Asking your satisfied customers to review your business on Google My Business makes extra-good business sense. Especially since roughly 90 percent of potential customers of all kinds of goods and services do online research prior to engaging with a given company. And while it’s not realistic for every business to be able to exact a favor from every happy customer – let alone get those satisfied clients or customers to say something nice on Google My Business – wherever it’s feasible to do so, you should make the effort to help amplify your online review buzz.
There’s no doubting the power of online reviews, and there are many review sites and platforms where satisfied and dissatisfied customers alike can sound off about nearly any type of business offering goods and services. Many people who search online reviews are also doing a lot of online shopping and ordering, so getting them signed up using their email addresses is a good way to ensure that you can send them a quick email asking them for a Google My business review, perhaps even in exchange for something like a 10% off coupon on goods or services as an incentive.
Here’s an example anecdote given regarding the Google review-request process, provided by WebWorks of KC:
“After completing a project at WebWorks of KC, we send a simple thank you follow-up email to clients. After thanking new clients, we wrap up the email by a asking for a review on our Google My Business listing.
With this request, we send a direct link to the form for them to leave a review – https://www.webworksofkc.com/review.
As you see (if you click), this URL automatically loads the Google My Business review form so clients can easily leave their review of WebWorks of KC. This direct link means there is no searching, frustration or abandonment of the review mid-process when the client starts to leave a review.”
And, although creating a universal direct link to the Google My Business review box is a little bit of a process, it’s well worth the effort. The second hyperlink in this article will lead you to exactly how you can create one.
Google My Business Rules
Google is of course the most-used search engine on the Web, and as such literally “rules the internet”. This is why focusing on Google My Business as the review platform of choice when it comes to engaging your customers to give their feedback will carry the most weight.
Fact: Nearly 65 percent of all internet searches are done through Google. When a potential customer searches for your business using the Google search engine, your average ratings on Google My Business are displayed on the search engine results page (SERP) with a link so the searcher can read all your Google My Business reviews, and make their shopping decision accordingly.
Here is an example of what a Google reviews page looks like when searching a business:
The Power of Outstanding Customer Reviews
For any business owner who has any lingering doubts about the power of online reviews, the statistics are all over the Web that back up claims that online reviews impact business positively or negatively, depending on a given company’s “aggregate satisfaction level” among their customer base.
Another fact: 92% of consumers now read online reviews, which means people find online reviews to be at least as credible as personal recommendations from friends and family. Most people like having the extra corroboration of both online reviews and word of mouth recommendations. Either way, it’s an undeniably powerful tool, and you don’t want to end up on the downside of customer reviews!
