How to Get Reviews for your Local Business

For a local business to hop to the top of the Google’s search listings, you need some great reviews and citations. They are like the breathing element of a local seo just like backlinks are to the traditional seo. When a Local Business has more reviews and citations, Google consider it a plus point and give it higher rankings than its competitors. Also, it appears in the pack of local listings that Google usually displays for many of the Geo-specific search queries.

Many of you may not take it seriously but it really is a fact. In this guide, we have explained how you can get reviews for local business. In addition to that, we have also analyzed number of geo-specific search terms and found out that sites with the most number of reviews and citations usually rank on the top for nearly every search keyword around that business keyword.

Not only that, we also noticed that those local businesses have a pretty good conversion rate. Of course, customers are likely to trust a business with more positive feedback on their services.

The real challenge here being is that many businesses find it pretty difficult to get reviews and ratings. Well, if you are up to some fake or incentivised reviews for your website, just to improve your local search visibility, you might get badly screwed.

Back in 2013, Google already warned many seo companies and businesses that were red handed caught publishing fake or incentivised reviews. During the same year, the New York’s attorney general investigated multiple businesses that were using fake reviews for local seo and heavily fined them. Some were even fined as much as $100,000.

So, as a reputable seo firm, we strongly disagree from using fake reviews and citations. Here is a great tactic that can possibly encourage your customers to reviews your business on sites like Google+, Yelp and TripAdvisor. Any local business owner willing to rank higher, he must follow this simple guide for great conversions.

1: Always ask

This is yet the simplest way of getting a review. Ask your customer to leave a review as soon as they experience your service. But don’t ‘order’ them. Instead request or ask them if they are interested in leaving an honest review about your service.

However, not every website will allow to ask customers for a review, however; those who allows can yield some great results for your business.

For example, via TripAdvisor, you can ask your business customers to leave reviews. This also encourages the businesses to ask their customers and guests to leave reviews, but make sure that they are not fake or incentivized.

In simple, you need to get a review from your customer and he must not, in any way, benefit from the review. Of course, a positive review is expected against a satisfied business service!

Google also has policy where it wants businesses to encourage and keep on reminding their customers to leave reviews along with honest opinions. Paid reviews are usually banned and non-incentivized and free ones are highly encouraged.

2: Using the Customer Feedback Software

Some software like the GetFiverStars simplify the process of getting local reviews and citations for you. It simply integrates it to your internal customer feedback survey.

So, instead of you asking your customers to leave a review, this software lets you email them and asking them for a review for the business for internal use. It gives a detailed summary of Net Promoter Score with some crucial retention metrics as well.

Once your customer leaves the feedback it is automatically divided in multiple groups, usually based on their experience with your service. Those customers who have a great experience, are encouraged to also leave a review on other websites like Google+, Yelp and TripAdvisor.

In simple, the whole process is automated. Getting reviews from your customers has never been so simple. Just think, you delivered the services to 20 customers in a month, the software automatically encourages them to leave a review and it gets published on one of the three sites? Even a few citations can add a lot to rankings.

3: Utilizing Social Media

Of course, if you are running a local business it will have a social media presence, especially on Facebook. There is a huge potential from that audience as well. They are more likely to leave a review for your business. Though it is very rare that a client will like your Facebook page, still if there are a few hundred or thousands of them, always reach out to them and ask them to leave a review about your business. They can leave a feedback on the page as well, but it is better to get it on websites like Google+ and TripAdvisor.

Hope this guide was helpful! You can hire us to rank your local business!