How To Improve Your Google Reviews
When it comes to choosing which business to support, people trust other people a lot more than they trust businesses. The most effective marketing campaign in the world can be instantly undone by one bad word from a trusted friend, and conversely, brands with no advertising budget can grow purely on word of mouth.
With the advent of the internet that word of mouth has evolved into online reviews, with Google Reviews being the undisputed king. So in light of that, let’s look at how you can improve your Google Reviews and start bringing in new business.
Become A Verified Business Owner
The first step to improving your Google Reviews is being able to manage them, and that means becoming the verified owner of the business. This will require a Google My Business account, so if you don’t have an account yet go ahead and create one.
Once you have an account you need to create or claim your business listing. Google has in depth instructions here, but essentially you need to claim ownership of the business and ensure all the details they have listed for it are correct.
Once you have your business profile ready to go you can verify it through Google My Business, full instructions for which can be found here. Verification will take some time to process, but once it's done you’ll be granted access to all the tools you need to manage your Google Reviews as the business owner.
With that groundwork taken care of, it’s time to start managing some reviews, for which we’ll need some reviews to manage.
Encourage Customers To Leave Reviews
It’s an unfortunate reality that Customers are most motivated to leave reviews when they’ve had a bad experience. Something goes wrong, and they immediately rush online to warn everyone about it. This can cause your reviews to become unfairly weighted towards the negative, which gives you an unfairly negative reputation.
To balance this out we obviously need more good reviews, and that means encouraging happy Customers to leave positive reviews. The best way to do this is actually very simple. All you have to do is ask.
A request to leave a review can be done in a number of ways, the most basic of which is in conversation. At or near the end of a conversation or transaction with a Customer, ask them if they’d mind leaving you a Google Review, and mention it would really help you out. Keep it personable, keep it friendly, and you’ll find people much more likely to respond positively.
You can also request Customers leave reviews via any digital or printed materials they interact with during the course of their time doing business with you. At the bottom of menus, invoices, brochures, or on your website, a polite request for Customers to leave a review if they’d like to help further support your business can help to draw in additional positive reviews.
By being polite and specifically targeting those wanting to help you out, you can influence the kinds of reviews you receive.
So now we should have plenty of reviews to work with, and they should be trending more towards the positive than the negative. It’s time now to add the finishing touches.
Respond To What Customers Are Saying
Reviews aren’t just for Customers to look at, they’re also for you to study. Written reviews especially provide a very useful indicator of what you’re doing right, and what you’re doing wrong. If Customers regularly mention your checkout process is confusing, you need to simplify it. If they say they love the way you package goods, then don’t mess with that method.
This process of refinement will help you improve the products and services you’re offering, which on its own will naturally lead to better reviews, but we can also take it a step further. We didn’t go to the trouble of claiming and verifying that business listing for nothing you know, this is the part where we get to use that ability to respond to reviews as the owner.
Your responses will be clearly labelled as coming from the owner of the business, granting your responses authority. Use this to thank kind reviewers, and tell them how glad you are they enjoyed their experience with you. This kind of post transaction, positive interaction leaves Customers feeling that you genuinely care about their experience, rather than being eager to shuffle them out the door the instant they’ve handed over their money.
You can also, if you’re quick, turn around bad reviews and limit the damage they do. Even the best of us struggle to maintain a completely perfect score, and occasionally things just go wrong. When that happens you need to take the time to read the reasoning behind the negative review, and respond to any reasonable issues they have.
Show you’re willing to be held accountable and fix mistakes and you can potentially turn a negative review into a positive one. Even if you can’t, the act of trying tells everyone who reads your response that you care.
When handled well, Google Reviews are a great way to build brand awareness and Customer trust. Improve those reviews, improve your Customer experience, improve your business, that’s what it’s all about.
