How to improve the review to the website ?

[WayneRooney]

Hello guys,
lately we think how we can improve all the reviews on our site from the clients.
We notice that there are all these option regarding to reviews :

Google Reviews/Local/Places/+
Yelp
Facebook
www.feefo.com
www.trustpilot.co.uk
www.ekomi.co.uk/uk

And much more...

Now, the problem here with a lot of these sites, the person that write the review need to register to the site.
Most of our clients, not interesting in register or to open account.
They need something fast that they can write the review and move on.

What do you think is the right approach to manage all this ?
We getting a lot of traffic but its seems that we don't advantage all of him regarding to the review part.

Any tips here from the expert ?

Thank you

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Guy,

Edmond has give some thoughtful feedback. The one suggestion I would be careful of is the one in which a central device at an office is being used to encourage reviews. If reviews stem from the same IP address (known as a review kiosk) they are likely to be flagged by Google as spam, so that is not something I would recommend.

I would also be careful about offering incentives for reviews. Google's stance on this has been very strange, and is worth researching.

Beyond this, though, having print materials to hand to the client at the time of service is a great idea, as is educating key members of the staff to request reviews. Whitespark has a great, free handout that you can brand with your own company logo that gives directions for leaving a Google+ Local review. You'll find it here:

http://www.whitespark.ca/review-handout-generator/

*Just remember, the one review platform on which you cannot ask for reviews is Yelp. Their guidelines forbid soliciting reviews in any way.

Additionally, if you have good customers who simply are not going to go on the Internet to leave you a review, but who would be happy to give you a hand written testimonial, you could get them to write you one at the the time of service, or in a follow up email, and you can turn these into testimonials you post on your website. You can use Schema review markup to encode these reviews, giving you a chance that Google will display stars on your results in the search engine results. This is a good solution for customers who are not tech savvy.

Remember, no business needs to earn a huge number of reviews all at once. A little, slow trickle of them over time is a much better signal than a whole bunch at once.

Here's a post I like, by Phil Rozek, about Google+ Local reviews. I think you might like it, too:

http://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/2013/04/04/the-complete-guide-to-google-pluslocal-reviews-and-especially-how-to-get-them/

Hope this helps!

[WayneRooney]

Hey,

Thanks a lot for your answer.
We are B2B company, so its make it even more harder to convince them to write review.
One of our idea was to add in the thank you page after they leave a quote, to add  all the review sites that we have account there and to ask them to write something over there.
Another thing is like you said its to give them coupon for the next order or free t shirts (we are t shirt company).
We will test it and i hoop it will work better.

Thank you for the article and the respond.

Guy

[WhiteboardCreations]

Hi Edmond,

Unfortunately, you are correct about it being a pain in the butt to get customers/patients to submit POSITIVE reviews on those mentioned websites, including a ton of other review sites. Isn't it funny, people have no problem going to those sites, creating an account, and then leaving NEGATIVE reviews?

We see it all the time. I'm guilty of it, however, I do try to leave positive reviews when I'm truly amazed at the service or product I receive.

We work with dentists and eye doctors and other categories where it is mainly B2C, so we've implemented in many of those businesses a process to create small business cards which have direct instructions about how easy it is to leave a review online and how much we appreciate it OR our clients offer an incentive. "Leave us a review at Google and receive a free X-rays at your next dental exam." It does work really well as the patient is able to hear the offer at the office and then take home instructions about how to do it.

We have an eye doctor who keeps their iPad open to Google the whole day and his front desk staff asks patients to leave reviews on their Google+ page if they have a Gmail account. If not, then the staff offers to walk them through getting them a Google account.

It's a combined effort on the business owner, his staff and the internet marketing consultant/company to work together to figure out the best plan and educate their clients/patients.

Here's a GREAT article in whole which I recommend you read, but more importantly to your question, read this section http://moz.com/blog/top-20-local-search-ranking-factors-an-illustrated-guide#nineteen. You will see that Google gathers the other major review sites' reviews (you'll see in the 2nd screenshot of the review site links). So, yes Google is very important to get reviews, but they are also pulling from many other sites.

I hope this was a good answer and that you find these ideas helpful in your efforts! - Patrick