How to get reviews

 

Have an intentional review acquisition process in place because it’s an essential element of success for your local search strategy.

Knowing the importance of customer reviews, you might be tempted to blast all your customers at once, asking them to leave reviews. Or worse, you might consider buying your way to the top with fake reviews from Fiverr or similar sites. These techniques might lead to success in the short term but dramatic pain in the long term. Google and other review platforms are getting better at cracking down on this behavior. This is pretty trivial to spot algorithmically.

Instead, a steady drip of reviews will lead to sustained long-term success. Depending on your industry, this could be a handful per month or a handful per week.

Getting Yelp reviews

Getting Yelp reviews can be challenging, thanks to Yelp’s overaggressive review filter and historically asinine policy on review solicitation. You’re not supposed to ask people to leave reviews on Yelp, so your best bet is to try and get these organically.

Under no circumstances should you offer an incentive to leave a review on Yelp — or any other platform, for that matter. This is a violation that will get you blocklisted. If the incentive is not disclosed, it may violate United States FTC guidelines or similar laws in other countries.

Responding to reviews

No matter how great your business is, you’ll get a negative review at some point. Many sites, including Google and Yelp, allow you to respond to that bad review as a business owner. The critical thing to remember is that the real audience for that response is not this particular customer but the dozens or hundreds of prospective customers who read your response, evaluate your empathy for the reviewer and attempt to resolve the complaint.

What’s next for reviews

The reality is that reviews are a far more democratic ranking signal than inbound links or even citations. They more accurately reflect the popularity of a business than either of these prominent local ranking factors.

Half of the consumers asked by a local business for a review have left one. This is an exponentially higher fraction than the number of consumers who operate websites, let alone have given a local business a link from those websites!

While Google has a long road ahead in fighting spam, it will shut down the most egregious spammers within the next few years. And as long as consumers continue to make decisions at least partially based on reviews, they’ll be a fixture in local search results (and rankings) for years to come.

Behavioral signals

As one of the most pervasive companies, Google has as much data about our behavior as any company in human history. Only Google has a full picture of user behavior, so it’s the blackest of Google’s many algorithmic black boxes. But experts in the Local Search Ranking Factors survey have pegged these signals in the top eight most crucial factors and competitive difference-makers.

But Google’s longstanding mission in local search has been to reflect the real world as accurately as possible online. A reflection based on real-world human beings will be far more accurate than one based on data from digital-world webpages and robots. It stands to reason that as Google can gather more real-world behavioral data, it will grow in algorithmic importance for rankings.

Let’s look at some of the behavioral data that Google is likely using to inform local rankings and search, from most basic to most advanced.

Location of searcher

Google has always been very good at detecting location on mobile phones. Now, they are scarily good even for desktop searches. And while it’s hard to describe something as sophisticated as detecting a user’s location as “basic,” the algorithmic outcome of that location is relatively straightforward.

The distance of a business from the location where a search is performed influences how well it ranks for those searches. All other factors being equal, the closer the company is to the point of search, the higher it will rank.

Beyond numeric rankings, the radius of businesses Google considers proximally relevant varies by category. High-frequency brick-and-mortar businesses like coffee shops have a tighter radius of relevance. Low-frequency or service-area businesses like golf courses or roofing companies have a wider radius.

Suppose your business lies outside this relevancy radius from the search locations of large groups of your customers. In that case, you will have a tough time attracting those customers via Google.

Branded search volume

In a way, branded searches are a kind of citation. If corroborated by information in Google’s business database, they’re an expression of interest in that business — if not an out-and-out endorsement. While branded searches are a fundamental indicator of the awareness or popularity of a company, most internet users perform these regularly, making them one of the most democratic ranking signals.

Beyond just the number of times a brand name is searched (and searched by people in a given geographic area), the context of those brand names is also important. Adjacent keywords used in those searches that rank for future unbranded searches for those keywords.

Generally, branded searches favor established businesses over new ones and companies that take a holistic marketing approach, so including offline. They’re one of Google’s best heuristics for word-of-mouth as it tries to build its reflection of the offline world.