Here at Codastar we help clients optimise their Google place pages, which makes their businesses visible in important local searches.
One of the main components of these local searches is a review section, created by users that have visited or had contact with your company, whether that be someone who’s eaten in your restaurant or used your local garage. People are able to leave reviews as well as give your company a star rating out of five:
These ratings and reviews are really important, if there are lots and lots of place results for a term such as “restaurant Camden” your business could stand out if it has a high star rating and lots of glowing reviews! It also gives people more confidence in your company if they see people are happy with the service they received.
We read earlier this week on the Search Engine Land blog that Google has recently made some changes to its place pages and the way it displays reviews. It used to show reviews from third party sites, like Yelp and TripAdvisor, but the search engine has recently scrapped this feature and now just uses its own reviews. Although this may seem like Google is ignoring other review sites too much, Matt McGee wrote on the Search Engine Land blog that the change is “probably a good thing, because the algorithm occasionally chose disastrous snippets”.
Google now puts the main focus on inviting reviews through the place page, as there’s large, red “write a review” buttons on the page. A user simply has to press one of these buttons and they can leave a review simply and easily, just in the same way they’d leave a comment on a blog.
The question is how do you get people to leave reviews?
There are a range of ways you can get your customers to leave reviews. Firstly, they need to know your company has a Google Place page, so you could ask for a review as soon as you’ve completed a job for a customer. More and more companies are asking customers to interact with them in some way online, so they’ll be used to this and it won’t be irritating to them.
You could also start to set up a monthly prize draw for customers who leave reviews to win an Amazon voucher. You can then choose a review at random at the end of the month and this could act as a nice incentive for customers to get involved.
In order for customers to leave a review they need a Google Mail account, so it might also be worth looking through your database of contact details to see who has a Google email address and then inviting them to leave a review as well.
Here at Codastar we can help you set up a Google Place page and then give you even more handy tips to get more reviews and really make the most of all of your good work.
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