Are you looking to increase the number of google reviews on your google my business? In this video, we are going to cover 6 strategies for you to increase your reviews.

Check out our youtube video where we break down these 6 strategies. Watch this video if it’s more convenient for you.

Now, first I do want to cover why it’s even important for you to be striving to get more Google reviews and the benefits that you’ll receive once when you achieve this goal. To do this, you first have to understand Google My Business’s ranking factors

Google My Business Ranking Factors

Google My Business (GMB) is essentially a local service that connects customers to businesses like yours that is within the customer’s vicinity. So location plays a humongous role in determining whether your business is recommended or not.

And there are three ranking factors that Google will use to determine your ranking on the local map pack.
The 3 factors:

• Relevance
• Location
• Prominence

Relevance

So 1 of the 3 ranking factors is relevance, meaning how relevant is your business to the person’s search inquiry. So if someone is searching for Mexican food near me, but you are a pizza restaurant, you are not going to pop up on the local Mac pack because you are not relevant to what the person is searching.

This is when keyword research and strategy play a critical role in your Google My Business. So it’s important to have your industry keywords so that people are more likely to find your GMB profile.

Location

The second-ranking factor is location. Again, what Google My Business is, it’s a local service. So this really tremendously helps with your local SEO and location is one of the biggest ranking factors because it is hyper-dependent on how close your business is to the customer.

So for instance, even if you are a 5-star business with 200 plus reviews, they will not populate your business on the local map pack if you are 40 minutes away from the customer.

So there’s no way in guaranteeing that you will be pop-up in the number 1 ranking spot because it’s always dependent on location. Even a business with three stars can pop up, number one if it is the closest to the customer search inquiry.

Prominence

However, the way that you can help increase your chances to be number 1 ranking spot, is through the third ranking factor prominence.

What prominence is essentially how well known your business is, how well trusted your business is. And the way that Google determines by determines this is by Google reviews.

So if you have a high Google Review number and rating, you’re more likely to be recommended. But it is important to note that no matter how many Google reviews, you can never guarantee that you’ll be the number one search inquiry. However, more people will be recommended to you and more will trust to do business with you because of your high ratings.

Benefits of Google Reviews

By having a higher amount of google reviews you will start to experience these benefits:

• Increase credibility and trust
• Becoming an authority in your industry
• Higher click-through rate on your website
• Higher traffic to your website
• Higher local foot traffic to your store

6 Strategies on How To Increase Google Reviews

Now that you understand the ranking factors of your GMB factors and the benefits of increasing your google reviews. Let’s talk about 6 strategies that you can start implementing today so you can start increasing your google reviews.

1. Always ask for a review after completing a service

This may be obvious but many business owners actually don’t ask for reviews. You may assume that people will go ahead and leave a review out of their own will, but that’s not the reality of the situation.

It’s not that people don’t want to leave you a review. It’s more because we are forgetful and busy people. People need to be reminded and directed as to where they should leave their reviews.

There 2 different ways you can approach a review:

• 1. Ask right away after they purchased your service/product. This is the perfect time to ask because you’re already on top of mind and your customer may be happy with the service/product they purchased from you. So they’ll be more than happy to leave a google review
• 2. Wait anytime after 4 weeks to 5 months (depending on your industry). This option is usually best when you are looking for more of a results-driven type of review. For example, “This product helps me achieve X results in just X weeks. I can’t believe how much X% I’ve grown.” These types of reviews are stronger than an average review explaining the like the product.

If you’re considering doing option 2 then it’s important to be on top of checking in with your client. You do not want it to be too long and the client may have forgotten their experience. I recommend doing a quick check-in and even giving a guide on what you’re looking for.

2. Generate a Shorten Review Link

This builds on the first point where people need to be directed to where to leave the review.

Do not just ask them to leave a Google Review on Google. What you want to do is ask and send a link for their convenience.

Here’s How to Generate a Short Link:

Go to your GMB profile and click on “Get More Reviews” and you’ll get a shortened link

3. Have an email template to request reviews

Any small business owner knows that systemizing is the best way to stay consistent and achieve results. Not everyone you ask will leave a google review so it’s important for you to ask anyway to increase your chances. So I want you to create an email template that is ready to send to your clients.

Here’s an email template you can use if you don’t have one already.

Hi [CLIENT NAME],
Thanks for purchasing/booking [PRODUCT OR SERVICE] with us! It was a pleasure to serve you.
As a valued customer, we’d like to ensure you’re satisfied with your purchase. We’d love to hear about your experience with [PRODUCT OR SERVICE]. If you could take a few minutes to leave us a review on Google [LINK], we’d greatly appreciate it!
To write your review, just click the link below and let us know your feedback!

If you have email software you can even automate this when your client completes payment.

4. Showcase Your reviews on your website! And Have A Call To Action to Leave A Review

After all your hard work of capturing reviews, I want you to feature your google reviews on your website! Featuring reviews on your website can be another important selling point for someone to do business with you and to trust in your services.

I also want you to have a call to action button asking people to leave you a review.

A great strategy is to feature some google reviews on your homepage and then have a dedicated review page featuring all your reviews with a CTA button requesting to leave a review.

By doing this, you’re not only building your authority and trust but also helping your website with local SEO if you’re using a Google Review plugin.

5. Create a review landing page

A review landing page is a creative way to direct customers on where to leave you a review. This is perfect if you’re trying to have a customer leave a review on multiple platforms as well.

For instance for realtors, it may be important for people to leave you a review on Realtor.com, Zillow, and GMB. So this is when having a review landing page would be helpful because all the links would be available to them for their convenience.

Your review landing page can also be included in your email template for people to be directed to where to leave the review. If you’d have a preference on which one to leave a review on then I’d instruct that in the email.

6. Reply to ALL your google reviews EVEN your bad reviews

This may be again obvious, but there are many businesses that do not reply to their reviews at all.

By replying to reviews, you can make a great impression on your visitors and increase their trust to do business with you. According to Google customers view businesses that reply to views as 1.7x more trustworthy than businesses than don’t.

When you do reply, what you don’t want to do is to copy and paste the same reply to every review. That sounds robotic and ungenuine. Instead, it’s great to add some personalization to the review by their name, and what they purchased.

Another tip is when you do reply to add some keywords like what they purchased aka your services/ products, location, and business name. Don’t force it. It should come off natural. You can make a great impression on your visitors and increase your local SEO by including keywords in your reply

Yes, even reply to the bad reviews. Trust me, it looks far better for you to reply than when you don’t. Also, don’t be unprofessional when replying to the review. You don’t want to give future customers a bad impression. Reply with the intention to problem solve. You could say something like this

“Hi Name, we are sorry to hear about your experience when purchasing x service/product. Your dissatisfaction is not something we take lightly. Please call us at (XXX)-XXX-XXXX so that we can resolve this issue together.”

You will come off much more respected than someone who starts getting in an online fight with their customers.

BONUS TIP: Offer a Reward/ Discount

I’d recommend doing this strategy last and especially if you are in great need to start generating some reviews. You typically first want to ask people to leave a review without some type of incentive. But sometimes incentives are the way people are motivated to do things. I would offer a small discount for them to leave a review. If you want a video review then the incentive must be quite bigger.

Final Thoughts

These are my 7 strategies for you to start increasing your Google Reviews for your GMB profile so that you can start ranking higher on the local map pack. Remember there’s no way to guarantee you will always be in the number 1 ranking spot. But the best way to increase your chances in the Number 1 spot is by increasing your prominence through Google Reviews.