Reviews 2021: Definite Guide

In this post I’m going to show you EXACTLY how to get more reviews for your business in Google My Business efficiently and fast.

Including 3 secret strategies

Guide for 2020

Reviews are extremely important. The more you have relevant real reviews on Google My Business listing the more traffic you will get
In fact, this is the exact process that I used to grow my listing to 33,600 views per month:

How I Grew My Reviews From “Nothing works” to “So easy!”

So if you want to get more reviews on Google My Business (or Facebook or elsewhere) then you’ll love this new How to get reviews fast in 2020.

Let’s dive right in…:

Before we get into today’s reviews tutorial, a quick story:
When I first started my business I struggled to get ANY reviews.

Fast forward to today, and my listing has 328 reviews on Google only:

34k views/month

Why is important? Because it is one of the main reasons I am discovered by 16,000 searches every month!

And about 9,600 visitors conduct some activity EVERY MONTH!:

In fact this strategy is so powerful that while I am writing this post, I got 400 additional views!

And the beauty of it that I don’t need to pay for clicks, create sales funnels on Facebook and other tricks. I get that traffic for FREE.

I decided to try this strategy with my fellow PMU artist from Omaha, NE. 

After a couple of months she got to the top of Google listing!

Aug, 2020

Now that you can see that I know what I’m talking about, let’s dive into the steps that I used to get these results.

But let’s talk about basics.

Why and how Google decides who to put up to the top of the list, to so called 3-pack?

Let’s do an experiment. I “googled” myself: I searched “microblading Miami Beach” here is how the search result comes

August 12, 2020:

How to get to 3-pack?

Relevence

Distance

Prominence

Relevance

Relevance refers to how well a local listing matches what someone is searching for. Adding complete and detailed business information can help Google better understand your business and match your listing to relevant searches.

In other words, Google is checking that your business is PMU or Microblading related. 

Main points where they check is your business description and business category (Permanent Make-up).

We cannot do much more than to choose the right category and create the proper description here.

Distance

Just like it sounds–how far is each potential search result from the location term used in a search? If a user doesn't specify a location in their search, Google will calculate distance based on what’s known about their location.

Same here: we are where we are. We cannot do much more than that:)

Prominence

Prominence refers to how well-known a business is. Some places are more prominent in the offline world, and search results try to reflect this in local ranking. For example, famous museums, landmark hotels, or well-known store brands that are familiar to many people are also likely to be prominent in local search results.
Prominence is also based on information that Google has about a business from across the web (like links, articles, and directories). Google review count and score are factored into local search ranking: more reviews and positive ratings will probably improve a business's local ranking. Your position in web results is also a factor, so SEO best practices also apply to local search optimization.

The only part we can improve if how much people love us on Internet.
Content on your webpage, social networks activity etc will help. No doubt!


But most important factor of all here are:

Reviews

Reviews are very powerful. Not just to get you to the top of search engines. Potential clients are checking the reviews prior to make a purchase or booking.

One of the most reputable SEO companies SEO, Moz, has recently published the report for 2020, showing that reviews became the second most important factor in GMB ranking behind only GMB elements, like keywords in the name, category etc. Even ahead of proximity!

July 17, 2020
https://moz.com/blog/announcing-state-of-local-seo-industry-report-2020

Secret#1.

Now let’s see what options do we have?

Nielsen Research about Yelp:

Problem with Yelp:
According to Yelp own guidelines:
You cannot ask for reviews!
But look at the upper right corner of the Infographics above

If not Yelp, Who?

Yelp gives us an answer: 84% turn to Google!

And Google is OK with you asking for reviews. In fact Google encourages business owners to solicit reviews and even suggests the mechanism:

“You can request reviews from customers through a short URL that’s specific to your business. To get reviews on Google, encourage your customers to spread the word about your business by following these best practices:

Remind your customers to leave reviews. Let them know that it’s quick and easy to leave business reviews on mobile devices or desktop computers. Learn how to leave Google reviews 
Reply to reviews to build your customers' trust. Your customers will notice that your business values their input, and possibly leave more reviews in the future. You can also create and share a link that customers can click to leave a review. Learn how to read and reply to reviews  
Verify your business so your information is eligible to appear on Maps, Search, and other Google services. Only verified businesses can respond to reviews. Learn how to verify your business
Reviews are only valuable when they are honest and unbiased. (For example, business owners shouldn't offer incentives to customers in exchange for reviews.) Read more in our review posting guidelines.  If you see a review that’s inappropriate or that violates our policies, you can flag it for removal.

Secret #1:

My first secret:
Don’t ask the clients for reviews on Yelp - you maybe punished severely.
Instead: actively and intensively request clients for review you on GMB - you will only benefit from it!

Secret #2

Back in the day, collecting reviews was a tactic that you threw into your business practice sporadically.

But to succeed today is not enough just to ask your clients for reviews. Why? 

Did you try to track how many clients you asked? And how many left actual reviews? In my experience “just asking” brings 1 review per 100 requests. People are nice and promise to do it but they tend to never do it, they are busy, forget, they don’t know where to go.



ALL REVIEWS PLATFORM FORBID ASKING FOR THE REVIEWS IN EXCHANGE FOR MONEY OR ANY FREE OR DISCOUNT OFFERS!!

Did you think of incentivizing them for the reviews? Offering them some free or discount services?

If you thought or did that
- you MUST STOP IMMEDIATELY

Not only this practice is unethical, it can be illegal in some states/countries.

Companies like Google, Yelp, Amazon, Facebook etc all have developed sophisticated algorithms to detect any fake or “bought” reviews. You can be punished severely by loosing many legit reviews, your ranking or even by being banned from the platform.

Same counts for so-called “review gating”. Review gating is a practice to filter out good reviews from bad reviews, and channel only good reviews to the platforms. I even saw some software products using that type of practice
.

DEVELOP YOUR OWN REVIEWS REQUEST STRATEGY

This strategy should include:

- Request delivery
plan: orally, through email or through text messages;

-
Schedule. Make sure that all the clients will receive reminders;

-
Tracking. You want to see who got your request message and engaged or not engaged. You don’t want to get on the nerves of the people who you approached 3 times already, they didn’t show any interest to leave a review but you keep bogging them. don’t approach those who already left a review. etc. You MUST have tracking;

- Make reviewing process for them as
pleasant and as effortless as possible. Studies show that 68% of the clients are ready to leave a review if asked. Your task to ask in a right way;

- All above is super difficult and time consuming. Use special software.

Secret #3

I have tried tens of different reputation management or review generation software myself. I installed and de-installed at least 10 of them to my websites. I spent thousands of dollars and enormous amount of time. You don’t have to. you can just take my advice.

Most of the software I used are pretty much reviews oriented spam systems and cost you between $80 to $500 per month!

But here is one that is perfect. I will explain
EXACTLY how it works and how to use it in the STEP-BY-STEP guide.



How to ask for reviews?

There are three ways available

Option 3 is the best

Why so?.
1. SMS opening rate is much higher compared to emails: some reserch found out that it's 93%.


2. The "bare" SMS message is boring and shows to the clients that you want something for business not offereing anything for the client. While SMS with bot - can be very interactive, entertaining and informative (if you opt to add some valuable info for the client)


3. Business SMS - cost you between $0.05-$0.10 for EACH "bubble", while bot-backed SMS - you only pay for the first "bubble", the rest of the messaging dialogue is free.


4. Bot will handle a VERY IMPORTANT psycological part for you. After a brief chit-chat (we recommend to program the bot that it wonders how the client's day going, if everything is OK, how the healing goes or similar: something to show that your business cares about the client); the bot can say something: "hey, we are reopening after COVID-19 lockdown, do you mind to give us a review on Google? It will take only 10 sec of your time, but it means a world for us!" And offer them a choice: "Sure, I don't mind" "No, I don't want to do it". Of course most of your clients would agree (we assume you run the business with client-oriented service in mind and most of your clients are happy). 

What happens next?

The bot says "Great! I made it super simple for you: just click on the button below". button says "Google" and when client clicks on it - he/she is AUTOMATICALLY redirected to your Google review page - no need for the client to search for your business, log in to your listing, find review section, find the page where they add reviews: all that is done by your bot!

Cool isn't it? I found that reviews to requests ratio with SMS-bot is 25-40/100 vs 1-2/100 with regular non-bot SMS or email campaigns.

I tried so many different systems, most of them cost me $100-500 a month. but nothing compares to 'the new kid on the block": botzzup.com.

It's free. It's super easy to use. you will get 50 requests for free. Then they have pay-as-you-go system, no monthly fees, no lock-in contracts of any type. It's about $0.14-0.20 per request depending on how many you buy. But it worth every single penny:

All other "cheaper" systems: they have monthly $100-500 fees on top of SMS. You pay for each sms, while on botzzup - just for the request, the bot "bubbles" are free. so for $0.15 you get 10-100 messages vs just 1 for $0.05-0.10.

And the most important part: it works! My friend and collegue, Autumn Lee, from Autumn Lee Artistry, Omaha, NE used it for a month and got 58 reviews in that 4 weeks on top of 40 that took her 2 years to collect!

But that is not all! I can share how you can avoid paying botzzup.com for requests and got them for free! i am not going to reveal it publically. Only to the closed limited group of PMU artists. If you want to know the SECRET#4, please fill in the form below. I will send you detailed instructions plus 2 other cool tricks!



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