After claiming your Googles Local listing it’s time to get to work improving your position. Local search works a little differently than organic search. Your position among the local search results is determined in large part by feedback left by Google users.
Feedback for Vermont Pub and Brewery
Google Local ranks local businesses by gathering users’ feedback. As you see in the image above, business listings on Google Maps have a ranking of 1-5 stars. If you perform a couple test searches you’ll see that most businesses are unranked.
Local search is driven by Google’s users. So the more reviews and feedback those users provide, the better chance you’ve got to be promoted in Google’s results. So the key to getting a higher local listing is to get people to leave feedback for your site and business on Google.
Getting Reviews
To leave feedback, users will need to be registered users- that is, they’ll have to have a free Gmail account. Then it’s just a matter of clicking on your search result and clicking the ‘write a review” link and leaving a star-ranking or writing a review.
Ask your customers to review you. Add a link on your site directly to the Google Local results, ask people to leave a review and good ranking. Just asking is good enough often, but a little something extra can be a great motivation. Offer a coupon, savings or other promotion to a good review.
There’s nothing wrong with writing the review and asking other users to copy and paste it into the form field. The easier you make it for your users, the more likely it is that they’ll be willing to help you out.
What stops your competition from leaving negative reviews?
A poor review at an undisclosed business.
Nothing at all. That’s the downside of social marketing. Fortunately, negative feedback can help too. All feedback is beneficial to your position in the local results. While a negative review might scare some potential clients off, but you’ll gain position in the search results.
Asking for, and encouraging reviews is about the easiest thing you can do to improve your local search results. Search for your business now and see how you’re currently ranked. Try sending that link out to your satisfied clients and let us know in a comment here how it worked out.
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[...] Clients: Your clients that have their own website or social networking promotion can benefit from your reviews. Take some time to look up your clients online and leave a comment or review. Not only will this [...]
When i had finished putting one of my clients on Google maps i told him to hand out coupons for his customers to have a free pint if they came with a friend the next time they called into the wine bar. all they had to do was a a review.
Hi, thanks for the post. Iv always been worried about reviews…Like you say what is stopping a competitor leaving bad reviews? If this occurs, is there any way to get the review deleted due to it being fraudulent? If so, how so?
First, there is nothing that can stop competitors (or others) from leaving bad reviews. Second, all reviews help your SEO. You don’t want to delete any reviews, even bad ones. The better way to handle bad reviews, is to publically address them. If you receive a bad review, see if the review site allows you to post a response. Most should let you address/reply to any reviews. In fact, it’s also a great idea to reply to favorable reviews. People love to see that you are actually engaged with your reviews.