Tips For Earning More Local Business Reviews

All business models that have a physical storefront or makes use of face-to-face contact with consumers will rely on local business citationsA citation is a mention of your company, product, or service in an online publication. Citations increase the ranking of your site on search engines and listings. From single-location SMBs to internationally recognized brands, local reviews are an essential factor that can improve online visibility and, ultimately, have a positive impact on your profits.

Understanding how to leverage local business reviews, and why they are so important, is vital and could be one of the most useful strategies that your business adopts. If you’re not sure why you should be focusing on local business reviews, or how to go about it, then here’s everything that you need to know.

The Importance of Local Business Reviews

Never underestimate the importance of the reviews that have been left online by your customers. It is estimated that around 92% of consumers will read an online review before they commit to a purchase, and up to 68% say that the more positive reviews, the more likely that they will trust that business to meet their needs. That’s why it’s so vital that you encourage your customers to leave reviews.

That doesn’t just mean one platform, though. The more reviews that you can gain on a variety of platforms, the more likely that you can make improvements to your local search rankings and your profits.

Learn To EAT

Google has placed a high priority on businesses that meet the EAT criteria. This is one of the methods that search engines use in order to evaluate just how useful you are to a search engine query.

While EAT has changed, the basics of EAT remain the same:

• Expertise: You need to show that you are an expert in your industry. For humorous websites or clickbait news sites, experience is not a priority, but for businesses it is absolutely essential. Content on your website needs to be professional and knowledgeable. Above all, your content needs to be both truthful and useful, so that search engines can gain a better understanding of where to place you in their SERPs.
• Authoritativeness: The content on your webpages needs to be created by someone who not only knows the subject but has the credentials or personal experience to back up the views and opinions in the content. For businesses that rely on community conversations or forum discussions, the quality and moderation of those conversations will play a role in your perceived authority.
• Trustworthiness: While all businesses should strive to be trustworthy, this is especially true of those that rely on online payments. The goal is to make your potential customers feel safer when they are giving you their private, sensitive information like bank account details. Factors like SSL encryption can improve this, especially considering that up to 70% of all page one SERPs are websites that use SSL. Google uses this as one of its most important scoring signals, so it’s essential to get this right.

Ultimately Google is the king of the search engines, and they state that EAT is one of the top three considerations it uses when judging the quality of a website. Knowing how to use your local business reviews in order to have a better EAT performance can be a long-term project, but it’s more important than ever that you focus your online strategy into perfecting it.

Earning More Local Business Reviews: A Strategy Guide

There are a variety of ways that you can generate more local business reviews for your business. The challenge is to find the strategies that work best for you, and then incorporate them into your daily business processes.

1. Deliver and Over-Deliver

Not all of your customers are going to leave a review. However, there are suggestions that up to 25% of consumers will only leave a review if they have had a very good experience with a business. This works the other way as well, with 33% of customers saying that they will only leave a review if their experience with a business has been a very negative one. In order to take advantage of this, you need to ensure:

• Fantastic customer service
• Robust staff training
• Improved quality control
• Positive business culture

The goal is to always exceed customer expectations in order to meet that 25% bracket regularly.

2. Offline Encouragement

For your brick and mortar locations, it’s a good idea to have visible signage that encourages your customers to leave a review. You might consider:

• Banners
• Business cards
• Messages on receipts
• Menus
• Flyers

The more methods that you have for communicating your interest in feedback, the more communication you will get.

3: Email Addresses

Email marketing is one of the most potent strategies for increased B2C interactions. If you can collect your customers’ email addresses, then you not only have a direct line straight to their inbox when you have a promotion, you can also follow up a sale over the next few days to check that they are happy with their experience. Remember to give them a choice of platforms where they might leave a positive review.

4: Audit

It needs to be easy to leave a review. Conduct regular checks of your website to ensure that it is easy to find your reviews page, and provide both linksHyperlinks, also known as links, are the connection points on a webpage that take you to other webpages. and instructions for how to leave a review. Have a variety of options in terms of platforms where the reviews can be left. You also need to perform regular checks to ensure that there is not a platform that contains reviews about your business that you don’t know about. Use your audit to evaluate just how easy it is to leave a review and make adjustments as needed.

5: Respond

You should make it a priority to leave a response to every review that you receive on every platform. While it is common sense to respond to negative reviews, you should set aside time in your day to respond to the positive ones as well. This is a common courtesy, a way of saying thank you to the reviewer. It makes it very clear that there is a human at the other end of the keyboard and removes that impersonal nature.

Make your responses personal and unique. This has the effect of making potential customers see that you have a genuine desire to create the best customer service, and can go a long way to establishing trust.

While the majority of SEO strategies need to be adopted quickly and be perfect from the get-go, improving your local business reviews can be a long-term process. The idea is to build up a bank of reviews over time, and that can take months and years. Online reviews are not a quick process, but they don’t have to be a lot of hard work. Some simple changes to the way that you collect, display, and react to your local business reviews could mean that you are positively impacting your future profits in the long term.