Increasing your number of Google+ reviews can help your business thrive both online and offline. As consumers are consulting more online reviews than ever, achieving a higher star rating than your competitors will help increase the click-through rate to your website and generate leads. Boosting the number of positive reviews also helps to promote social proof of your product and services.
We touched upon this subject earlier in the year, but let’s take a closer look at how you can get more Google+ reviews for your business.
Ask Customers for Reviews
This is the most obvious way of getting a review, yet many businesses do not ask their customers for a Google+ review. By emailing a satisfied customer or calling them afterwards they are more likely to leave a review. By calling a customer you will also find out if they were dissatisfied in any way, which you can then actively respond to. This has the potential to turn an experience that would have lead a customer to leave bad review for you in to an opportunity for them to leave an improved review, as you have actively made the effort to fix the situation.
The customer life cycle is important when considering when the best time is for a customer to leave a review. Depending on the product or service it could be the next day, or a couple of weeks later, once they’ve reaped the benefits. When you have decided when the best time is to get a review, communicate with the customer to gather feedback and mention that you would appreciate a review.
Include Google+ Calls-To-Action
Include links to your Google+ review page when you communicate with customers. By adding a call-to-action such as “Leave us a Google+ Review” with a link directly to the review page, you are making it easier for your customer to leave a review. I recommend adding calls-to-action to marketing emails, customer surveys and newsletters. Newsletter subscribers and regular customers are often more likely to add a review as they are familiar with your business.
Leave Google+ reviews for your partners and businesses you work with
By leaving positive reviews on your partners’ Google+ page, they are likely to return the favour. If they don’t return the favour, or if they don’t regularly check their Google+ page, I recommend asking for a review and go one step further to explain the benefits of Google+ reviews to them.
Add a Google+ button to your website
It’s more than likely that you include Twitter and Facebook buttons across your website. I recommend adding a Google+ button along with your other social media buttons to help generate followers and reviews. There may not be as many people on Google+ compared to the other social media platforms, but we cannot ignore the importance Google+ in the Google search results:
Address bad reviews
Many businesses receive the odd bad review. If this does occur, we recommend that you contact the reviewer and see how you can rectify the situation. There is also the option to respond to comments on Google+ where you can publicly apologise and resolve the situation. See below where a restaurant owner asks the customer to send a quick email for a complimentary voucher.
Conclusion
At Hallam we recommend that you don’t offer an incentive or discount in return for Google+reviews, as you can often tell if a review is fake or contrived. Also, your Google+ needs at least five reviews for you to see the brightly coloured gold stars in the Google search results, which stand out incredibly well in the search results.
