How to Get More Google Reviews

In this article you’ll learn why Google reviews are so important for your business marketing and how to get more good Google reviews using a marketing technique called SCARCITY.

Why Google Reviews Matter

Ideally, you have leads coming in from multiple places, like facebook, mailed ads, personal referrals, and organic Google searches. It’s the be everywhere marketing plan. They are all powerful, but what converts best? What will get customers to take actions and either call, come into your store, or buy your products online? Obviously personal referrals are probably the highest converting leads.

If you’re looking for a good mechanic to fix your car, who do you call? Personally, I ask around. I ask friends, family, and neighbors to see who they used. What was their experience. Then I’ll usually doing a little more digging and look at their website and look for testimonials and more importantly, online reviews to see what other people are saying.

If that mechanic has a lot of good reviews, there’s a higher probability that I’ll call that business. And conversely, if they have quite a few negative reviews I’ll go to Google and search for other mechanics near me and look at their reviews. This is where online reviews can really help your business get more customers or even allow you to charge more.

Google Traffic and SEO

Another important aspect of online reviews is that it actually drives traffic to your website. Online Google reviews equate to about 10% of a website’s SEO or Search Engine Optimization. What this means is that the more reviews you have the easier it is to get ranked on the first page or top spots on Google.

Now I’m not talking about testimonials on your website or blog (unless those are linked to the actual source from a plug-in). Testimonials are nice to have, but those are added to a website manually and can be manipulated, whereas true online reviews are from the customer and carry more weight, which is why Google puts an SEO value on them.

How To Get More 'Good' Google Reviews

 So what’s the trick to getting more good reviews? Typically, customers are more likely to leave a bad review. If you’re a restaurant owner and someone has bad service one day, they might jump on Google and leave a bad review. There’s nothing you can do about that unless you cut them off at the pass first and offer to fix whatever it was that went wrong.

But if you have some bad reviews you can’t delete them. All you can do is get a lot more good reviews. The best way to do this is to email your customers or clients and ask for an honest review. Hopefully you are using an email management system and keep your clients on a list. It’s truly a powerful asset and one of the things companies look for when acquiring other companies. For example, Facebook could have easily just recreated Instagram and launched their own version of it, but by acquiring Instagram, they had instant access to that client base and list of users along with their email addresses.

But you can’t ask for a good review. That’ not ethical. You can ask for an honest review though. Now here’s where this thing called scarcity comes in to play and it’s very powerful.

What you do is email your clients and ask them for an honest review and in exchange you’ll give them something in return. Maybe it’s a free dessert if you own a restaurant, or a free set of wipers if you own an oil change shop, or 50% off a spring HVAC tune up if you own an HVAC company. But the key is you have to put a deadline on it or have only so many available.

You want to offer something of high perceived value that costs you very little. For example, there’s a woman in Wisconsin who owns a dance studio and what she did was to email the parents and ask for an honest review. If they could do that in the next three days, they would get a free pair of tights for their daughter. The tights cost her maybe $6 and she sold them for $15-20. So, it was a good incentive. She had about 50 google reviews in about 24 hours.

Take Action and Make it Easy For Your Customers

Imagine what that can do for your business on just SEO alone, not to mention the reciprocity you get from those reviews. Now the great thing about this technique is you can be selective. Email your best clients. Reach out to past clients that you know were happy with your service and ask for a review.

Make it easy. Send the Google link or Facebook link so all they have to do is just click and write a review. Don’t forget to add a reason for them to take action. Give them something they want and put a deadline on the ability to get it.

That’s how to use scarcity in your marketing to get more online reviews which ultimately will drive more traffic to your website (click here for 5 key steps to a better website) and give you great reciprocity by showing prospects that you live up to your big promise.

Please leave me a comment below and let me know what you do to get reviews for your business.

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