One Simple Trick for Getting More (and Better) Google My Business Reviews
Today I am going to give away one of our internal secrets that we use all the time, which is simply how to get more and better Google My Business reviews. So for those of you who don’t know, Google My Business is an incredibly important part of your marketing strategy. If it’s not, it should be. Google My Business is simply known as often the map pack or local listings. So if you search for optometrist in your city, so we’re based in Fort Collins, Colorado. If you search for optometrist in Fort Collins, inevitably you see several ads right at the top, but then you see the map pack. This lists usually three, at a time of this recording, it’s three, but it can be anywhere from one to seven different local listings. It’ll show a little photo, a click to call button, a click to at the website button. Very importantly, it shows your reviews. And it shows the number of reviews and the average rating from one to five stars.
Get More Reviews for Your Google My Business Listing
These reviews are a very, very important part of the decision making process for most consumers. People who are going to visit your practice look reviews, especially if they’re unfamiliar with you or, or perhaps you don’t come recommended. They’re just doing a cold search to try and find an optometrist. Getting good reviews should be a big part of what you actually do and what you focus on. So let me tell you the number one trick that we use to actually help them get better reviews. And in order to do that, let me tell you a story.
So we have a client who we are working with. This has been an outstanding project in the sense that we’ve already increased their overall number of reviews and review rating very positively. And so here’s what was going on is they had an email follow up process in place so that whenever someone visited their office, within a day or two, those people would receive a follow up email. This is something I highly, highly recommend. It would ask for a review and the software they were using, I believe it was demand force, but it doesn’t really matter. You can use whatever software you want for this project. Now here’s the problem is that that email that went out asked for a review, it would send them to demand force to leave a review.If you actually looked at their reviews on demand force in their own little ecosystem, they had an average of five star reviews and they had 800 reviews. I mean, something just bonkers and they were all very, very good, but here’s the problem is when you searched in Google for either their brand name or for optometrist in the city, in which they were located their reviews related to demand force. All their demand force reviews did not show up what showed up were all their Google reviews.
Now the problem for them was all of their customers who were doing them a favor, leaving them these five star reviews. All those reviews were being walled off in this little ecosystem in demand force. Meanwhile, all the negative reviews, the people who, for whatever reason had an issue, and every business has people who have issues. They don’t like the doctors, maybe, your front desk staff are having a bad day, who knows? Right. But at the end of the day, all these negative reviews were being published on Google.
At the time we started with them, they had a very low 4.2 star rating on Google because the only people who would go to Google were people who had a problem. Who were mad at the company and wanted to take their complaint public by leaving a negative review. We said, okay, this has to stop, we have a problem.
Generating Positive Google Reviews
Here’s what we did. The first thing we did is we took a look at demand force and we said, okay, this email that goes out to everyone, we need to make sure that those reviews aren’t getting published on demand force, especially the good ones. So we created a little webpage with their logo on it, that just had two options. It has a thumb up and a thumb down.
It says, we would really appreciate it if you left us a review in the email. They click on the the link and it sends them to this page with a thumb up or a thumb down. If they hit the thumb up right, it says, everything in my visit was really good. We send them straight to Google. There’s a way you can actually copy the review link from Google. So we’re giving people a chance to say, yes, I had a positive experience. If we do that, we send them right to Google where it’s real easy for anyone with a Gmail account (which is many people nowadays) to leave a review. So super, super helpful. Here’s where the magic happens because that’s easy to do. It’s easy to update, right. A link and just send them to Google.
Dealing with Negative Reviews (keep them off your profile and actually resolve them)
So what happens if you hit the thumbs down icon? Well, we realized that we wanted to make sure that the reviews that were actually going to Google were positive, right? They are actually the ones that we wanted to show there.
We wanted a chance to address any negative issues that were happening before they went public.
So when you hit the thumbs down arrow on this web page, it takes you to a complaint form that you can fill out and it goes directly to the front desk staff so they can resolve it.
Recap of How to Get More Google Reviews and What to do with Positive and Negative Reviews
What we did is instead of, sending people to a generic review page, we send them to, what we call a landing page with a thumb up and thumb down. Thumbs up and they go straight to Google and we have gotten lots of five star reviews from that. Thumbs down, if they have an issue, well, that’s fine. They have an issue we take them to a complaint form where they get a chance to air their grievances privately. On a form that goes directly to the doctors without necessarily needing to publish. Now, of course, someone can still go out and publish a negative review. We’re not stopping anyone from doing that. We are just sort of nudging them to say, hey, if you have a problem, we’d really appreciate it you let us make it right. Give us a chance to make it right. Don’t just leave a negative review. So far, we’ve generated lots of reviews for them. We’ve increased their average. We’ve only been live with this less than a month. We’ve increased their average significantly and things are looking extremely up for them.
In fact, any optometry practice optical, I highly recommend using this. This is one of the little hacks that we use to really help get more positive reviews. I promise you if you adopt this strategy. If you send those follow up emails, send the good reviews to Google, send the bad reviews to a complaint form and try and funnel those that you will not only get a lot more reviews, but you will get an overall higher average of reviews in star rating. This is the optometry marketing podcast. That’s a trick that we use among many others to help optometry practices grow. I hope it’s helpful to you. If you’d like to learn more about how we do what we do to help optometry practices and opticals grow, visit us at optometrymarketing.com. That’s just optometry marketing.com. That’s our domain. Come find a us, learn more about us, reach out to us.
Schedule a free 45 minute call. On this call, I know 45 minutes. We’re busy. It’s a lot of time, but here’s the thing. If you fill out the form online, we’re gonna learn a lot about your business. And we’re actually gonna go through and do a bunch of research to learn about your company. We’re gonna look at your organic rankings. We’re gonna look at your Google local listings. We’re gonna evaluate your ad. We’re going to dig in really deep and we’re gonna help you put together a strategy and you don’t even have to work with us. It’s free, but we’re gonna help you put together strategy to grow your business. So if you wanna learn more about growing your optometry practice, visit us at optometrymarketing.com. We’d love to help you grow your practice. In the meantime, if you implement this simple trick, I can virtually guarantee that you’re going to get more positive five star reviews than you have ever gotten before. So with that, this is Tyler. You are listening to the optometry marketing.com podcast, and I will talk to you soon.