satisfaction rating with your customers the last thing you want is a disgruntled customer seeing that link you know and they may choose to leave a bad review on their own but you definitely don't want to make it that easy for them and what you can also do is have that link printed on your business cards or on dedicated cards that you only hand out to certain customers okay so if you want to get a lot of reviews you're gonna need to ask for them but there are good ways and bad ways of going about that so I'm gonna share all the best tips I've come up with over the years that tend to work the best first of all when you ask whether in person or in an email you want to give a reason for them to leave a review there's a pretty famous study from the 70s where a woman tries to cut in line for a Xerox machine and sometimes she just asks if she could cut sometimes she'd say it's because she's in a rush and sometimes she'd say just because she needed to make copies which is a pretty stupid reason right I mean everyone in line was there because they needed to make copies but the two scenarios where she gave any reason at all even the stupid reason increased her success rate and actually getting to cut the line so I think it was like 60 percent up to 95 percent when she gave either reason all that to say that if you just ask for a review you're less likely to get it than if you were to give a reason that reason can be as simple as because it would really help us out and help us be found by more customers and this can really help when you're asking somebody who doesn't know you well and would probably be on the fence about you know if they want her to take the time at all and I do want to address the elephant in the room here while Google encourages you to ask for reviews there are guidelines strictly forbid incentivizing reviews so their old policy just said not to offer anything in exchange for positive reviews but now they've widened that stance to any reviews at all so offering a deal or coupon in exchange for a review is technically against Google's policy but there's nothing in their policy against rewarding your team members for bringing in Google reviews which leads us to a really effective tactic that may work for your business if you have a sales team you can offer a bonus for each review anyone in the company brings in and then when one of those team members asks for a review from a customer if they simply tell them that they're gonna get a bonus for that review guess what reviews will increase because you're appealing to that part of human nature that enjoys helping other people out and it seems to work really well so there are a few different methods you can use to ask for review the absolute best being in person or on the phone and the best time to do it right after they've given you a compliment on how much you help them but be sincere and humble say something like thank you I love hearing that it would really help us out if you could take a minute to let others know that in a Google review the most likely at least verbally agree to do that then you can just email them the link or if you're in person you can give them you know business card with a link on it but with an email you can always follow it up with another message if they don't actually leave the review more on that follow up a little later on the second best way to ask would be an a personalized email to customers or clients who you know are happy with their experience and the best time to send the email is right after you've helped them the more time that passes they may start to forget the details that make for a really good review and they'll be less excited about the experience too so send a request with a few details so they know you're reaching out personally and again give them the reason so those are the two best ways but they aren't really scalable unfortunately so what if you don't personally know all your customers very well okay so the third way is a way to reach higher numbers of people but it's a little more dangerous because if you don't know what they're thinking you may run the risk of getting some negative reviews in the mix as well so this method involves sending out automated emails to your customer list you can send out a blast all at once but I'd actually recommend staggering them a little bit Google looks at patterns so if you get a bunch of reviews rolling in all at once they may think something's up and penalize you for faking reviews so I'd go little by little then get new customers as you get them into an automated email funnel that starts once they become a customer that way everyone goes at their own pace not all at once so how do we lessen the chances of negative reviews when you send out these mass requests what I like to do is start the email off by asking about their experience then you know make it clear that if they're unhappy for any reason you're committed to making it right and that they should contact you directly this will help read out the people who may have otherwise left a very public and negative review and it won't stop everybody but just knowing that they can come to you and hopefully have their situation resolved might be a more appealing option than just venting about it next say if you're happy we want to know about it please review us by clicking this link you know then remember to give the reason which is that it helps other customers like you find us and of course we'll be eternally grateful for it now for bonus points I actually want you to make a very simple very short video making this request that you can just embed right in those emails and if you have a smartphone and I know you do this will really increase your odds of getting positive reviews and dissuading the negative ones just be sincere and genuinely appreciative in that video just say something like I would want to thank you for your business and I want to know about your experience if you're unsatisfied in any way please reach out to me at Wes at the deep end design.com so I can make it right and if you love what I did what we did for you I want to know about that too just take a few seconds and click the link below to leave an honest Google review real clients success stories help us reach even more clients that we can help as well it would mean a lot to me and I thank you in advance for taking the time so when you're sending out these emails whether there are automated email blasts or personalized outreach emails there have been a few studies that suggest if you send that email between 1:00 and 3:00 p.m. your odds of them following through on it shoot up by about 20% that's probably just because people are just getting back to their desks from lunch and getting back to their emails and they're not ready to jump into work just yet so let their procrastination work for you so what about those people who don't follow through on leaving a review after you ask well one simple trick is just to send a follow-up email reminding them how much it can help and be sure to let them know in this follow-up email that they can just leave a star rating with no written review if they want a star rating on its own is never going to be as powerful as a testimonial but it's better than nothing especially when you realize that most people aren't reading through all the reviews anyway they're simply scanning to see a number of reviews and the average star rating so this is a great way to pick up some extra stars from people who might have been intimidated by trying to think of what to write and lastly once you start getting reviews you should personally respond to each one even the positive ones so thank them for their business be genuine and show future customers that are researching your business that you're someone they want to work with and if all of this sounds like something you'd rather outsource click the link below to see how I can take some of this off your plate and get you a steady stream of five-star google reviews on autopilot all right that's gonna do it for this video and be sure to look out for my next video which will show you how to get fake negative Google reviews removed so for more tips like this just click subscribe to our channel down here and if you'd like to speak with me to see what we can do about getting you set up with more Google reviews just click the link below I'm Wes McDowell with the deep end see you next time [Music]

Channel: Wes McDowell

Views: 93,593

Keywords: how to get google reviews for my business, how to get google reviews, how to get google reviews link, how to get google reviews on my website, how to get google reviews on website, how to get google reviews on your website, 5 star google reviews, embed google reviews, google my business, google my business 2018, google my business reviews, google my business tutorial, tips to get more reviews online, google review link, online reviews, googlereviews

Id: 0W5q1X42y44

Length: 14min 46sec (886 seconds)

Published: Tue May 29 2018