The Importance of Reviews
In one of our previous posts we took a look at 3 easy ways to get more out of your website. This blog post could’ve been the fourth way to get more out of your website, however sometimes getting reviews for your business is not so easy, even if you provide high quality work.
First, let’s establish the importance of reviews and clarify what we are talking about. Reviews are user-generated content that your customers provide in various online listings for your business. The three most prominent user reviews usually come from your Google Map listing, Yahoo Local Listing and your Yelp listing. Your customers will need to register to these sites in order to leave a review. This shouldn’t be too much of a hassle as many people already have a gmail or yahoo email account they could log into.
Let’s take a look at an example of how reviews can help online rankings. We’ll take a look a local company in Naperville IL called Knoll Landscape Services. When you do a search in Google for landscaper Naperville IL, you will find this company as letter A in the Google Map listings. You will also notice that they have 3 reviews for their business. As you take a closer look, you will find that 3 out of the top 4 listings have reviews. This is just one example, but we have seen many businesses rise up the rankings quickly after fully completing their online profiles and getting more reviews for their business.
The hard part becomes getting your customers to actually leave the review. The easiest way to get more reviews is to simply ask your customers after the job is completed. If they don’t know the importance of these reviews they probably will not bother with them. We supply our clients with a document to send their customers that includes all of their online listings and a step-by-step guide on how to create a review. This document also includes their Facebook and Twitter accounts so they can stay connected with each other in the future. Feel free to get in touch with us and we’ll send this document over to you free of charge if you would like to start using it.
If you have good relationships with your clients, it may not be a bad idea to shoot them an email about it. You may want to give a little incentive like a free service that you provide or a gift certificate to a local restaurant. Trust us, it will be time or money well spent. Other good people to ask would be local companies you may have bartered with or members of your chamber of commerce. We participate in a forum www.contractortalk.com that helps others in the online community “like” their facebook posts and gain more twitter followers.
Hopefully this post gets your creative and networking juices flowing and helps you realize the importance of reviews. If you are serious about increasing your exposure online, then you need to start an active review campaign. Thanks for stopping by, see you again soon!
