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Getting reviews for your company online has become more and more prevalent in the past couple of years and the year 2020 is no different. Receiving online reviews should be apart of any company’s local SEO strategy. While there are many platforms to receive reviews on, we are going to list a few of the ones we deem most important, why they are important and how to get people to leave you reviews.
At some point in everyone’s digital journey we have all searched for a service, product, or company online to help us decide on whether we use or buy that specific service or product. As the digital age grows and advances in 2020, online reviews will continue to play a huge role in local SEO, converting prospects into leads, and helping legitimize to the internet that you are a reputable company.
While there are many great platforms on the internet to receive reviews on, and some better than others depending on your industry, we are going point out the top 3 we deem as most important to pretty much any business.
1. #1 on the list of best platforms to receive reviews on and the one we deem most important is none other than Google! So, if someone told me that they have NEVER used Google once to search something, I would not believe them! Google is by far (and has been for a LONG time) the most dominant search engine period! Let me throw some quick statistics at you: In 2019 almost 76% of the worlds searches were made on Google. 3.5 BILLION searches are made on Google every day. 35% of product searches start on Google. Between 40-50 percent of searches on google are for local businesses! That’s crazy to think about and makes it very obvious that Google is the dominant search platform, and why its #1 on our list.
2. # 2 on our list is Yelp. Yelp isn’t our favorite platform, but it’s company profile pages with reviews are pretty prevalent in popping up in search results. Not only do the company profiles pop up in search results, Apple maps actually uses Yelp to populate information like reviews, photos, etc. So, it’s super important your Yelp business profile is set up and optimized properly, and that you are sending people there to leave you reviews. Now, the downside to Yelp reviews is that the Yelp platform has an “algorithm” where it only displays reviews it “deems” useful to a user. What I mean by that is what we usually notice is that yelp will display the one or two bad reviews and maybe one or two good reviews and they will hide all the other reviews. In doing that it gives you a not so good star rating. So, with Yelp’s platform, while it’s not our favorite, we still heavily advise you optimize it!
1. #3 on our list is none other than Facebook business pages! Facebook sees over 1.5 billion searches every day and over 600 million users visit business pages every day! Now, I’m sure we are all familiar with Facebook business pages, but, did you know that like Yelp, the Facebook business pages is also notorious for popping up on the first page of results when you search for a business? Like Yelp, it will display a star based rating right there on the search result page for Google. These are great and quick ways for a user to see how great you guys are without even having to click the link.
So, we’ve told you our top three review platforms you should be using heavily, but now I’m sure you are asking yourself “What is the easiest way to get people to these platforms to leave a review”? Well, keep reading!
Now, in our years of local business experience, what we hear a lot about when it comes to getting reviews is people just aren’t asking for them and are expecting the end user to just do it on their own. Now, sometimes that does happen, but it is rare unfortunately. We know that if something goes wrong, people are quick to hop online to let you know about it, but when things are good, they forget to hop online and leave you a positive review. So, we ALWAYS encourage asking your customers for reviews, trust us, it’s not as awkward as you think! We believe that you would be pretty surprised at how many fans you have of your brand and how much they really do like your company, but just never thought of slapping up a good review online.
Below we are going to share with you the tools we use to make review links that you can send directly to your customer through messenger, text, or email!
Aaron is the CEO of AP Technology and is an expert on Digital Reputation.
Oklahoma City’s premier digital design agency.
