Folks gab, and you want the word around town to be good
If you’re wondering why getting reviews from customers is important. Let alone how it affects your SEO efforts. Let me give you the skinny.
Imagine you are looking for a plumber, common complaint. You want someone you can trust, it’s your house after all. So, a friend of yours recommends one. Says they do amazing work.
Naturally you are probably going to listen to your friend’s advice and use that same plumber.
Reviews online are much the same. People trust well reviewed business and will want to give them more business.
Thing is, Google, Yelp and other review sites are treated much the same as a trusted friend, with 75.5% of potential customers trusting online reviews of a product, service, or company. 90.6% of buyers will read a review before they make a purchase, with 88% saying that they are more likely to use a company or brand if they respond to reviews.
Review platforms
These review platforms are an amazing way to gain trust from your customers, and in turn Google. I have previously talked about getting reviews on your Google Business Profile, but there are other review platforms that specific types of businesses should be paying attention to.
Yelp focuses on brick and mortar, and businesses that have dedicated service areas. Other review platforms like Care.com, Angie, and NextDoor are more specialized, focusing on a specific industry, type of business, or a specific location.
Look at your industry and find the most appropriate review and business listing platforms for your business to be on. Below I’ve listed some of the larger ones and the types of businesses that they host reviews for.
Popular Review Platforms to Consider
- Yelp –
- Yelp focuses on brick-and-mortar businesses, as well as hosting customer reviews. Business owners can claim and manage their Yelp profile. They also offer advertising services for business owners and the ability to respond to reviews. You can also advertise with Yelp as well as get valuable resources for your business such as training and networking.
- Facebook Business Page–
- A social media profile that you should be managing regardless, however, Facebook does allow for customer reviews and, of course, has its own advertising services.
- Google Business Profile –
- I’ve previously covered this in depth, but you should be leveraging your Google Business Profile and getting reviews for it.
- Better Business Bureau –
- An established and long-standing organization, the BBB hosts reviews, complaints, and responses about businesses. Businesses do have to pay for accreditation from the BBB to be “BBB Accredited”, however.
- Consumer Affairs –
- Another long-standing organization, Consumer Affairs focuses on Automotive, Home, Finance, and Senior Services. They help to collect reviews and offer resources to businesses on maintaining their reputation.
- Foursquare –
- While Foursquare focuses on their check-in features, for food, drink, entertainment, and shopping, businesses can also manager their listing, and manage rewards to customers, along with receiving reviews.
- Angi and HomeAdvisor –
- Formerly Angi’s List, this is a membership website for customers to leave reviews and see vetted reviews. Businesses can use Angi to set up deals and discounts, in addition to responding to reviews. Angi focuses on various home service providers, from cleaning to repair and remodeling. HomeAdvisor merged with Angi’s List and offers the same kinds of services as Angi, but they remain two separate websites.
- Judy’s Book –
- A generalist review website like Yelp, they list various types of local business by city and allow customers to leave reviews.
- My Area Network –
- A location focused directory listing service, while they don’t focus on reviews, they do allow you to set up a listing for your business where it is located.
- Manta –
- Another general business directory, they host not only business listings by city and business type, but customer reviews as well.
- Merchant Circle –
- Merchan Circle hosts customer reviews and puts the top-rated businesses at the forefront. They are another general business review and directory website, with no industry focus.
- Open Table –
- Specializing in Restaurants and Dining, they not only host reviews, but also can help you to manage and take reservations.
- Superpages –
- Another general review website, they host listings and reviews of businesses ranging from arts and entertainment to trash hauling.
- VendOp –
- Specializing in vendors for businesses, VendOp, helps to connect businesses with suppliers for materials, parts, products, and business services.
- NextDoor –
- Focusing on local networking, NextDoor also offers business listings and reviews for various types of local businesses.
- Care.com –
- Specifically for caregivers such as child, senior, house, and pet care. Care.com hosts customer reviews and business listings.
- Yellow Pages
- The online version of the classic business phone number directory. They are a generalist business directory.
Don't ignore smaller review sites and directory listings
This is just the tip of the iceberg, there are hundreds more review and directory services that you can set up profiles on for your business.
Search for review websites for your industry or niche, search for local businesses directories that focus on your area. Not all of them will help you directly by attracting customers through reviews and referrals. The most popular platforms will be the ones that have the biggest impact on your perceived credibility and traffic to your business. But you shouldn’t ignore the smaller ones as well.
Let me tell you why.
Each of these profiles that you create is not just a link back to your website that potential customers can use to find you. It is also a small vote for your website and business that it exists.
Each of these helps you to create what is called a “Local Citation”, each of these citations lists your Name, Address, and Phone number for your business.
Google will crawl these listings, looking for consistent, Name, Address, and Phone number information. If Google and other search engines find that this information, along with other information such as business category, and it is consistent between these listings it will increase the trust that Google has in your business.
If Google finds your information is consistent, it will view it as more trustworthy, and in turn your business as more trustworthy.
Additionally, you can also potentially get your business higher rankings and more exposure through these review sites.
Top Ranking Listings
Let’s look back at that screenshot I shared for “plumber near me”.
You’ll notice that in the top of the organic listings is a Yelp Page. This is true for other searches as well.
Yelp “10 Best Chiropractors” appears at #2, below the map pack.
Yelp at #1 – “Mechanics Near Me”.
I could keep going but I think you get the point, These Top 10 Pages, do show Yelp ads at the top of them, however you can get boosted up in the organic Yelp listings through having a high review score. Potentially bypassing the competition through your Yelp listing. It won’t work for every kind of keyword that you would want to rank for. And it won’t deliver the same results as if you had your own website ranking, but it does give you a leg up as you improve your own listing’s performance.
Handling, and building out, listings to get reviews and build local citations
Below we’ll go through the process of finding, creating, and taking advantage of these review platforms from start to finish. Each website will have a slightly different sign-up process.
However, most will ask for some kind of verification to create or claim your listing. Most commonly a business email and phone number to set up the account to manager your listing on their website.
- Identify what websites are either currently listing your business or website information
- Take ownership and control of these profiles
- Ensure that all information listed is correct and up to date
- Add any missing information
- Business category, website link, etc.
- Prioritize the most popular and most visited websites first, where customers are most likely to be reviewing and interacting with your business profiles, but don’t neglect less popular ones.
- Google Business Profile
- Yelp
- Encourage customers to leave reviews for you on these profiles.
- You can create QR codes to display in store that takes customers directly to your profiles to leave reviews or add links on your website to get more reviews.
- Your Google Business Profile and Yelp will be the most important ones for most small and local businesses, but don’t forget about other, smaller review sites.
- Smaller, more business category specific business listings may give you less traffic, but visitors from those websites are more likely to convert due to their more focused nature.
- Respond to reviews where possible, be they positive or negative.
- Take note of the negative reviews and note down any feedback that they give.
- Honest reviews, negative or positive, are a good way to get feedback on your business.
- It can be difficult to take criticism and separate those who can’t be pleased from those that have a legitimate complaint, however responding to even negative remarks politely, establishes that you value your customers and accept feedback. Earning trust in those that are coming to your business for the first time.
Now link building –
Why and How
I mentioned that each of the review platform and directory citations gave you links back to your website. While the goal of review and directory listings is to establish trust and credibility in your business, you also want to be actively building links back to your website to improve your business’ rankings in search engines like Google.
This is referred to as link building and it is one of the oldest, but still important aspects of Search Engine Optimization.
Think of a link as a “vote”, a little message that says, this is something that you might want to look at. In the early days of Google, this was a major factor in deciding the quality of a website.
While it was not the only one, and the methods that Google and other search engines use have evolved and expanded rapidly, links remain important.
Links are not only a vote, but a good link will also send relevant traffic and visitors to your website and business. A link to your website will often be referred to as a “back link” or a link back to your website.
Say a popular blog in your industry recommends your products, they link back to your website.
This will ideally net you not only visitors, but visitors that are specifically looking for your products and are coming from somewhere that they already have trust in and are far more likely to make a purchase because of that.
This kind of activity also sends signals to Google and other search engines that this website and business is getting attention. Because of this, it might be worth ranking higher in the search results.
So, with links being important to both search engines and users, how do you go about getting them?
Well, we have already covered taking control of your listings on review and directory websites. These sites give you opportunities to set up links to your website, but that is not their primary purpose.
Types of link building
Organic link building:
- Here you naturally get links from other sources as word about your business spreads and people share your content either from your social media or your website.
- The key to organically growing your links is to have content that is worth sharing.
Manual link building:
- This is where you do outreach to relevant voices in your industry, or figures that have already built an audience that you want to get access to.
- The key here is to have something that the person or organization that you are reaching out to would think would be of interest to or value to their audience.
Paid link building
If you start looking for more information on link building, you’ll eventually run into people talking about paid link building or Private Blog Networks (PBN’s).
Basically, it boils down to you paying money and you get links built for you by website owners, often in large numbers and made using generic content. This content is often “spun” simply rewriting of generic writing or produced by AI and not reviewed at all before being posted and used to link to your website.
This can vary in terms of price and quality. You often see things like guaranteed “Page Rank or Domain Authority” or “.edu/.org/.gov links”, or something similar.
Put simply paid link building can be incredibly dodgy and doesn’t always deliver on the promised results. At best, these paid links can help boost up your rankings a bit, at worst, the links could get flagged as spam and result in your website having manual action taken against it by Google, dumping you down even farther than you were before.
In general, paid link building is not something that I recommend to business owners do because it involves too many risks and unknowns. If Google thinks that a link has been paid for, they consider it to be spam and manipulation.
Paying to have an unknown person give you thousands of links from websites and pages with garbage content simply is not worth it in the long run.
Ultimately a few good links that send you traffic, are far better than many links that send you little to none.
Link Building Methods
So how do you build links properly, without worrying about strikes on your website for spam or manipulation? Below we’ll outline how to build links properly and in a way that will help you with your goals of getting reviews from customers and building your authority.
Organic Link Building
- Have content that’s worth sharing
- We have already talked about the need for quality content for your website and is it serving a purpose for your visitors. Make sure that the stuff that you are sharing, be it articles on your website, videos on YouTube, or infographics are worth something to those that you want to be visiting your website and making purchases from you.
- Share your website and services or products in as many places as you can.
- Share the videos, infographics, and other content that you are producing to help answer questions that customers might have.
- Use your social media channels.
- Focus on relevant places where your content or services would be of interest to others who are in that space already.
- Facebook groups
- Twitter Communities
- Quora Spaces
- Sub-Reddits
- Etc.
- You want to spark interest and get people to share your website, social media posts, and other types of content that you produce.
- Link Bait or Lead Magnets
- Create a product that does something worthwhile and give it away for free.
- This could be a simple calculator or a how-to/reference guide that people can download.
- The goal is to create something that people will want to reference or share to help their own content.
- You can turn this tool into a lead magnet by asking for email addresses and names to access it.
Manual Link Building
- Influencer and publication outreach
- Just about every industry or niche will have reviewers and “influencers”, or major voices in the space. They often will have interested and invested followings that you can leverage to not only build links but also grow your brand awareness.
- Reach out to them and ask them for reviews or ask for feedback on a certain topic that you are writing or creating content on.
- Ask to interview them about their work and their opinions.
- These influencers often run blogs, YouTube Channels, or Podcasts and can be great sources of exposure if there is proper alignment between your brand or business and their goals.
- Look for websites, YouTube channels, or podcasts that host interviews or guest posts from others in your industry or niche.
- Reach out to these publications with an offer to do the same but for your brand, website, or business.
- HARO
- Stands for Help a Reporter Out
- Writers, Journalists, and Media outlets often ask for input from experts in the industry platforms like Connectively host these requests and you can respond to the ones in the network.
- Home – Connectively
- You can also contact news outlets yourself directly. If you have a press release announcing an event, opening, or other newsworthy development about your business these same organizations may want to pick up the story and publish a piece about it.
- Outline of a press release
- Header with name, logo, contact information for an individual in your company, release date guidelines.
- Headline
- Subtitle
- Dateline
- Lead Paragraph
- Body
- Boilerplate and end notation – This should include company name, description of the company, what makes your company unique, and any company achievements.
- The end notation is just three-pound signs (hashtags)
- ###
- Header with name, logo, contact information for an individual in your company, release date guidelines.
- Instead of a formal press release you can create a public relations campaign
- Develop a story about your brand and a current news story or trend.
- Missed Opportunities
- Find articles such as business round ups that would be more comprehensive if they mentioned your business.
- Find blog posts that an infographic that you made could benefit from adding.
- Guides that could be improved by a link bait tool that you have created.
- Reports that could be more compelling if they utilized your published data or findings.
- Resources that could benefit from linking to your articles to be more complete.
- Inherit Broken Links
- There are many tools that help you to find broken links, both on your website and for other’s websites.
- Most of these tools like SEMRush require a subscription or annual license.
- You can, however, use some free tools instead; just note that this will not be as efficient and make this process more time-consuming.
- Using Google search terms to find pages that might contain the kinds of links that you are looking for.
- “useful links” [topic]
- Replace topic with a term related to your website or industry.
- [topic] inttitle:”useful resources”
- Replace topic with a term related to your website or industry.
- [topic] inurl:resources
- Replace topic with a term related to your website or industry.
- Once you are on the web page use a plug-in like check my links to find any broken links on the page.
- Reach out to the webmaster through a contact email or other means to let them know that they have a broken link and you have a resource that could be an appropriate replacement.
- If you are having trouble finding contact information you can use tools like Seamless.ai to find contact information.
- Another way to reach website owners directly is whois.com, but this is less reliable as many domains are privately registered or don’t have monitored emails on their public records.
- Template Email
- “Hi [name of contact], I noticed your article [link to article] contains a broken link. Looks like [old website] deleted their page. If you are looking for an alternative, I have a [link to your page] here that would be a good replacement. Kind regards, [your name]”
- Obviously, you should take some time to customize this template and rewrite it as necessary based on who you are talking to or talking about.
- Find brand mentions and ask for links
- Search for anyone talking about your brand using Google
- Reach out to them and ask them to link to your website on the page that mentions your brand.
- Steal Links
- Like looking for broken links, however in this case you are looking for links that are still good, but you may be able to offer a better resource to the website for them to link to.
- Collaborations and Partnerships
- If you have any partnerships or collaborations with other businesses, you can leverage this as an opportunity to get them to link back to your website from theirs.
- Client pages, blog announcements, joint public relations campaigns, testimonials, and case studies are all opportunities to build these links.
- Recovering lost links
- This requires some amount of manual monitoring unless you are using a paid tool like SEMRush.
- You can download a list of crawled links from Google Search console and look for any changes.
- Look for any links that have disappeared and check the page to see if it has broken or been removed.
- If something has happened, you can reach out and ask the owner of the website to put the link back or fix it.
Professionally Managing Customer Reviews and Building Links
Finding and setting up a profile on each relevant review platform is an incredibly time-consuming task.
Requiring research to find the right ones, and effort to set up and fill out each listing. Then you’ll need to spend even more time responding to reviews and keeping each profile updated.
Building links to your website that will be effective and provide value is yet another difficult and time-consuming task that also requires quite a bit of research, planning, and direction so that it can be effective.
With professional management both can be far more effective than simply going at it alone. There are professional services that help with these challenges, building your reputation and building links to your website.
Wrapping up
As you can see, there’s a lot that you can do to get customers to review your business. And all of what we have talked about will help you with your SEO or local SEO efforts. If you are looking for professional SEO or reputation management services that will help you rank higher and increase your positive reviews, contact us today.
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