Local SEO Video: Online Reputation Management

Is your Business’s Online Reputation Helping or Killing Your Business’s Growth?

 

 

Here is a Local SEO video that I created a few months ago on how to manage your online reputation management as a small business. If you are not monitoring your online brand, this could be bad for your business, especially when it comes to getting new customers. This video explains why.

 

This SEO video also explains how to get online reviews for your business and why customer reviews and testimonials online are super important. This video also explains where to get online reviews to increase CTR and Customer Acquisition. Lastly, it provides some insights on more Advanced Review Management Strategies. Here is the video and transcribed version, enjoy!

 

Local SEO Video Transcription

 

Video Transcript Start

What’s up everyone!

 

My name is Lamar and I’m the founder of ‘Organic Clicks; a local SEO company based out of Charlotte North Carolina. This is local episode seven and we’re going to discuss reputation management for local businesses. And we’re gonna break it down into four sections.

 

So, we’re gonna talk about why and where to get online reviews. We’re gonna discuss how to get online reviews. We’re also gonna discuss review management. So, when a customer responds whether it’s good or bad, how to respond to those reviews. And then lastly, I will discuss some advanced review management strategies.

 

A lot of clients come to us and the biggest concern they have is not just from a local just SEO standpoint. But some of their concerns come from their reputation online. And sometimes we’ll see where you search for their brand and all you see is these review platforms with a tonof bad reviews on them. Or there’s an article in the top results for their branded keywords with just a lot of bad content, or bad feedback from customers.

 

And that’s a big concern because if you have a lot of bad reviews, what happens is you lose a lot of business to your competitors who are thriving with positive reviews. So it’s very important to provide great service. I always tell them that; provide great service to make sure that positive reviews follow that. Whether you ask them or whether you try to purposely get more reviews online. But it’s really important to just provide great service. Once you do that, you’ll naturally get some positive reviews.

 

Alright, so let’s go ahead and jump right into it. So why and where to get online reviews. So we’ll discuss just the why aspect of it. And part of that is 81% of consumers go online before making a buying decision. And that’s super important to understand because that’s a high number.

 

So if you have a ton of bad reviews online, and you got 81 percent consumers looking for your local services, you’re going to lose out on a lot of opportunity, and you don’t want that to happen. So that’s the biggest why in itself. So if you need more whys behind that, so look at the images on the right here. 72 percent of consumers trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation. I mean that’s pretty high number.

 

 

 

So you wanna make sure that you have those positive reviews because a lot of people are making their decisions based on that; on what other people are saying. 68 percent of consumers go to social network sites to read product reviews.

 

And whether it’s product reviews, or local reviews, or whatever channel or platform you’re on or in, you wanna make sure that even not only on your main local sites, but even your social media sites. They’re getting reviews. And I’ll go into that more in depth here in a second. But having reviews across several platforms; positive reviews that is, is super important.

 

And then lastly, this is probably the most profound. 90 percent of consumers say that positive online reviews influenced their buying decisions. So if I’m left up to 90 percent, then I need to make sure that I’m getting… I’m providing great service, and consumers are leaving positive reviews because I don’t wanna miss out as a business owner.

 

And I know if you’re a business owner watching this, you don’t wanna miss out on a potential new customer because you have bad reviews online, and those are not being taken care of.

 

And then secondly is just from a local SEO local marketing standpoint. If you look at the pie graph at the bottom here, you see that reviews is about 13 percent of the pie. So you wanna make sure that reviews is a big part of your strategy.

 

 

 

And a lot of statistics show that in 2017, reviews are highly valued; positive reviews are highly valued. And now in today’s age, you see a lot of businesses putting a huge focus on getting positive reviews online. And that’s the how part and we’ll discuss that in a minute. But quickly I wanna show you just from a review standpoint how impactful getting reviews are.

 

So just going over to Google here for a second and I’ll search Dentist Ballantyne North Carolina. And one of these are well use our clients, Friendly Dental. And if you look in this local pack here, the top three results are showing. And if you look at each one from top to bottom, you’ll see that the top one has 443 reviews, the second one has 128, and then Friendly has 106.

 

 

 

 

So you can see a descending order here. Not to say that all profiles… Google map profiles are gonna rank this way based on descending order and how many reviews you have. But this is a good indication that Google is valuing reviews.

 

I mean you see the more reviews that you have here, the higher your ranking. But there’s other correlations and factors from a local SEO standpoint that can rank you higher in this local pack. But reviews do play a huge part of it.

 

So Google, Yelp, and Facebook. Those are some of the major players for reviews. And the reason why is because when you go online if you search for your brand today, you’ll see that your Google profile shows up, you’ll see that Yelp shows up, and Facebook. These are very consistent across the board.

 

So you wanna make sure that you are getting positive reviews on these platforms. There’s obviously other niche specific options; Home Advisor, Health Grades. And then there’s many others where you maybe you have a more personal profile you can do reviews on. But you wanna make sure you’re getting reviews on these platforms because they show up for your brand specifically.

 

And just real quick just looking at one of our other clients. So just even a non-brand term such as “massage Kenilworth Charlotte”. You’ll see that for this client, Day Break Massage they… if you scroll down, look Yelp’s up there, Facebook’s up there, and some other review platforms.

 

 

 

 

But these are up there and you’ll see that this is very consistent with a lot of businesses. And this is a non-brand term. So if we search for their brand, Day Break Massage, it’s gonna be the same thing. You’re gonna see as I pull it up right now. So Day Break Massage Charlotte. And when you search that you see you get their website of course, but look Yelp, Facebook. I mean it’s very consistent.

 

So and it’s across the board for most brands and businesses. So getting reviews there, should be a top priority, and then filtering those down as you get a lot of reviews there.

 

All right, so how to get online reviews is the next step and that’s always the hardest part for most businesses. The first step you need to take is just asking. They say you can’t close a sale if you don’t ask for it. So it’s the same concept here. You gotta ask patients or customers; especially the ones that are happy, ask them for review.

 

The percentages here are less than 5 percent. But I’d rather have some percentage of a chance than zero. So asking is super important.

 

Website reviews; so you can add a page on your website, and you can… if you have a WordPress site, you use WP customer reviews. That’s a great plug-in with great reviews on it. What it will do is it will allow visitors to leave content, or testimonials, or reviews on that page.

 

And of course you wanna have some moderation to it. But you wanna let reviews whether good or bad go on this page because it will help you see some issues within your business. And you can continue to evolve and fix those issues.

 

But the good thing about this user generated content through your testimonial page, it allows consumers to leave reviews. It will evolve as a lot of keywords, a lot of local relevant keywords. And this could be valuable to your business in terms of ranking and improving its authority through this testimonial page.

 

Thirdly, is just making it easy in your newsletters, emails, reminders, text reminders; whatever the case may be. If you have a review form with custom links and I’ll explain that in a second. But put your review options in their face; Facebook, Yelp, Google, your Google profile page. And constantly send them reminders. Like leave us a review especially your existing customers. If they’re continuing to come back and enjoy your services, and why not get a review from them.

 

So let’s talk about review form with custom links, okay.

 

So I don’t know if you’ve heard of White Spark. But it’s a great local SEO service. And it’s an overall great tool to use to increase your local SEO impact for your business. So here’s a review handout generator.

 

So essentially what this is is it allows you to add information within this tool. And this is a free tool by the way. And as I scroll down, you can see, you can add your city information, your custom. You sign in to your gmail account, or your Google Plus account, and so forth.

 

And what it does is it creates a form that really allows them to see how to leave a review on your social media platforms that are pretty important. So as customers come into your store, or your business, or you’re in front of them; whatever the case may be. You can hand them this form and it makes it easier for them to just follow directions, simple steps, and go home and actually leave a review.

 

This is helpful because it’s something they can take away with them and leave whether they put on the table or on the fridge, at least they can see it as a reminder. That’s an okay I need to leave a review there. They’re really good. So this forum is free and I would recommend using it.

 

To create a custom link for your say Google my business profile. Because if you use Google’s… your Google my business custom link generator through actual Google this does take some technical savvy, and it may take more time.

 

You can literally do it a White Spark again and you’ll see the link up here. And they have a quick review generator link tool for you for free again, and it creates a custom link within seconds.

 

So if I go scroll down, I typed in my business name, and you’ll see the map come up, and there you go. There’s the review link and it’s a short snippet. In your emails, whatever the case may be if you wanna leave a short snippet instead of any long custom URLs, you may have to make this tool work as it will do the trick.

 

 

Whitespark Review Link Custom Short-code Generator

 

Next is just online review software. So these type of softwares have become very popular lately. Because again local reviews has they become 13 percent of the overall ranking factor for local businesses. So if you look at the image on the right, that’s your Google my business profile and that’s where you want to get your review. So I’ve got to mention that, but on the White Spark or Google review generator this is where you would get your review.

 

All right so back to online review software. So some popular ones out there are Bird Eye, My Social Practice. You’re gonna see these tools have a monthly subscription of anywhere between 50 to 150 bucks a month. But when I say it’s well worth it, it’s well worth it.

 

If you ask a patient for review, less than five percent chance they’re gonna leave it. If you use this software, it’s almost a 40 percent chance, and we’ve seen it. We’re using some of these tools now, and they’ve really increased the amount of reviews that a business will have online.

 

So we’ve had a business increased their reviews by or they went from zero to 50 within a month and that’s not normal. But it’s good to get real customer reviews. They’re actually leaving the reviews online and it’s just because we’re making it more accessible to them.

 

So let’s talk about the online review software. So we’re actually ‘Organic Clicks’ for creating our own review software. And it’s gonna be called ‘Organic Reviews’; a good twist to that. So here’s just a quick snippet of how this will work, and how it will look, and so forth.

 

We still got a lot of a lot of functionality to add to this software, but the plan is for it to launch in 2018. But first section is just dashboard. It just really shows okay an overview of how you’re stacking up against your competition, the industry, how many reviews you have overtime, or average ratings; just a whole bunch of data here just for you to analyze and say, “Okay are we improving in our reviews online?”

 

 

 

 

The next section is just a section where you see just the aggregate review total or actually reviews for every review that you get online and you’ll see it; the actual review itself. So you just have a list of all the reviews you’ve ever gotten here, and you can filter that by a certain time frame.

 

From a campaign standpoint. This is really just saying, “Okay how many people have we asked for a review?”

 

So you can see if the execution part is being done. And real quick just explaining this. So how the review softwares work is you use it, utilize the review software. And when you enter the customer’s phone number or email in the software, it will send them a text message, and they can click on the link within the text message.

 

And when they click on the link, it directs them to your profile page for your Google, Facebook, or Yelp profile. And immediately the review box pops up. And they can click post, they can click… they can leave a small comment and then click post.

 

And the cool thing is it connects directly to their profiles because they’re logged in on their phones. And it goes directly to your profile for them to leave a review. And they can do this within 20 seconds. And that’s why you see the huge increase in reviews with these softwares because they can literally do it immediately.

 

They don’t have to go home and wait, they can do it right in front of you, you can ask them while that’s on their mind and they’ve had a good experience. But it’s so cool to see these features in. And this section just shows you okay how you’re interacting with your customers when asking for review.

 

From a blog standpoint this is just general blog information from ‘Organic Clicks’. It just really helps you with your local strategies overall outside of reviews. This is a report section. So this will just really give you insights on how many people are opening, clicking, how many you sent, click-through rate, open rate. Just give you details and there’s other tabs here. But it just gives you a lot of information just to see how well you’re doing with getting reviews online.

 

 

 

 

This is the part I’m most excited about with this softwares. That’s the local keyword tracker. And what you’ll see here is that most of the other tools that I mentioned earlier; the review tools, they don’t have this feature. And the goal for this feature is really to see by keyword, at a keyword level by location how you’re ranking.

 

And we wanna see the correlations with how many reviews you get online, and how well you’re ranking in the local pack in Google mobile, or just Google search results itself. So this is helpful just to overall see okay, how are we improving from a keyword standpoint in our rankings?

 

And obviously there’s a ton of a whole bunch of local SEO factors that you have to execute as well. But reviews is a part of it, so this will help you see how you’re trending.

 

 

 

All right next is review management, okay. So this is how you respond to customers that leave reviews. So if a good review is left, you do wanna respond to the good reviews because responding, you wanna respond with gratitude. And it shows positive reinforcement.

 

You wanna… you got an audience looking at your business so you want to show that you care about them and you’re happy that they responded and they’ll see you’re happy that they responded. And the other aspect of that is if the audience is watching and you’re responding, you’re taking the time to do that, you also make the customers feel happy.

 

Like you make them feel good about their situation or the services that you provided. And then by you responding that may trigger them you know telling a friend. So you wanna respond just to show that you really appreciate them.

 

Bad reviews, okay. So this is what most people are concerned about. And what I’ll say to this is don’t panic. There’s some ways just to really handle bad reviews. And the first way is just responding in a positive way. Don’t try to convince the audience that they’re wrong and you’re right or convince the person who left a review they’re wrong, you’re right because the audience is looking.

 

They’re looking to see how you respond. And I mean you can state facts in there, but still it’s not your goal to prove them wrong. It’s your goal to really show sympathy, tell them that you appreciate their feedback and you’re looking to improve. But you want to just show that you care, you do care that they had an issue.

 

And then the underlying aspect of that is fixing the issue. Like what is the actual issue? Most… and what they say is 75 percent of customers leave reviews based on how they were treated. And that’s huge because you wanna make sure that as a business, you’re always treating customers the best way possible. And so sometimes you’re gonna have customers where there’s something that goes wrong. Like you’re not gonna be perfect, something’s going to happen, something’s gonna go wrong, and you just wanna make sure they’re treated well.

 

Like you really treat them well and you make them feel good about the situation even though something went wrong. And that will help carve out some of the negative reviews that you get online even if they felt in their mind they they had a bad experience. 

 

But yeah they left a bad review, but call them up, figure out how you can resolve their issue if you can resolve it. And we’ve seen by doing that like consumers really updating their rating to five stars and then also removing the review. And just don’t forget this part though. You need to ask for the removal or the update.

 

If you resolve the issue ask for it just like the close. You gotta ask for it. We all know the everyone’s busy.

 

Next is just really getting positive, more positive reviews online. And that’s using the software or asking more people and so forth. But if you get positive reviews, it’s gonna push down the negative reviews. So just make sure that you’re constantly getting positive reviews online, and it’s super important to do that.

 

All right lastly is advanced review management. So if you’re a business and you’re getting… you’re moving up in the rankings, and but you still want more visibility, you want more customers. I recommend using paid ads.

 

Obviously, paid ads depends on your budget, cost per click on certain keywords and what your competition is doing is a ton of factors here. But with paid ads, if you look at the image at the bottom here. Important Note: After this video was made, Google AdWords removed the review feature!

 

You see those three ads for South Park Dentist?

 

The last one has star ratings at the bottom. So what that will do is increase. That’s probably gonna help them increase click-through rate there. And with Google ads, they have ad extensions that allow you to add real reviews from your customers on your ad copy which you can see here.

 

And one thing to know about review extension is that you need to have a third-party software that houses all of your reviews on a specific landing page, so you can input that information into Google Adwords. And that’s the benefit of also having a software that allows you to get more reviews online or some kind of email marketing system.

 

Like demand force or dentrix; whatever the case may be. These types of softwares will have landing pages for to add all your reviews. So doing that is important because that can definitely help click-through rate and more visibility.

 

The next thing is Google search results. So there’s some advanced SEO strategies that you can implement that communicates with Google at a level where they can see some of the code that you’re putting on the back end of your website, of your pages.

 

And that’s called schema markup. And I’ll show you real quick what schema markup looks like within the search results. So for the same keyword “dentist Ballantine North Carolina”. If you look down here. These are… this is the local pack and then this is the top ten websites in the search results. So if you look here for our client, Friendly Dental. They have 5-star reviews right here.

 

 

 

 

If you look at every other website here, they don’t have that. And this is just a review schema markup strategy that we’ve executed on the backend. And this will help increase click-through rate. If I go in this page obviously look here first.

 

If I go here, I’m gonna look here, and I see those five stars, so that drives attention to it. And also if you increase your click-through rate here when you’re doing all the other local SEO factors executing those, that could help you move up in the search results as well.

 

Because Google is going to award where people are clicking and executing the right SEO strategies. But that’s it for today. That was just review management online for local businesses. I hope that was helpful, and I appreciate your time. And I look forward to seeing you guys next week; thank you.

 

 
Video Transcript End
 

 

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