Over the next few blog posts, we’re going to focus on increasing your online review presence across the 4 major players: TripAdvisor, Google, Facebook, and Yelp. Last week we addressed your TripAdvisor reviews. This week, we’re going to focus on getting more Google reviews.
Google. It seems like they own the internet, doesn’t it? It’s amazing how a simple search engine website named BackRub became the company that it is today. But I digress: we all know how important Google is. Let’s dig right into learning how to increase the number of reviews your business receives on their platform.
As we learned last week, the most effective way to get more reviews for your business is to just ask. With TripAdvisor, we could ask through an automated system called Review Express. However, Google doesn’t (yet) have something like that. Sadly we’re going to have to work manually on this one.
On the TechWyse blog, we found a terrific article covering an entire Google reviews strategy. Elijah covers everything you need to get started, and get optimized.
I have the link, now what?
Once you have your Google reviews link, you have a couple of options to get that seen by your customers. You can send it in email campaigns, linked in social media posts, and perhaps best of all, embedded in QR codes you have placed around your business. For instance, maybe on receipts, menus, tables, at your front door, etc.
Another way to send out your Google reviews link is on your WiFi page. You could display it directly on the main splash page or on a redirect URL. If you’re a Surge Social customer, we have an additional option for you: create an automation that asks anyone when they disconnect from your WiFi. When is the best time to do this? Probably 30 minutes to an hour after they leave. That way, the amazing experience from your establishment will still be fresh in their minds.
As we have seen, Google doesn’t make it AS easy as TripAdvisor to ask for more reviews, but it’s still not that difficult. In the next blog post: let’s take on Facebook!
