Customer reviews are a fundamental part of your local marketing efforts and online reputation. If you can get enough good ones, they can go a long ways. A slew of good reviews can boost both your local search ranking as well as click-through rate (CTR), which should ultimately lead to converting more customers.
90% of consumers say an online review is as important as a personal recommendation while 72% say that positive reviews make them trust a local business more.
Below is a breakdown of some of the things that our team, and other industry experts, have found to be effective tactics in building high-value customer reviews for your business.
Tips on Building Customer Reviews (in no particular order)
Politely askYou should coach your staff to notice when you have a highly satisfied customer, and to politely ask, “Would you be willing to leave us a review?” If you have the customer’s email, personally send them a link (see... [Read Full Article]
What good is a testimonial if the person giving it doesn't know what to talk about? SMS, email, or face-to-face, these can help get the ball rolling. [Read Full Article]
EZlocal contributors help reveal hot spots to fellow locals and all the while earn cool rewards. That's the concept behind EZlocal's growing Contributor Program - the only reward-based program of its kind. [Read Full Article]
When an authority site like Yelp rolls out a new feature to add video content to reviews, small businesses and marketers should take note. [Read Full Article]
Outside of Yelp (whose review snippets were removed from Google) and native Google+ Local reviews, here are the top third-party sources for dentist reviews in the US. [Read Full Article]
Having good quality reviews on your Google+ Local page (i.e., Place page) not only influences your ability to convert prospective customers, but can affect your local search ranking. Most customers won’t know to leave you a Google Places review, so it is important to promote or actively encourage customers to give honest reviews. [Read Full Article]
Customer reviews are a fundamental part of your local marketing efforts and online reputation. If you can get enough good ones, they can go a long ways. A slew of good reviews can boost both your local search ranking as well as click-through rate (CTR), which should ultimately lead to converting more customers.
A Local Consumer Review Survey (2012) showed that approximately 72% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations, while 52% said that positive online reviews make them more likely to use a local business.
But building customer reviews, and doing it ‘the right way’, especially on Google (with all of their flip-flops and recent updates) has been a dizzying process for SMBs.... [Read Full Article]
Mike Blumenthal blogged last month on the topic of becoming a Top Reviewer (as a business page) in Google Plus Local. Notably, there appears to be an opportunity for a business, as a Google+ page, to achieve this distinction. But how exactly do you (as a business) become a Google+ Top Reviewer?
As you may have noticed, Google Plus ranks review content based on who is leaving the review and what other users think of the review (most useful -> least useful). More or less, it’s an effort to weed out spammy or fake reviews and establish a hierarchy for everything in between. There’s also anecdotal evidence to suggest that reviews from... [Read Full Article]
