THIS IS STEP BY STEP SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION
PAGE 34 TO 36 CHAPTER 5
Put simply, customer reviews, customer reviews, and more customer reviews. Reviews have become an increasingly important aspect of local searches for two reasons. First, reviews can actually have a positive impact on search rankings. Secondly, reviews will tremendously increase the percentage of searchers that click over to your website when they find you on Google. People love and trust reviews.
When you do a localized search on Google, you will notice a common trend. Those high-ranking websites all have a large number of Google reviews. So how do you get reviews? You ask for them.
It’s imperative you make a serious effort to follow up with anyone who’s used your services or products. I also recommend offering your customers an incentive to fill out the reviews. An incentive could be anything from a discount the next time they do business with you to a Starbucks gift card. After all, they’re spending their own time to write a review for you. Every time I’ve made the effort to collect these reviews, it has paid off. I’ll repeat—every time.
I recommend focusing primarily on collecting Google Places reviews since Google has a tremendous amount of users and gives preference to its own reviews. However, Google recently purchased Zagat and is including those reviews in their searches for relevant categories as well. Yelp is another service that can be a robust referral source for business if you have a strong profile set up with lots of reviews. While Yelp won’t play a big part in your search engine rankings, it will make sense to focus on it once you’ve fully established yourself on Google as the local superstar that you are. Yelp can serve as a tremendous referral source on top of the traffic you’re receiving from Google.
Here’s a sample e-mail I’ve sent that seems to work well:
REVIEW US ON GOOGLE PLACES
At [name of business here], we are always excited to be at your service.
One of the top compliments we can receive is a testimonial from you! Google Places is where most people search for local services online, and we’d love it if you can go there and write a little something about us. It’s a very simple process and will help us tremendously in getting the word out!
We really appreciate your support and thank you for being a part of our family!
CLICK HERE
to post your review
If you’re not currently collecting your customers’ e-mail addresses as part of your business process, you should be. If you’re looking for a reliable company to help with the sending of these e-mail requests, I recommend Mail Chimp (www.mailchimp.com) since it offers inexpensive services and a ridiculous amount of useful information about the e-mails you send through them. Currently, they offer a free service for your first two thousand subscribers, so there is really nothing to lose by trying them out. Mail Chimp can tell you how many e-mails were sent, which e-mails were read, how many users clicked on your Google Places page, and more.
Once you get your local profiles filled out and your review request process in place, you’ll be in a great position to start driving some serious local search engine traffic
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