Online Reputation Management

Full Training for Local Service Businesses

Approximate time to implement (for beginners): 1-2 weeks

Note 1: To get the point across easier, I will use a fictitious business called ''ABC Company'' when showing examples.

Note 2: These tips can apply to any service business, large or small or in any industry (construction, beauty, restaurant, finance, etc)

Better reviews can lead to more revenue

More reviews and higher quality reviews = more customer trust = more sales (potentially)

Why Improve my Online Reputation?

For local service businesses having high amounts of positive reviews is one of the biggest make or break factors for your business. Since your business is most likely ''unknown'', people don't trust it as much as other larger businesses with established brands. This means that having reviews is crucial to gain customer trust. It is a prerequisite to play the game of business at that level, without proper reviews, it will be almost impossible to compete.

What does Improving my Online Reputation Entail?

Optimizing it includes two phases. The initial set up phase and the consistent effort phase. The initial set up will consist of creating and optimizing the profiles of all available review platforms (GMB, Yelp, Trust Pilot, etc.). Then, the consistent phase will include setting up e-mail reminders for reviews, automating responses and more.

Optimizing them can do the following for your business:

• Increase rankings on Google locally as Google encourages good reviews (which will lead to more leads)

• Increase conversion rates (higher percentage of people will click on your website/call you)

• People will trust you more, and be more comfortable spending more (can help increase AOV)

Here's an example to show the importance of good Google reviews (using Google reviews as they tend to be the most impactful for local service businesses)

Increasing the amount of reviews you have to 50+, and increasing the rating average to 4.5+ in the span of a month is not uncommon with the proper strategies set in place.

 When you set a proper review strategy in place, not only do you benefit from getting proper reviews from the get go, but you get the long term benefits of having a consistent flow of new, high rated reviews.

This document will share exactly how you can optimize your GMB for your own service business, or other people's businesses (if you are an agency owner)

Part 1: Introduction to Online Reputation Management

What is Online Reputation Management

It goes without saying that reviews should stay authentic and not be ''bought''. When we refer to online reputation management we are talking about taking the actions that will motivate clients to leave good reviews as well as the automations we can set in place to respond to all these reviews in a timely and professional manner.

Why Should you Optimize your Online Reputation Management

1. First Impression: Reviews are the first thing most people will look at when dealing with you. It is the easiest way for them to decide whether or not to do business with you. Even though it might not be the fairest way to do so, it is the quickest for them.

2. Increased Conversion Rates: Better reviews means more people will trust you, more people trusting you means more will buy from you. It is a virtuous cycle in which you win more with higher rated reviews and loose everything with bad ones.

3. All Platforms: Although most people will look only at your GMB  listing to get an idea of your business, a minority will look you up across the web. Especially for higher risk/cost services like roofing, dental services, etc. That being the case, you want to be on as many platforms as possible, all with extremely good reviews. Giving every single one of your clients the confidence to do business with you.

In short, optimizing your online reputation is a great, somewhat free way, to get more people buying your service. Should be at the top of the list of things to do to improve your business online, as it has a trickle down effect on every other part of your business.

Part 1.2: Types of Optimizations

For online reputation management you can increase the amount of reviews you get, increase the rating of them and improve the responses to them.

Main Optimizations

Brief summary on the main optimizations possible:

Optimally Responding to Reviews

What does it entail:

Responding to reviews in a way that shows the client you care, as well as upsell them into other services offers.

Why is it important:

Especially for bad reviews, people will be looking at your responses. If your responses are bad, you loose instant credibility, reducing the chances they will purchase from you.

Initial Improvements

What are they: 

Optimizing your profile on all review platforms so they entice the best reviews from people.

Why is it important:

Setting up your profiles on all platforms optimally from the beginning will allow all your future efforts to have a bigger impact.

Constant Efforts

What are they:

Asking for reviews and responding to new reviews coming in.

Why is it important:

Most people, when looking at your reviews, won't look at reviews from 5 years ago to judge your business. They will use the newest ones to make their judgement. This means that constantly responding to new reviews and asking for new ones to come in will increase the credibility of your business.

Considerations that apply to all aspects of reputation management

• Be Authentic: People might forget that your business is not a corporation with robots running it. They might forget that there are humans running it. Responding authentically and showing that your truly care about your customer's is the best way to get people to leave you sincere and hopefully positive reviews,

Part 2: Responding to Reviews

Here are a few tips on how to respond to reviews, old and new

Responding to Reviews

In this section we will be going through all the strategies to optimize the responses you will send out.

Why is Responding to Reviews Important?

1. Shows you care: When you respond to reviews, especially done authentically, you are showing people that you care about your business and its effect it has on your clients. This lead to future customers trusting you more because they can see how much you care.

2. Shows you are active: If you don't respond to reviews, people might think your business is not active or that you are not accepting work at the moment.

3. Can lead to upsells: You can use your reviews as a form of upsell. You can direct happy customers and offer them other services you offer that are complimentary. Leading to more sales.

Responding to Old Reviews

Responding to old reviews is surprisingly a very high ROI activity. Responding to them might lead you to:

1. Resell to Old Clients: People who have done business with you in the past might have forgotten about you. By responding to their reviews, you might get some of them to remember you and decide to do business with you again. When responding, it is best to mention services they might be interested in or that a complimentary to the service they received initially (ex: If you were the one to build their roof, you would be able to offer them roof cleaning/gutter cleaning)

2. Change Negative Reviews: Some negative reviews were made in the spur of the moment. Responding to negative reviews might lead to clients changing them. Maybe they have changes their opinion of you but never bothered changing their review. When responding to old negative reviews, offer them a solution to solve the issue they had with your service and offer in the review a way for the reviewer to contact you.

3. Show Potential Clients your Care: By responding to old reviews (or any review in general) you are showing your clients you care. This will also allow clients that had the intention of leaving a negative review, to reconsider and contact you before leaving that review.

4. Explain the Services you Offer: Most clients don't know all the services you offer. By mentioning them in the responses of your reviews you allow potential clients to know the details of what you offer without having to visit your site to find out. You want to mention the service you did for the reviewer as well as the service you can offer them in the future.

With all these factors in mind, here is a review response template:

Positive Review Response Template:

Hello ''Name'', thankyou for the great review, it means a lot to us! Happy we could do ''service'' for you in ''region served''. Hopefully you think of us if you need your ''complementary/upsell service'' done. We are open ''opening hours/work hours'' to help you, feel free to contact us!

All the best,

''Personnel Responding'' from ''Business Name''

Negative Review Response Template:

Hello ''Name'', thankyou for leaving a review. I noticed that you had an issue with ''issue described''. We would love to discuss it with you and see if we can resolve it for you. Please call us at ''Phone number'' to discuss it.

Sincerely,

''Personnel Responding'' from ''Business Name''

Bonus Tips:

• Respond fast, rule of thumb to respond in under 5 minutes. Have notifications set up to respond as quickly as possible. Will show clients you care as well as reduce the negative effect of bad reviews, as you will address the issue directly.

• Contact them directly. If a reviewer leaves a bad review and you know the reviewers contact information, don't be shy to give them a call to see if you can't improve their situation. Sometimes you might just have someone who miss clicked and gave you a lower rating by accident.

• For GMB reviews, responding to them with keywords won't affect your rankings. Responding to reviews on other platforms will. Keep in mind when responding to reviews on other platforms.

Responding to reviews is a great, quick and free way to keep your customers engaged and increase the revenue of your business (directly and indirectly). Positive reviews are a great opportunity to upsell services, and negative reviews a great way to show you car. A good rule of thumb is to answer to every single review you have received.

Part 3: Initial Set Up

Here are a few strategies how to set up all your profiles optimally to increase the chance people will leave reviews (hopefully positive ones)

Initial Set Up Optimizations

In this section we will be going through all the different improvements you can make to all the review sites that are used (ex: GMB, Yelp, Trustpilot, etc).

Why does setting them up properly matter?

You want to make sure that your business looks good on every platform it is on. Having proper profiles set up will allow you to increase the amount of reviews you can accept (more profiles, more reviews). But will also help increase the quality of reviews you get. People are biased, and seeing a GMB listing set up poorly might influence their decision in leaving a review.

*For SEO purposes, keep NAP the exact same on all these platforms.

1. Google my Business Listing: We have a training dedicated to optimizing your GMB profile but I will discuss the major aspects of it here.

   1. Full Listing: You want every part of your GMB to be filled with information. As many images/videos as possible, Q&A section filled, description of business, etc.

      1. This will allow your listing to answer every question someone could have, ultimately, reducing the chances of you getting bad reviews caused by confusion.

   2. Constant Updates: Having your listing constantly updated will show clients that your business is active and that the reviews you have will reflect the service they will get in the present.

2. Facebook: For most service businesses, your Facebook page will be the second most used platform to leave reviews on.

   1. Full Listing: Best to have your listing fully optimized. This means having images, text and contact information on it. All that to reduce the chances of someone leaving a bad review because they couldn't get answers to your questions or couldn't resolve their issue directly with you.

   2. Constant Updates: Having your listing constantly updated will show clients that your business is active and that the reviews you have will reflect the service they will get in the present.

3. Yelp: Yelp is the third most used review platform. And so it is most likely worth it to spend some time optimizing it.

   1. Complete your company information in full with NAP the same as other platforms.

   2. Allow for communications, on Yelp you can directly communicate with customers. Integrate the messaging with the other platforms for easy messaging.

4. Trust Pilot:

   1. Complete your company information in full with NAP the same as other platforms

   2. Reaffirm the security messaging on your website using the promotion box. You can use this section to display the top three reasons why a customer should buy from you.

   3. Complete the guarantee section — display what customers are guaranteed every time they order from your website.

   4. Implement the Facebook ‘like’ box to display an overview of your Facebook account including the number of ‘likes’.

   5. Display reviews on your Facebook page and anywhere else possible. As Trust Pilot reviews hold the most weight.

   6. Link your reviews to your Google Seller Ratings (so Trust Pilot reviews show up on search results)

   7. Customize your email invitation.

5. Yellow Pages: Like all the other platforms, you want to fully set up your Yellow Pages business profile.

   1. Use the same NAP as all other platforms

   2. Use your best keywords as they will help you rank and potentially get you business from Yellow Pages

6. Extra Platforms: Although they are not used nearly as much as the main ones, it is still worth it to set them up as they are free to set up and can be done in a few hours. They can also serve to get you more clients, if people stumble upon your business on there.

Extra Tip

1. Stay consistent on branding. Use same color tone, same image styles, same logo and illustrations. Will help customers trust your business more and lead to higher conversion rates throughout.

2. Optimize all your content for Mobile. 80%+ of content online is consumed by mobile users so making your images adapted to mobile is important (framing images vertically, having legible text even for small phones)

Having multiple places where people can leave reviews, allows you to ask the same person for 10 reviews, and boost all those pages up. (Obviously most people won't want to do 10 reviews, call in favors of friends that have used your services for this technique)

Part 4: Constant Optimizations

Here are a few strategies on how to optimize your reviews constantly by getting new and better ones.

Constant Improvements

Reviews are constantly going to come in to your business and will affect it forever. To neglect them is to neglect your business of success in the future. You want to be ahead of the curve when it comes to reviews, getting new ones coming in and optimizing how you do so.

Why is consistently getting new reviews important?

1. Quantity and Quality: Although having a good review rating is important, having more reviews then your competitors affects your business as well. More reviews means more trust, and when people compare two businesses in the same industry, they will, a majority of the time choose the one with most reviews, all else being equal.

2. Improves Brand Trust: More reviews shows that you are established, have been doing this for a long time and that people can trust you and your services. Not having a lot of reviews almost makes it impossible to do business, and having many reviews makes it impossible not too.

3. Helps Rankings: Having reviews come in consistently will indicate to Google that your business is in high demand, and should be rewarded by being placed higher in the search results.

4. Shows you are Active: One of the most discrete ways in which people will decide not to contact you is if they see you aren't getting new reviews (at least non in the last month). This will give people the impression you are maybe not in business anymore, and will reduce the chance they call you.

How to Ask for Reviews Optimally

Here a few tips on how to ask for reviews in a way that increase the odds they will leave one, and increase the odds they will leave a positive one.

1. How to ask for reviews: You want to make it as simple as possible for them to leave review. Reducing the friction between them being happy with your service, and publishing a review (hopefully on more than one site)

   1. Multiple Sites: The best situation would be a customer, leaving you reviews on every single site possible. This is very unlikely and very annoying for the customer. So when you feel it is right (maybe they are your friends, maybe you can offer them a gift), ask them to leave reviews on every single review site on your list.

   2. SMS: Can ask for reviews with short e-mail or SMS after job is done with link to review. Use SMS to get higher response rates and chances they leave a review.

   3. Tutorial and Link: Some of your clients might not be too good with technology (especially if you work with older clients). Can create an step by step guide on how to leave a review with the link embedded in the illustration. This will allow people who are less tech savvy to understand how to leave you a review. (Can use Canva to design)

2. How should they leave reviews: Obviously, you should let a customer review you authentically. Even so, you can ask them, if they really enjoyed your service, to do you a favor and write reviews with these things in mind (while keeping the integrity of their review)

   1. Keywords: Keywords written by customers on reviews, helps your business rank higher on Google and other platforms. If appropriate, when asking for reviews, ask the person to use the keyword you most want to rank for (ex: This is the best ''Roofing company in Toronto'' I've ever worked with). Longer review the better, means more keywords and more details for other people to read.

   2. Images: Having images with your review improves their quality and trustworthiness to clients. If you have professional pictures of the job you did, ask them to leave you a review using that picture. Send the images over to them with instructions on how to do the review.

   3. Specifics: Ideally, if a customer is to leave you a review, you want them to write the details of the service you offered them. What is was, what was the result and where it was done.

   4. Filtering Reviews: Ideally, you only want 5 star reviews to show up on your GMB, but truth is, sometimes people won't be satisfied with your service or are not the type of people who leave positive reviews. Want you want to do is filter them out when you can.

      1. How to do it: When someone scans your QR code to leave a review (or follows any link you send them), direct them to a page that is yours before directing them to Google. On that page you will ask for a review, if they give you 5 stars, you redirect them to the Google review page, if they you 4 stars or less, you direct them to a form so they can fill out and explain the details of their disatisfaction. This will reduce the chances of you receiving bad reviews, and help you understand what your clients don't like about your service.

   5. Asking old customers:

      1. Ask every customer you have ever had that hasn't left you a review. Even if it has been 10 years, Google still allows their review to post. One of the greatest and easiest ways to increase reviews. Create an e-mail or SMS campaign and send a personalized message to everyone asking for reviews.

   6. Asking new customers:

      1. Ask every customer you serve to leave a review. If you aren't in direct contact with them, get your team to ask them for reviews. Ask them in real life, right after they have received your service (when they are most excited about it), tends to get better results.

   7. Asking customers of all sizes:

      1. Google doesn't discriminate reviews by size of service offered. You can get a review from a 10$ service and one from a 10 000$ service and Google will treat it the same. This means that if you offer a high ticket service, most likely you will not get many reviews (less amount of people that buy from you per year compared to a restaurant). A great opportunity for you would be to have a smaller service that you can do for the masses, allowing you to get more reviews than any of your competition could ever.

         1. Ex: You have a roofing company that typically charges 10 000$ per job, you could then offer gutter cleaning for a short time for 200$ a pop. Allowing you to get a whole new market of reviews, boosting the trust people will have for your main service.

3. Where to ask for reviews: You can ask for reviews either through links or in real life. The best being in real life. Higher amount of reviews and also higher amount of negative reviews.

   1. At your place of business: Can have a ''review tap'' card set up at your front desk for easier reviews. These cards, just by tapping them with your phone, will direct clients to your Google my business or yelp page so they can leave a review. Great for physical location businesses like hair salons or dental clinic.

      1. If employees have stations (ex: hairdressers, dentists), you can have these tap cards set at every station, allowing every single one of them to receive reviews individually as well.

   2. On Site: Bring the tap cards on site, or give them to employees to use. Best to ask for reviews right after service is done, and so if your team is on the field, best to have them ask the customer on the spot for a review.

      1. Can give every member of your team a tap card so they can share it whenever they are doing solo jobs.

4. When to ask for reviews: The best time to ask for a review is right after they have received the service and before they have paid. This is when they are most excited and happy about the service they received. They are also most likely to actually write you a review, as they feel more ''obliged'' to give you one, than if you asked them weeks from when the service was done.

Overall Tips for asking for reviews:

• Ask reviews for all the services you offer, big or small. Review sites usually don't discriminate by the price of the service offered. Which means that whether you offer a 10$ service or a 1000$ service, the review will be worth the same. Meaning that for a competitive market, you can get ahead of your competitors in terms of reviews by getting hundreds of reviews for smaller services. (some businesses implement 10$ services just to get reviews)

• Call in some favors. If you want to rank well on review sites, you want good reviews. It's time to call in some favors and ask friends and family to leave reviews on all platforms.

Constantly getting new and better reviews is a sure way to keep your ratings up, your rankings on Google up and your business rolling. The compounding effect of good reviews on all aspects of your business is enormous.

Conclusion - Reputation Management

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