What is a Google My Business or Google Business Profile?
Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business) is a VERY powerful and underutilised tool.
First of all, let’s define a Google Business listing.
In our example, if you type in “web design” depending on where you are geographically located you will get a set of results like this:
Google will typically prioritise the listings based on the relevance, distance to the searcher and finally prominence.
A big part of making your profile prominent is ensuring that it is claimed, verified and fully complete including:
- Ensuring the profile is correctly categorised and tagged
- The profile is fully complete including:
- Your phone number
- Photos (updated regularly)
- Profile description
- Opening Hours
Importance of customer reviews
But it isn’t enough to just have your profile listed, you need social proof.
Proof that you are a company worthy of doing business with.
This is where customer reviews come in:
The problem with relying on customers to provide positive reviews is it doesn’t often happen! Usually, it is the annoyed ones that go out of their way to provide negative reviews. We are not in the business of annoying people off so fortunately this hasn’t happened yet.
Positive reviews usually need a little prompt.
How can you get more Google reviews?
So how can you get more Google reviews? We suggest making it nice and easy for a happy customer to provide a review.
We utilise the review link provided by Google which generates a really easy link for your happy customers to follow.
To get this, open your Google reviews, then click get more reviews in the top right.
The review link will take your customer to something like this:
Once we either finish a project, are in the thick of a strong campaign, or just think the client is open to leaving a review, we send a simple email such as:
Dear Joe,
It has been an absolute pleasure to work with you on XYZ project. I hope you are very happy with the process and results we have driven for you.
Can you spare 2 moments and click on the following link to provide your feedback on your experience? If you could outline what service we provided that would also add value!
Your feedback and support is most appreciated.
Regards,
Five by Five Team
Simple as that!
The great thing is we can reuse these testimonials in our website portfolio and other marketing collateral.
Take the time and effort to elicit feedback from your customers and Google will love you for it.