It’s a fact that 90% of potential clients go online to get information about a company before contacting them. This shows the important role that public business reviews play for businesses, especially small local businesses.
How to Get Reviews on Google My Business
It’s not possible for every company to openly communicate with their clienteles asking for reviews – but if your company has the capability, you should definitely go for it.
How do you go about it?
By sending a link to your customer that directs them to your review.
Is that all?
No, you should be courteous when asking the client to leave a review. Remember that the client doesn’t have to leave a review. Ask for a review by following these steps:
- Once you’ve completed a project for the client, send a thank you email.
- After thanking the client, in the same email, ask him/her to leave a review on your Google My Business listing.
- Send a direct link that automatically loads your Google My Business review form. This makes it easy for the client to leave their review.
The link takes the client straight to your listing taking away all the hustle.
You might ask, why Google My Business?
Well…because Google dominates the internet.
Don’t get it wrong, reviews on other sites are good too but Google is the caviar.
Reviews on Google My Business will not only get you more clients but will also boost your ranking on Google’s SERPs.
More than 80% of searches are carried out on Google. When a prospect looks up your business through Google, the average rating of your company is shown on the results page. There is also a link for the searcher to go through all of your Google My Business reviews.
Will the Reviews Make Any Difference?
With 84% of people trusting online reviews, it’s safe to say that online reviews make a big difference, especially Google My Business reviews.
Think of Google My Business Reviews as a recommendation from a family member or friend.
How many reviews should you have?
I know you’re thinking somewhere in the range of 100s but our research shows that 5 is the magic number of Google My Business reviews.
Once you get 5 reviews, your business will profit from organic search results and the local pack of results.
Google My Business Reviews are valued because a user must have an active Google account to leave a review. This means that Google My Business reviews are left by real people, not fake reviews made by business operators to make them look good.
However, there are those clients that chose to remain anonymous.
How do you deal with them?
Don’t try to convince any of your clients to leave a Google My Business review. But you can politely ask them to leave a review on your site or on Facebook, we will cover this a bit later.
How to Make a URL to the Google My Business Review Box that is Pre-filled with 5 Stars
First of all, you’ll need an iPhone for this task.
Generating a direct URL for Google My Business review pre-filled with 5 stars isn’t easy, but it’s definitely worth it.
- Create a Google My Business Page for your company.
- Get your iPhone
- You will need Google Chrome for this task, so download and install it from iTunes store if you don’t have it.
- Use the incognito mode in Chrome and open a new incognito tab. The private mode ensures that you aren’t logged in when creating your Google My Business direct review. This means that your accounts will not be part of the link that you send to customers.
- Go to Google.com or your country’s version i.e. Google.ca in Canada.
- Now look for your business name as it is displayed on Google My Business Listings. You can change your search if your business doesn’t appear at first by including the registered phone number, address, city or state – do this until you locate your business.
- Scroll down until you find the Review and Rate tab and tap on the 5th star on the right. By selecting the 5th star, your URL will have a 5-star rating by default.
- You will be presented with a review screen. Don’t be alarmed that it asks you to log in. This part is the most crucial so instead of logging in, scroll up to the address bar.
- Once you get there (should be straightforward), press and hold the address bar until you get the “select all” option. Click it and then select “copy” to copy the URL.
That’s It! you now have a URL that will work everywhere, on mobile or desktop. Save the URL and start using it ASAP.
Please note that Google has revised the local business function including the name of this service from Google Places, Google+ and now Google My Business. If this service doesn’t work for your location, we are more than happy to do it for you.
One thing that you will note about the URL that you’ve copied is that it’s long.
The good thing is:
You can shorten the link by using link shorteners. Use goo.gl because it keeps the name recognition of Google.
Some people claim that goo.gl link expires after some time if it’s not clicked, but this is yet to be confirmed because we haven’t experienced it.
Another good option is to personalize your URL. A personalized URL redirects to the long URL that you copied first.
You can create this URL in the .htaccess file in the root of your website. This file is accessible through your hosting control panel (cPanel) or through FTP.
Open the file and add the long email on a single line. Contact us if you need any help creating a personalized professional URL.
How to ask your customer to leave a review
Asking the review is the last part and if you don’t write a good email, you will fail to get the client to leave that precious review.
Your email should be short, simple and sweet to make the client happy; here’s an example:
Hi
Working for you was a pleasure!
Would you mind taking some time to leave Artlogic.ca an honest and short review on our Google My Business listing?
Here’s where to leave your review
Thank You,
Peter
Artlogic.ca
As we mentioned earlier, you must have a Google account to leave a Google My Business review.
If your client isn’t sure about it, ask them to leave a testimonial on Facebook or an email review that you can put up on your website.
At Artlogic, most of our client come to us for new websites, SEO, and digital marketing. With every new client we get, we ask our client whether they have a Google account. This includes Android, Blogger, YouTube, Google Analytics, AdSense etc.
Some clients are unaware that all these sites are Google and any of them will work. If the client doesn’t have a Google account, we help them create one.
Once we create the account, we add Google Search Console and Google Analytics into the client’s site plus Google My Business, all of which require an account from Google.
Work hard and keep it smart and simple to get the reviews.