Google reviews are often the first thing a potential customer sees and are worth their weight in gold. The problem is that getting them is like pulling teeth!
The problem is that if your reviews are bad or non-existent, a visitor may not even look at your website.
So, how do you actually get these elusive Google business reviews?
Remember these 3 important steps:
- Make it easy for your clients to provide a review
- Ask for reviews at the right time
- Make asking for a review part of your process
What works best for you will depend on your service and how you usually interact with your customers.
1. Make it easy for your clients to provide a review
Let’s face it, people are lazy.
If a client has to jump through hoops to provide you with a review, they simply won’t do it. If you want to get reviews, your job is to make leaving them as easy as possible.
How you ask your clients for reviews will really depend on how you communicate with them.
Here are some examples of ways to ask for reviews.
In person or by phone
Perhaps you prefer the personal approach? If that’s how you like to work, then you can simply ask your customers to leave you a review face-to-face or over the phone. Bear in mind that unless the customer is going to sit down and write the review then and there, you’ll need to let them know how to leave you a review.
A simple redirect to your Google reviews from your website, such as yourwebsite.co.uk/review, is easy to remember and provides customers with a quick way to leave feedback.
Our Google business reviews tool improves upon this by helping you to tackle negative feedback before the customer adds their review to Google. Ask us about this if you’re curious!
By email
If most of your communication with your customers happens via email, you can easily send a link that way.
Talk to us if you’d like to know more about how we can integrate this for you automatically.
SMS or WhatsApp
Not everyone uses these methods to communicate with their clients, but they’re surprisingly effective!
Since switching to WhatsApp as our main source of communication with clients during projects, we have noticed that the response rate to our questions has increased considerably.
Email is easily ignored. You know how it is these days, you’re getting marketing emails from all sorts of online shops, newsletters from blogs, told that you’re the sole heir to a multi-million-pound fortune…and so on.
Email is by no means ineffective and clients will respond but you’re far more likely to get a fast response via SMS or WhatsApp. Try sending your client a link to your Google business reviews using one of these platforms.
2. Asking for reviews at the right time
What is the “right time” to ask for a review?
In general, a good time to ask for a review is soon after your complete a job for a client.
If you ask earlier than this, they may not have full confidence that you will deliver the service. Ask them too late, and they may have forgotten the level of quality you provided.
3. Make asking for reviews a part of your process
You’ll have a process for how you work, whether it’s officially documented or not.
Your “process” is, simply, the steps involved in getting your client from needing your service to having received your service.
By making “get a review” a part of your process, you’re more likely to ask for that review and with experience you’ll learn when to ask for that review.
At what stage of the process should you ask for a review? And how?
As I mentioned above, the best time to ask for a review is usually soon after your work for a client is completed.
Do you email your clients when you’re finished? If the answer is yes, then add a link to your reviews in that email.
Do you have a face-to-face at the end of a project? Ask the client for a review and tell them how they can leave one. You could even get some thank you cards printed with your Google Reviews link written on it.
The stage at which you add asking for a review is down to you and your business process, but you should think about adding it in somewhere.
What happens if my client leaves a negative review?
When you allow clients to review you online, you can almost guarantee that at some point, you’re going to get a bad review or two.
Naturally, you’re going to see that 1-star review appear and worry about how this will look to other customers.
Our Google Reviews Builder helps you to capture and cope with negative reviews before they hit Google. You can learn about that here.
In summary…
Google business reviews are valuable to your business. Google is more likely to list your business in local searches if you have a high number of reviews, both good and bad.
Don’t forget…
Your potential customers are highly likely to read what previous customers think of you.
You can maximise the potential for getting good reviews simply by asking your customers for them in the right way.
