How to get more reviews?
Here is how can you help your clients get more online reviews:
- Make sure their listings are accurate. When customers search a business, it should be easy to find. Don’t give customers any obstacles to leaving a review—search, find, write. We, of course, offer some top notch listing services that are key to getting any business found online.
- Set up profiles on multiple review sites. If customers can’t find a business, they definitely won’t be leaving reviews, so make sure your local business clients are listed on a variety of review sites. The ideal list varies by industry, but Yelp, Facebook and Google are some of the basics for every industry. Picking and choosing review sites can be dangerous—you can’t anticipate where consumers will search for the information. Make sure consumers can find reviews where they are looking, not just where you think they should be. Usually it doesn’t take long to set up profiles on these directory sites, so err on the side of making too many.
- Ask. This is like the love story everyone knows, where two best friends fall in love and say things like “It was there all along, we just never knew it.” So although painfully obvious (especially for those of us forced to sit through the rom com), local businesses who ask for reviews are much more likely to get them. No matter how much they love a business, customers are busy.
- Make customers aware. Putting up visible suggestions in the physical business is a good reminder for customers. A sticker in the window that says “Review us on Yelp,” a card you can hand to people paying at the till or tent cards on the table. A gentle reminder is always better than a nagging pest.
- Use automated software. Send reminders to customers via email and take the legwork out of the business’s court. Doing this regularly will help maintain a trickle of reviews, which makes a business more trustworthy than surges every few months. Vendasta has built some of the best review generating software tools on the market—skip to the tools and resources section to get the link.