What’s the importance of Google reviews?

Google reviews can give businesses a big credibility boost without having to spend a dime. The many benefits of getting Google reviews include Google ranking for local SEO, levelling the playing field, increasing your online reputation, and helping mum and pop operations.

So how do you get more Google reviews?

Hopefully by now you realise the importance of Google reviews, but you might be wondering how to get started. Here is a 2-step process for setting up your Google My Business page and optimising it to collect online reviews.

Step 1: Claim and optimise your Google Business listing

The first thing you need to do is claim your Google Business listing. This process is easy and straightforward:

• Navigate to business.google.com
• Search for your business by name and address
• Fill out basic information about your business
• Submit for verification

Typically Google will send you a post guard within a couple of days with a PIN to finalize the verification process. 

Once you have the ability to update your listing you should put in the effort to make sure it’s attractive and filled with relevant information that will entice searchers to click on your listing. At the very minimum you should do the following:

• Add relevant information about your business
• Upload high-resolution photos
• Include up-to-date hours of operations

Step 2: Start asking your customers to leave you a review

Now it’s time to start collecting Google reviews and interacting with customers. You should make a proactive effort to ask all of your customers to write a Google review. Here are some best practices to follow:

Determine the right timing of the invitation: The best time to ask is when there’s some downtime in the sales process. You want to ensure you ask the customer after some sort of service has been given but before they leave your physical location.

Set the expectation for the review: After you’ve determined the right time to invite the customer, now you can start setting expectations for what you want them to do. When setting expectations, you should let the customer know:

• Why online reviews are important for your business
• How they will be receiving the invite (text or email)
• When they will be receiving the invite

Eliminate barriers: 70% of consumers would be willing to give you a review but most fail to do so. One of the main reasons customers fail is because the process can be difficult and cumbersome. They simply don’t know how to do it and if you send them a link there are too many steps to follow. 

To prevent this, you need to make the process as frictionless as possible. This can be accomplished by implementing an online review management platform that streamlines the invitation process and makes it ridiculously easy for your employees to invite customers and for your customers to leave reviews.

The best software for collecting reviews, Podium, utilises text messages as the primary channel for invitations.

This results in a significantly higher response rate and enables you to collect as much as 15 times more Google reviews than traditional email-based platforms.

Watch a Demo here to see how Podium can help your business collect real Google reviews from your customers