When thinking about purchasing a new product, what would you trust more: A sales pitch or a customer review?
I pick the latter — and I’m not alone. Did you know that 81% of consumers rely on google reviews to evaluate local businesses? if you want more local customers you need more positive reviews on your google my business page. Buy google reviews or influence customers to get more positive reviews.
People consult reviews and testimonials to determine whether or not they trust a product, service, and even a seller. Let’s take a look at why and how customer reviews and testimonials impact consumers and businesses of all sizes.
What is a customer review?
A customer review is a reflection of a customer’s experience with your company’s products or services. Reviews can be found on sites such as Google Reviews, Amazon, Yelp, and Facebook.
Consumers use customer reviews during the buyer’s journey to understand how your product works and whether it’s worth the investment.
Most everyone can publish a review online, and these reviews can contain good information, negative experiences, and sometimes even untrue claims about your business.
Since they’re posted on third-party sites and from real users of your products, consumers view these reviews as a reliable source of information. In fact, customers find online reviews to be so helpful that 49% of consumers trust them as much as personal recommendations.
Customer Review Sites
There are many sites where consumers can leave their reviews. These include broad customer review sites, such as Google Reviews, Facebook, and Yelp (where any business can be reviewed), as well as industry-specific customer review sites, such as TripAdvisor, a travel-related review site, Zomato, a restaurant, and food-related review site, and G2 Crowd, a site dedicated to software reviews.
Let’s dive into two of the more broad customer review sites that people use: Google Reviews (which is part of Google My Business) and Yelp.
Google My Business Reviews (a.k.a. Google Reviews)
Google Reviews is currently the most commonly used platform for customer reviews. This is because … well … it’s Google. All types of businesses can be reviewed and rated on a 5-star scale.
How to Set Up Your Google My Business Profile
With the help of a Google My Business profile, anyone can create a presence for their company so it can be found via Google search.
Step 1: To receive Google Reviews, businesses have to complete a Google My Business profile. Not only is it simple to set up your business profile on Google, but it’s also exceptionally easy for customers to review your product or service.
Step 2: Once you set up your profile, you need to create a review link so customers can write about their experiences or give you a rating based on a five-star scale.
Step 3: Make sure you have both a link to your reviews that consumers can find through a Google search as well as a link using the Place ID Lookup tool. With this, customers can write a review by simply looking up your company or searching for your location on Google Maps.
How to Leave a Review on Google
If you are the reviewer and are hoping to leave information about your experience on Google, all you need to do is provide your first and last name. Google does not allow any reviewer to remain anonymous. Anyone can see your name along with your review, as well as any other reviews you’ve left and photos you’ve added to Google Maps.
If you have a Google account already, you have an “About Me” page that Google My Business will link to your reviews. Here’s mine:
Google requires you to give this information for three reasons:
- It makes your review more legitimate to those reading it.
- People are typically less likely to make false statements when their personal information is attached to something.
- It gives credibility to your review.
- It allows the owner of the company to follow up with you about your review.
How to Respond to Google Reviews
You may be asking yourself, “What if someone still decides to leave a fake review about my company?” Or, “What if I want to respond to a positive or negative review?” Google helps you out with all of this.
Responding to reviews is very straightforward. After you’ve signed into your business account, find the original review you want to respond to and click Reply.
Although you can’t remove negative reviews, Google will remove reviews that do not meet the requirements of their User Contributed Content Policy. Some of the reasons that a review may be removed include hate speech, fake comments, spam, illegal information, a conflict of interest, and more. If you notice something Google doesn’t, you can flag the review, and they will check the content and remove it if necessary.
How to Optimize your Google My Business Profile
Now that you see how popular and important Google Reviews are for all businesses, you may be wondering how you can optimize your Google My Business profile. After all, reviews are just as necessary for your business to improve as they are for customers to make informed decisions.
Here are some ideas for optimizing your Google My Business profile to get more customer reviews and (hopefully) positive interactions:
- Complete all information on your Google My Business Profile. Otherwise, consumers can go in and “suggest” their own edits. These can go live without you receiving a notification or update. Log in to your account regularly to review updates and make sure nothing is changed without your permission.
- Create a Google My Business Post. These are like mini advertisements within your Google profile that give people an idea of what you sell or the service you provide.
- If you provide services, add a booking button so they can schedule an appointment or meeting with you efficiently.
- Ethically ask for reviews from customers. Don’t ask a friend to write you a super positive review just so you can have it on your site. If a legitimate customer finds out, why would they want to trust you in the future?
- Engage with customers and reviewers under the “Questions and Answer” section. Express gratitude for compliments, and thoughtfully respond to those who had a poor experience. Make your customers feel like you care about them no matter what they have to say about you.
- Allow reviewers to add photos and videos of your office, store, or restaurant. This adds a personal touch to their reviews. It also makes their reviews even more credible.
- Add your services or menus to your profile. You don’t want to lose a potential customer because they can’t locate your services and prices fast enough.
- Due to the popularity of Google Reviews for consumers and the importance of actually ranking on Google businesses, this is an exceptionally powerful and important tool for every company.