Reviews

Have you Google’d your business lately? If you haven’t, you should. And, hopefully you see a 4 or 5 star average next to your businesses name. If not, then you have some work to do.

I have a love/hate relationship with reviews. On one-hand, they are great for keeping a pulse on how your customers are perceiving your business – whether good or bad. On the other hand, if customers are more unhappy than not, then it can really deter future customers from choosing you if left unmanaged or left to drop to a 2-star or 1-star average.

My stance on reviews is to always respond. Thankfully, studies have shown that prospective customers take poor reviews with a grain of salt, and it helps even more when they see that the business is listening and responding to praises AND to the complaints.

My second stance on reviews is to take a proactive approach. Work with your customer service team to actively ask for reviews online from your customers. Not only does this help you keep up on how your business is doing, but it also shows Google that you are popular amongst users which helps with your local SEO ranking when you are consistently (not a big jump and then dark) receiving a range of reviews.

When hiring an agency to help you with reviews, be sure to ask them for examples of responses they would do. Hopefully they will ask you follow up questions about how you currently handle customer service questions so they can develop the voice and tone of the responses. You’ll also want to ask them about what they recommend as a review growth strategy.

When you combine the two best practices we mention above with an experienced agency, you’ll be able to improve your online reputation and reviews over time which will result in higher organic rankings and more customers!