As a business owner, I am sure you want your business page to always appear first on Google listing when prospective customers search for similar business categories on Google search. Prospective customers can also make a decision whether to patronize your business or not depending on the reviews from other customers on your business web page.
According to a recent study, 84% of consumers trust online reviews more than personal recommendations. This means that you get more customers for your business when you have more reviews on your business webpage, but for you to achieve this, your business reputation should be good and encouraging for consumers to want to transact business with your company.
Google My Business is an effective way to which Google has allowed companies to manage their business location and information in Google maps and Google search.
It helps businesses to build an online presence that assists consumers to easily search for specific businesses or make searches based by category and then receive information about the business name, address, phone number and some other information about the business.
With Google My Business, it is now very easy for consumers to search for specific business or company and get the correct address and information as to how to get to the physical location of the business or company. It has also helped businesses easily assessable to consumers all over the world thereby increasing their customer base.
Creating a Google My Business page
In order for people to leave reviews on your business page, you need to first create a Google My Business page and verify it. Creating a Google My Business page only takes a few easy steps. Google will lead you through the steps to successfully verify your page. Click on this link https://www.google.com/business/ and follow the easy steps.
Important Information to add when creating a Google My Business page
When you want to create a Google My Business page, there are some important information about your business that you need to add. Consumers who view your business page should at a glance get the necessary information they need about your business.
The first information you need to add is the name of your company. The correct and exact name of your company or business is the first information you need to add. The next information is the address of your company or where your business is located. Give full details of the physical address such as street number, house number, city, and any other necessary information so that Google map can easily locate the place and potential customers as well.
After the address, you need to add the phone number of your business. This is important for consumers that may want to call you to ask further questions about your business or any information they want to know.
Other information you need to add is the weekly opening hours of your business. Further information is your business website address. You can also use the chart to show your peak hours and non-peak hours for business of the day so anyone that wants to come to your company will know exactly the right time to come.
Images and photos of your company both the interior and exterior images are important to add. If you operate a restaurant business for example, people that are looking for restaurants to eat will like to see pictures of some of the menu and how they look. They will like to see how nice looking is the restaurant.
This will enable them to make a quick decision either to patronize the restaurant or not. The exterior images are useful for Google map as it makes it easier for people to locate your company.
How to Get Reviews on your Google My Business page
After you have created your Google My Business page, now you need to get people to leave reviews on your page. The reviews on your page are very important for the reputation and growth of your business. 74% of consumers admit that positive reviews make them trust a business more and 90% of consumers read less than 10 reviews before forming an opinion and making decisions about a business.
To get people to write reviews about your business or services, there are some things you need to do.
Provide good services
If you want consumers to happily write reviews about your business, then you need to provide good services to them. 9 out of 10 consumers that are happy with your services will give reviews about it.
People will naturally support you when you do something good for them and providing good services to your customers is doing something good which will make them give positive reviews about your company.
Ask them
Study shows that 7 out of every 10 people will leave reviews if you ask them. Ask them to give feedback about your services without any form of biased. It is not only to ask them, you need to ask at the right time.
You should ask them not too early and not too late. Let’s take for example, you just downloaded an app, using it in less than 5 minutes, there is a pop-up asking you to review and rate the app.
Very annoying right?
This is how it feels when you ask people to leave a review too early because they don’t have enough experience with your company or services. It is also important not to ask too late because if you ask too late the initial impressiveness about your services may wear off.
Share your Google plus link
To get more people to leave reviews on your Google My Business page, you need to share your Google plus URL link with your customers and to as many other people as possible. The URL link should not be too long as this may discourage people from clicking the link.
Also, you should try as much as possible to minimize the steps for people to write a review. Too many steps may discourage people from going further. It is best that when people click the link, it should take them straight to the page that they can write their reviews.
You can share your Google plus link through direct messages, emails and social media platforms.
Respond to Reviews
It is important that you respond to reviews because when people see that you provide helpful responses to other people’s reviews they will be motivated to give theirs. You need to recognize that everybody cannot give positive reviews about your business, hence when you get a negative review you should be able to respond to the review in a professional and amicable way. Provide adequate response to the negative reviews and assure the people of your company’s improvement in areas that need to be improved on.
Provide free samples
This is particularly important and necessary if you are starting your business newly. People will be willing to give reviews about your product or services when you offer them free samples of what you do. Let’s take for example a restaurant, if you open your restaurant newly, it is better if you give all the people that came to your restaurant to eat for the first day free meal.
This will serve as a means for them to give comments about the menu. You can take the opportunity to ask them to leave reviews on your business page. This is a very effective way to get a lot of reviews for your business in a single day.
Offer trial versions
If your company is an I.T company that is into software or apps, offering trial versions for your software or apps is an effective way to get more people to review about your products and services.
Most people decide on either to pay for the premium version of an app or software after having a satisfying experience using the trial versions. They are also motivated to leave reviews about your services as a result of the experience they had with the trial version of your product.
Conclusion
You can also be creative on your own and create other ways to get more people to leave reviews on your Google My Business page. Our guide are general guide which is not limited as you can also think of better ways to get people to review your business depending on the type of business.
The most important thing about reviews is to make sure that your customers give reviews that are true and sincere. Falsified reviews might appear suiting to the eyes but it does not add value to your business and may be banned by Google. Customers should be allowed to write reviews solely based on their experience with your business and services either positive or negative.
Negative reviews are also beneficial to your business because you get to know the areas you need to improve on and this will invariably lead to better quality services in the future.
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