Hi, David Hood here! I’m the Dallas SEO Geek.
Below is an approximate transcription of the above video
REPUTATION MANAGEMENT
I want to talk about reputation management. This is part of Dallas Local SEO. I just got a call on this and I got questions about this all the time. I have helped businesses with this and I want to give people an overview of what is involved, what you can do, what you shouldn’t do, and stuff like that. So, what I’ve done is I saw a truck from Baker Brothers Plumbing the other day and I thought I’d look them up. I didn’t know that their reviews were very poor. I just walked through my thought process.
Your Google My Business listing (GMB) is going to be the most important place for you to focus on.
You can go check out your online reviews by clicking on this right here. You can see your reviews down here and they’ve got a bunch of bad reviews. A 14 rating is pretty bad. You want to be in the ’20s and also, it’s not just about Google +. Google + is the most important but I find that Yelp is usually the second most important factor. You can figure that out by searching your business name and maybe the city you’re located in if you have to.
Yelp is even harder to post on than Google My Business because they have this thing where they hide a lot of reviews. So if you scroll down, a lot of other reviews won’t show up here. Obviously, they have bad ratings so they definitely need some help here. So 20 filters right here. These are reviewed that for whatever reason Yelp decided not to display. If you’re trying to get reviews up, a lot of the time they’re all up here and I figured out how to not get them named. But that’s too much to cover in this video.
What can you do? Let’s say you have a bunch of bad reviews or at least a few, sometimes if only have like 5 or 6 reviews, just 1 or 2 can really be exciting. No matter how good the quality of your service is, your business is not perfect and even if you were perfect, there’s still going to be people that are going to be happy. What you need to do is you need to push down those bad reviews with good reviews. Assuming that there’s not a problem in your business that is causing you to get a bunch of bad core reviews, then you just need to work out some systems that enable you to get more reviews that make it a little easier for your customers to give you reviews.
3 CATEGORIES OF REVIEWS
I split it up into 3 categories and what businesses do with regards to reviews. The first one is where most businesses are. Probably around 95% and 99% of the businesses are they leave it up to chance. They don’t know what to do. They don’t do anything. They just kind of leave it up to chance. That’s what Baker Brothers Plumbing is doing. This is a worse thing to do because you’re not trying to encourage positive reviews or even worst if you’re not doing anything and you have really poor customer service, you provide really poor service or product.
The second level is to promote your review sites to your customers. Preferably your happy customers and hope you have a lot more happy customers than not happy customers. What you can do is if you send them a receipt, you can send them a link to this. I wouldn’t send them the link to all of your pages, maybe just 1, 2, or 3 tops if you want 3 different types of reviews. This is good because it lowers the amount of work than if you just said “Hey! Give me your review, please. Did you like my service? Give me a review.” You’re sending them a link that makes it easier so they don’t have to find you. That’s one less step for them to do which means that you’re going to get a higher response rate.
There are issues with this because, with Google, you need to have an account in order to make a review and so, some people might not know how to make an account or might not want to make an account. This is going to lower the number of reviews that you get. The same is true for Yelp.
GETTING REVIEWS
If you want reviews, this is a good step to do that because it’s pretty cost-effective but it’s not the best. What you can also do is, if you don’t give out receipts, you can make business cards with a QR code which is basically a link for a Smartphone that goes directly to your review sites. You can also put what’s called a Short URL on there that says “Go Here, Tell us about your experience” that takes some rank to the Google + or the Yelp review site.
The best thing you can do is you can capture those reviews and then you go post them for a customer. This takes a lot less work for the customers because all they have to do is tell you what they think. You can even just have somebody for a couple of days or a week after services are provided. Usually, pretty soon, I would say within a few days is probably the best time. Call them up and your quality control unit can say “Hey, what did we do right?” Ask them a handful of open-ended questions and try to get them to talk about your business for a few minutes and record what they say. Then you go out there and you post those reviews on the top of the review sites. You don’t want to have a hundred reviews on Google + and no reviews elsewhere and that looks kind of fishy.
GETTING REVIEWS TO STICK
But the problem with this is “What is the best thing to do?” It’s very difficult to do without getting the reviews taken down. I spend a lot of time working through a process and even have a test client who suffered through it a little bit trying to get the reviews to stick. That’s where you put them up and they don’t get taken down. I eventually came to where I can get them to stay for pretty much all the top review sites like Yelp, Yahoo, and most importantly Google. I have a service that’s not really that expensive because it depends on how many reviews do you want that does that you for. I post them for you and I help you capture them as well if you need help with that. Some people don’t, some people have already been calling up their customers, asking and recording their feedback.
That’s great so you should probably be doing that anyway but if you’re not interested then I can help you do that. It’s not usually an issue especially if you already providing good quality customer service and even you aren’t, people are usually happy to give their opinions.
BEST WAY TO GET REVIEWS
That’s the best way because you get the most reviews. You can distribute them on major sites. If they were my customer, I would distribute them on Google +, Yelp, and probably Yahoo because Google is putting the rating in the results so when they go in there, they know what your rating is. I probably would focus on the majority of the review posting on those top three posting sites and then Google + would get the most because it’s the most important especially if you’re doing other offline marketing or if you’re doing direct mail. “Baker Brothers Plumbing Dallas” that’s what people are going to search for if they get an Ad and they’re going to say “Let me look up these people.” This is exactly what they’re going to search and this is what they’re going to see. You want to make sure especially these top few have good reviews. Having a good reputation like what I’ve talked about thus far about reputation marketing can improve the value of all your other marketing especially offline marketing where people are going to look up your business name.
If you have more questions or you need some help with your reputation, feel free to give me a call at 469-438-8153. This is David Hood, the Dallas SEO Geek, and thanks for watching this video about reputation management or reputation marketing. This is a major part of Dallas Local SEO. Thanks for listening! Have a great day.