Today’s episode of Focused On The Road centers on Focused Engagement’s review platform. We have talked a lot about reviews in the past, mainly how important they are, but we have not discussed how to get them. Watch this quick tutorial of our review platform and contact us if you have any questions! We would love to hear from you and get you on the path to more high-quality reviews.
If you would like to keep up with our company and the content we put out, follow us on social media @focusengage and subscribe to our YouTube channel. We publish content multiple times per week that teaches you about marketing, marketing automation, social media, online reviews, local SEO, and so much more!
Focused On The Road Episode 11 Transcript
Hey, this Bo with Focused Engagement. Today’s another Focused On The Road but in the office. We’ve been talking reviews, and today I really wanted to show you our review platform and how easy it is to get reviews when done right. Reviews really should be one of the easiest parts of your SEO strategy.
Let’s jump in. One of the great things about our platform is the ability to get reviews on just about any site you want. We have, obviously, our major sites, we have directory sites, social media sites, local sites, car dealers for different niches auto repair, dentistry, education, elder care, you name it.
We have a site we can get to reviews on. So if there is not one, as you see, it just keeps on going. If there’s not one here that you want to get reviews on, we can actually create a custom link. We can still tie into anything you want to tie into.
So why is this nice for Google? Google doesn’t just look at reviews on Google. They actually crawl other sites. Crawl all these sites and they look for reviews and they may show those reviews on your Google My Business listing. So you may have a 4.5, 4.8 on Google, but you may have a 3.0 on some other site. And that site may show up in your Google listing, which would allow your potential customers to click on it and see those reviews. If you don’t respond to them, that makes you not look quite as good right? So, we listened to all of these sites and we can send you notification if you happen to get a review on that site so that you will respond to it, good or bad, we always recommend you respond to all reviews.
If you happen to get a negative review on one of these sites and you know about it, then you can not only address that negative review, but you can start building up positive reviews on that site. We can focus on that site to get those reviews up as well. So it’s always best to allow the customer to decide where they want to leave the review.
They may not have an account with one of these, so you wouldn’t necessarily want to make it the only one but you could definitely be on the list. And you can request that they leave the review there. How easy is it to get the review? One of the complaints I’ve always received is how hard it is for a client to be able to leave a review. You may request it, but that doesn’t mean that they’ll leave it. I’ve actually seen businesses before: they’ll print off a sheet on how to leave a review. Now, honestly, who’s going to go home and go through those steps? You’ve really got to have a loyal customer to go through those steps.
Our platform makes it very easy. It’ll either email, which we’ll get to in a second, or text them. And again, we’ll get that to a second. But what it does is it will send a link and this is how easy it is to get review. They click on the link, it comes right up to leave a review. They leave that review. They put down their experience. They hit post. So some of the other benefits of this platform is our widgets. Now the customer goes to your website, they’re looking at your products or your services. You can actually have your reviews showing on that site, and they’re streaming and it automatically cause this widget is tied to our platform, which is watching for all your reviews.
When it sees a review, it can add it to this widget automatically and stream to your website so you don’t have to think about it. It just happens. Obviously we keep it to your four and five star ratings or we can put everyone if you want, but most of our clients keep it to the four or five star ratings and we can limit it to the top four or five reviews so it’s not, you know, a thousand reviews long.
Now why is that important? Two reasons: first of all, you can get some SEO benefit out of it. Google will crawl that they can actually put that review when the review is streamed properly on your site. Which of course, if you’re working with us at a stream properly on your site, Google can crawl that and use that review it in a snippet on your organic listing. You can get some free SEO out of it. Second, as your client is on your site. Anyway, they’re there looking at your services. They can look at the reviews right then and there. And since it’s streaming from actual review platforms, it’ll say where that review is from. They can click on it and go right to the platform so they know it’s not made up.
There are software packages where you could just type in whatever the review is. The problem with that is it can be completely made up. There’s no authenticity behind it. There’s no way to verify that that was an actual review from somebody. So this way they click on it, they’re going straight to Google.
They can read it right off of Google, right off of Facebook. It doesn’t matter where it’s right off a Yelp. It doesn’t matter. So they know that it’s a legit review. So that is a really strong tool. We have some others, email signature snippets. So you can actually put request reviews in your email signature QR codes that you could put at your desk.
They could just scan the code and leave a review that way. So lots of ways to do this now to the heart of it is the requests. We have two different ways to request reviews: email or text. So on our email one, it sends out one request right away. If they don’t respond to it, then it sends out another one in three days.
If they do respond to it and it doesn’t send the other ones we don’t want. We don’t want them to leave you a review and then receive a request three more days late saying, “Hey, don’t forget. You said you’d leave a review”. Well, I already left it, so why, why am I getting this email? So if they respond to that first one, they’re dropped out of the flow.
They don’t get the next one, but if they don’t then they get one in three days. And then again, another one in seven days, our experiences after that, the likelihood that they’re going to leave that review is diminishing greatly. And really, we just start spamming them and we don’t want to do that.
The idea behind this is to send a review, hopefully at a time when they’re checking their email and they can leave it in there. They’re available for it. so they’ll read it and they’ll say, “Oh yeah. I said, I would leave that positive review. I’m going to do it right now”. Always ask. It is always best to ask now.
Yes, you could send this without asking, but if they receive the review, the request without being asked first, they’re less likely to respond to it If they already said yes, they will leave that review. Now they’re seeing the requests. They’re saying, “Oh yeah. I said, I would do it. I’m going to do it”.
So it’s all about trying to get in front of them at the right time. I’ve always said in all my videos and everything I do: everything in automation is about getting the right information to the right person at the right time. This is no different, right? The right information is the requesting the review.
The right person is obviously the person that you asked to leave that review. Now we’re just trying to hit them at the right time. So for a text, we actually just send one request. This could be really powerful because you’re sending it to them right then and there, they can actually leave that review while they’re still in the store.
Now I got mixed feelings about that myself, because it may add undue pressure to the customer, but all of my clients say it works great. So if it works, it works. There’s a proof point, so do it. Either an email or text or both. And I’ll show you that here right now. So we’ll send you, we have this form and we send you what we call a magic link so you don’t have to remember any credentials and we’ll just it.
And it comes up right here. Now this form is mobile responsive, so we don’t have an app per se, but you can save this URL as a link on your homepage of your phone and it comes up. If you are service oriented and you go to your client’s home or place of business, you can still pull up this form.
if they want email, you click email. If they want text, you click text. If they want both, you can do both. There’s no problems doing both whatsoever. So I’m going to put in Kyle, but it’s designed to not add them to the flow twice again, cause we don’t want to spam them. And I can’t think of any, but you know what? My wife. She’s going to call and say, “Why did I get this?” But we’re still gonna do it.
You know what? I’m going to leave it mine because I don’t want to give you my wife’s phone number. So that’s going to come up and say, it’s already sent it. So Cassandra Ray tags, you can put a tag if you have salespeople, I recommend you use the tag. Cause when you look at the reports, it’ll actually show the tag.
So you’ll know who requested and who’s getting those reviews. Now, speaking of salespeople, a tactic that I’ve seen that is very, very effective. When a sales person asks for the review, they will actually say,”If I did a good job, leave my name”. The reason why they do that is because, and I’ve seen this, customers are reading the reviews right now.
They’ll show up to the business and they will ask for that salesperson because they are seeing his name and how well he treated his clients. So it is great way for your sales person to get more business. As the business owner, that’s up to you whether you want them to do that or not, but again, it’s a tactic that I’ve seen work very, very well.
One example was at a car dealership that they actually tied a $20 bonus to every review that the sales person got with their name in it. So they actively encouraged their salespeople to have their name put in the reviews. But if you don’t want to do that, you can still see who’s getting more reviews.
You can still tie some sort of bonus to it, which is a great way to get your sales people involved with getting reviews. If they add that to the tag here. So, tag in now, we’ll see this may kick out. I know the phone number will kick out. I’d maybe have sent it to my wife before. We’ll see, we hit sand and does that dated, but yeah, the phone number didn’t go through because I’d already done it to myself. So that’s it from there, our platform takes over. You don’t have to think of another thing. You’ll just start getting those reviews. And this works, I am telling you this works so brilliantly.
I know I’ve talked about and other review videos. Clients that have, I mean, they’re already doing well, but they really ramped up there business by getting reviews. We work with a real estate school. She started focusing on getting reviews and she already had a really good, she was ranked high in and website traffic. She was in maps and everywhere she’s ranked really high.
We got to really go up there when she started requesting those reviews. Now she’s got better reviews than any of the other schools and. She’s getting record numbers every month of, of students enrolling. So it works. It is easy. This platform is not expensive.
So I highly recommend give us a call. Talk to us about this. Let’s see what we can do to help you get more reviews. It will increase your business. Thanks and have a great day.