For businesses that service a local area (trades, retail etc), winning with Local SEO is vital.
What is Local SEO?
Essentially, simply being found locally by people searching for you.
This could be Google Maps (the Google Business Profile), or organic Google Search (your website), or even in local Facebook Groups where locals ask about various services and businesses.
For example, if you are looking for an Electrician in Auckland NZ, then showing up on Google Maps is a strong play. So would presence in a local Facebook Group, where people ask about Electrical services.
When we evaluate where leads come into these types of local businesses, it’s always amazing to us that often, the Google Maps listing (Google Business Profile), will send more customers to the business than what their website does!
What we’ve found in our work helping businesses rank better locally over the last few years, is that Reviews (Google, Facebook, other 3rd party options) are THE most important factor in improving your presence, and getting customers locally.
Yes, there are quite a few things to do to ensure you win locally on Google etc, but we’ve found if there is ONE thing that stands out, it’s getting good, regular reviews.
Obviously using a tool like myPresences will help you in this regard, so please consider using their help here.
Remember – regular reviews help you convert browsers into customers – almost everyone these days is looking at reviews online to establish if you are a good business.
We’ll list out some steps you can take to ensure you are getting good, regular reviews so that you can win locally online:
Always loop back to customers asking for feedback
This sounds obvious but it is truly amazing how many businesses do not do this.
For our clients, we work with them to design a feedback workflow that is mostly automated.
For example, every Monday, clients from the previous week get an email simply asking for any feedback on how their experience was.
If the reply comes into the marketing team inbox, and its +ve, a follow up goes out asking for a review.
Designing the emails and reach-out process is a once off job, following people up is manual, but well worth it.
Provide a 2nd Review option apart from Google
We’ve found that lots of people can’t or won’t leave Google Reviews. There are various reasons for this.
We’ve also noticed though that the Google Business Profile picks up reviews from other places, like Facebook pages.
So, we get clients to provide a 2nd option as well, and oftentimes we’ve noted that a customer might not have a Google account, but they do have a Facebook account.
All reviews count, all reviews help you get noticed, all reviews help you rank higher in a variety of places. Go get those reviews!
Go back to older customers
When a new client comes to us, we get them to design a strategy to reach out to customers from further back in time, e.g. last year, the year before that etc.
This is for 3 reasons – reviews, referrals, and reactivations.
Imagine you bought some shoes 2 years ago from your local sports shoe retailer. You get an offer via email for 30% off any new pair of shoes that people are free to share with friends.
This can generate a referral to a friend, a reactivation of that customer, and then give you an opportunity to generate a review as well from that client. It’s a very worthwhile tactic.
Recently we worked with our own Business Advisor, to discover ways to increase profit.
We were shocked at how much new clients were costing us in acquisition costs, so the idea of reaching out to existing clients certainly hit home for us.
Older customers can be such a great source of reviews, referrals, and reactivations!
To conclude – we can’t recommend ramping up your review acquisition enough.
Google Business Profile recently made this even easier by providing a built in QR code to their platform, so get busy and figure out the best method for your business.
More information:
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