Reviews are incredibly important to your business. And if you have multiple locations then setting up a multi-location review management strategy is a must.
They are one of the most important factors in helping you rank well and people read them before deciding to choose your business over your competitors.
There’s no 2 ways to say it. If you have limited or no reviews or they are worse than your competitors you will lose business online, and even worse, it will be to your biggest competitors.
It is essential to have a review management strategy for your business.
This should include at least:
- Determining which review sites are important to your business
- Ensuring each location is listed on your review sites
- Monitoring those sites for reviews
- Replying to reviews in a timely manner
- Proactively getting new reviews on the review sites where you need reviews
- Showcasing those reviews on your website or social media
If you are a multi location business you have more challenges. You need to do this for your brand as a whole and also for each location.
What is multi-location review management?
Multi-location or enterprise review management is the process of managing reviews for more than one location or branch of a business. It involves managing reviews at the corporate or brand level and for each of the locations that make up the organisation.
This can be time consuming and complex, especially when you have hundreds or thousands of locations to manage. It gets even harder when you have many review sites to manage for each location.
Good luck flipping accounts and logins and remembering which review you needed to reply to.
All while getting back in a reasonable period.
Why should I manage reviews for all my locations?
Best practice is to have seperate pages on popular online services for each business location.
Whether you created them yourself or not, you will have pages online for each of your locations on 100’s of online services.
Don’t worry, you don’t have to manage all of them.
But you should focus on the most important ones such as Google Business Profile, Facebook, Yelp, Bing, Apple Maps, Tripadvisor and more.
Each of your locations ability to rank on each of these services will be affected by the aggregate rating and reviews on each listing.
Your ability to convert visitors to customers on each of these profiles is also very highly affected by your ratings and reviews on these profiles.
On top of these services you probably have 5 to 10 niche websites with reviews that may be even more targeted to your business and the quality of your reviews there will directly affect how much business they bring your business.
Setting up a multi-location review management strategy
First things first, you need a strategy to tackle this problem.
Before you begin you need to lay some groundwork.
What is your multi-location listing policy?
Do you want to each location to be listed, or just the main brand? This may not be a decision left up to you on many review sites as listings will be created for you in many cases.
Some review sites like TrustPilot only allow one listing per domain so you can only get reviews at the brand level there.
Decide whether you want to have seperate listing pages or not for each review site. This will then dictate whether you need to add, claim or remove existing listings on some sites.
Which review sites do I need to manage?
When it comes to reviews the king of all sites is Google. Your Google Business Profile should be your first priority.
You should then look at sites like Facebook, Yelp, Bing Maps, Apple Maps, BBB and more to decide whether you want to actively manage reviews on these sites.
Then, look at your most important industry review sites (such as Tripadvisor, Houzz, Zomato and Realtor.com) to include the ones that are most important to your business.
Lastly consider any geographically local review sites that may be important to some of your locations based on where they are. These reviews sites can be very important in certain communities and you may want to manage reviews there.
The best way to do this is with a reviews and listings audit for a number of key locations. This will identify which websites are important and where each location is currently getting reviews.
Where is each location listed now?
To properly manage each location you need to have easy access to each listing. These listings need to be organised so you can quickly go to the reviews for that location on each site.
This may be via a management console for each service or via a review management tool.
Which locations don’t have listings yet?
If your strategy is to grow reviews for each location then they all need to be listed on each review sites where you want to manage reviews.
Even if a review site has some of your locations listed already, don’t expect them to have all locations listed.
You may need to claim or add new listings on the review sites you manage so that each of your locations is fully listed.
Monitoring reviews for multiple locations
Once you have your listings you should monitor your new reviews for each location and review site.
Your reviews are a great resource. You can use them for customer feedback, to see what is working and what isn’t. You should response to each review good or bad in a reasonable amount of time.
If a customer leaves a bad review try to help them to resolve their issue. Hopefully you can make them a happy customer again and get them to amend or remove the review.
Monitoring reviews for many locations, on many sites is complicated. You should be using review management software to do this.
Replying to reviews for multiple locations
You should aim to reply to as many reviews as you can, even if they are just a star rating. Always be respectful and try to get back to the reviewer will their review is fresh in their minds.
Replies are also a great way for other customers to judge you by how you handle feedback.
When you are replying you will have to log in and out of multiple service portals. If you are using review management software you may be able to reply directly from one interface for some review sites.
Getting new reviews for multiple locations
Most people don’t leave reviews without being prompted.
To really ramp up your review strategy you need to proactively ask your customers for reviews on the review sites where you need reviews.
You can choose to get new reviews on Google first and once you have enough start prioritizing other review sites where you need reviews.
The best way to get new reviews is automatically. You don’t want to have to think about it.
You should setup a process to automatically send review requests to customers who have recently used your service. These review requests might be triggered by raising an invoice, receiving a payment or just by adding a person to a list.
Customers should receive emails or texts (or a combination) in a sequence over a period of up to a few weeks until they leave a review. We recommend at least 3 touch points. Studies have shown that people rarely act on the first email so the follow up sequence is more likely to lead to a review.
Showcasing your reviews for each location
Once you have good reviews at each location you need to showcase them to your customers and prospects.
People visiting your website or social media channels.
You can do this using website widgets to automatically publish your best reviews to your website.
Each location should have a location page on your website. Put a reviews widget for each location directly on the location page on your website to show website visitors the best reviews for the location they are viewing.
You can also post your best reviews directly to your social channels as either text or an image.
Multi-location review management software
The process of managing reviews for more than a handful of locations becomes increasingly hard and time consuming as you add more locations.
If you not using review management software you are likely to stray from your goals and find it hard to keep up with new reviews.
If you don’t have this problem, you need to get more reviews.
We recommend you use a review management tool that:
- Consolidates reviews from multiple locations and review sites
- Allows you to reply to reviews for multiple locations in one place
- Works with all the review sites important to your business
- Allows you to manage your listings on your review sites to ensure each location is listed
myPresences is the world’s best tool to manage reviews online for multi-locations businesses. We support over 300 review services worldwide and make it as quick and easy as possible to implement your entire review management strategy.
Try myPresences free for 14 days or book a discovery call to get a 3 location demo using your own location’s reviews.
