The Importance of Local Reviews and How to Get More of Them

 As a modern business, you probably already know that if someone can’t google your business and find you, you don’t exist. To top it off, if homeowners do see you on the internet, you have to hope you have good reviews. That way, when customers are comparing you against your competitors, you stand out – hopefully in a good way.

 The importance of reviews is not uncommon, but how to build and manage your local business reputation is. Like most business owners, you don’t have the time to do all the review marketing – if you do, you might not have all of the knowledge to make sure you do it correctly and efficiently as possible.  

Unfortunately, many marketing companies know this gap exists as well, and if you are not careful, you can end up overpaying for something you may not even need. There are some great marketing companies out there, but there are also many scams.

 In this article, we hope to emphasize why reviews are critical, along with tips on how to get more reviews efficiently and ethically. This article will be a good start, but every business is unique, and if you haven’t already, we recommend contacting one of our local evangelists for a free call on how to run a buy local campaign.

Here is an overview of why reviews are essential for businesses

• Maintain a good reputation
• Help with your Local SEO
• Obtain More Customers
• Tells you where you are at
• Builds customer relationships
• Helps the economy

Maintain a good reputation

We won’t spend a lot of time on this where it is common sense, but if people think highly of your business, they are more likely to recommend you and revisit or reorder. It also goes the other way if customers have a terrible experience.

Having a good reputation is still done through word of mouth, especially for local businesses. However, the internet changed everything, and all someone has to do to get an idea if they want to do business with you is to do a quick search. 

Our economy has shifted towards an experience economy. You may have the best price in town, but nowadays, more than ever, if you don’t do it with a smile and excellent customer service, you won’t even be considered for a chance to earn their business. 

Help with your Local SEO

As we mentioned before, reviews significantly affect your local SEO. For those of you not familiar with SEO, it is how Google sees and portrays your company on the web. There are a lot of things that go into local SEO. There are blogs dedicated to just local SEO, and although we could take a deep dive, that is not the focus of this article. For now, we will keep this section simple, and you can read the related articles for further information if you would like to learn more. 

There are over 63,000 searches per second on Google and other search engines. Many of these searches are people in your community looking for solutions to their problems. The problem for business owners is that people want the right answer fast and only look at the first three items on google — generally, only the first one. If your business isn’t there, they aren’t coming to you. The best way to move towards the top is to have a Local Google Business page. 

The Google Business page is one of the fastest and easiest ways to move towards the top. Due to the ease of creating one, almost every business has one and just having or creating one isn’t enough to give you a competitive advantage. You must regularly update and optimize it to see success. One of the best things to do is to have a bunch of quality reviews to stand out. Although reviews are a significant factor, there are many things google looks at from your website, your social media profiles, and more. If you don’t have someone helping you specifically on digital marketing efforts that has experience with local businesses, you should contact them to get a full SEO audit. You can get a free local site audit here if you are looking for a place to start. 

Obtain More Customers

We already talked about Google, but there are a plethora of review sites out there similar to the Honey Do List Network. Some examples are Homeadvisor, Thumbtack, Yelp, and more. Each site has its pros and cons. These sites generally are just under Google’s Local Pack results, and some have such strong presences that users don’t even go to Google and only look for businesses on their preferred review platform. As a business owner, you need to identify which ones you should list your business on and make sure all the information is up to date. If you haven’t already added your business to our directory, add your local business here. 

From an SEO standpoint, you should be on as many of these review platforms as you can, and keep them up to date. Having different addresses or phone numbers on different platforms can penalize your presence on Google. We always suggest working with a reputation management company like us to make sure this is done correctly. If you are more of a DIY person, you can click here to get a free local scan of your business. This free scan will give you a gage on what sites you are listed along with a few recommendations. 

Tells you what your community thinks of your company

We want to be completely honest. Yes, reviews show you how people perceive your business, but they don’t give you the whole picture. The problem with reviews is that those reviews come from generally two extremes of people who have engaged with your business. You either did exceptionally well and got a great review, or you messed up and got one star. Generally, you don’t see any reviews in the middle, which may be true for your business. 

If you have enough bandwidth, you should look at talking to one of our team members to start a feedback gathering program. A customer experience plan, if done right, will help you truly know what customers think of you and generate more reviews for you.

Customer experience programs are a significant first step. If you have the budget, it is also helpful to conduct a win-loss analysis or some market research to see how the general public views you compared to your competitors. These efforts provide useful information, but unless you are a start-up or want to launch a new product or service should be done last. 

Builds customer relationships

Yes, getting reviews can help you build relationships with your customers. Now people like to be heard. Telling a customer a simple Thank you after leaving a review stands out. If the customer had a bad experience replying with a chance to re earn their business can go a long way. Some companies even give perks to their customers for leaving reviews. 

Perks are great, but most companies simply forget to ask their customers for reviews.. If you want reviews, you need to ask for them. Asking for reviews can be a turn off to a customer if not done correctly, so be tactful and courteous when you ask.

 To be efficient, you need to ask them where they are at generally using a review gathering tool and asking customers to make the review via email or text. The simpler the process is to leave the review, the more reviews you will get. 

Now a word of caution in giving perks for reviews. Many sites have policies talking about paying customers to provide reviews, especially only good ones. As long as you are giving everyone who leaves a review the same perk regardless if the feedback was good or bad, it is okay.

These types of interactions keep your business top of mind for your customers and can help create upsell situations. Being at the top of their mind also is excellent, so they come back to you when they need your product or service again. Better yet, they may even refer one of their friends to your business if you gain enough trust.

Helps the local economy

Let’s face it, Walmart and Amazon are well known. Now, as convenient as these stores are, everyone knows about them. Having reviews that sway people to use your services over big box stores not only keeps you in business but other benefits of keeping tax dollars in the city, allowing for local job growth, and even some environmental benefits. If you haven’t, you should look at starting a “Buy local campaign, so local consumers don’t just come to you but shop at other local businesses as well. Starting a buy local campaign is as easy as talking to one of our local evangelists and/or sharing “Why Buy Local” to those in your community. 

Now What?

So you probably knew most of that. Hopefully, we shed some light on some new perspectives on why local reviews are essential or how you can gather more reviews. If you haven’t looked at tools like our free local review scan or talked to one of our team members, we encourage you to do so. At the very least, we ask you to take action by doing one thing today to help you improve the quantity or quality of the reviews to strengthen the power of local businesses in your community.

Reviews have become almost excessive in our customer experience society — part of our economic life. As a consumer, you receive several and in many cases, too many emails and ads to review and give businesses your feedback. When you are looking to buy something or traveling to a new place, generally one of the first things you will look at reviews.