Google My Business (formerly Google Places) is a VERY powerful and underutilised tool.
First of all, let’s define a Google My Business listing.
In our example, if you type in “web designer” 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
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.
So how can you make it nice and easy for a happy customer to provide a review?
We utilise this tool which generates a really easy link for your happy customers to follow.
Just insert your businesses name & postcode and it will generate a unique link.
This link will look something like this.
Once we finish a project, we just 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 your brand new website!
Can you spare 2 moments and click on the following link to provide your feedback on your experience?
Your feedback and support is most appreciated.
Regards,
5×5 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 the effort to elicit feedback from your customers and Google will love you for it.
