How To Get Local Ratings & Reviews
If you are a prominent New York business owner, you should make it a point to get more reviews from your customers. The ratings or reviews help Google and other search engines determine the value of your business for their users. If you have a decent number of 4-star and 5-star ratings, Google will consider you a more valuable result on its search results pages, which means better rankings for your website.
Today, you will learn more about local reviews and Local SEO New York and show you why it is important to ask your customers to leave their reviews.
Google and Local Reviews
The first thing is to learn what Google says about local reviews. On the review datatype page, Google clearly states that it may display information from aggregate ratings markup in the Google Knowledge Cards that contain the details of your business. Google states that it uses the review snippet guidelines below:
Reviews and ratings must come from users directly. User ratings and critic reviews are not one and the same thing. Critic reviews involve human editors compiling or curating ratings information for local businesses and are completely different to user ratings.
Avoid copying reviews from Yelp or any other review website but rather collect them directly from your users then display these on your website. The focus on genuine reviews is quite clear. Add a name, photo, position, and any other public and relevant information about the reviewer. This is important for showing that the reviews are actually authentic.
Ask Customers to Leave Reviews in Person
It is actually quite simple since all you have to do is ask your customers to leave reviews. Yelp does not encourage this but Google actively promotes it. A coaching service asks customers to leave reviews after completing the coaching process on the Google My Business page and while it is an optimized website, it ranks at number 1 locally.
Asking customers to leave positive reviews might seem or feel odd but you might be surprised by the number of customers who are more than willing to do it for you. It is their way of showing appreciation of the great product, service, or friendly service you have. If you a believer in your business and you go out of your way to help your customers, they will definitely leave those glowing reviews for you. This is particularly important in local businesses where you know your customers and probably have been serving them for many years. All you have to do is ask.
Asking Customers for Local Reviews Online
Asking for reviews online is another important component of the overall local SEO New York strategy. Don’t hesitate to ask customers for reviews on your website, for instance, just after they make a purchase. If a customer was in need of your product or service so bad that he or she purchased it, they might be willing to leave a review about the overall shopping experience too. Even something as simple as “How can you rate your experience with our business?” can give you the local rating you are after.
You should definitely leverage Twitter too. Twitter works quite decently for local businesses. You will find a separate ‘community’ of tweeps that probably keep talking to one another on Twitter in your area. You can safely assume that most of them do visit local stores. Not only that, but they likely have an opinion on such stores and they could be willing to share those opinions.
A local shop recently won a national shop and many locals congratulated the owners of the business on Facebook. This is a great example of the perfect opportunity to ask for Facebook reviews. It is important to clarify a bit about Facebook reviews. Facebook reviews are also local reviews. On 5th Avenue in New York, is an Apple store that has more than 16,000 reviews with most of them being good while some are bad.
Local Reviews on Facebook
Facebook offers a wonderful opportunity for local businesses to get reviews. You must never underestimate the number of people that search for your business on Facebook. The issue about not copying reviews from the web also applies to Facebook reviews. It is very good to get them, but you should leave them on your Facebook page and get a different set of reviews for your website.
Negative Reviews Matter Too. Don’t feel bad if you get one, let this motivate you!
It might feel a bit awkward at first to ask for reviews, say, right from your email inbox, like in your email signature. However, it will encourage your brand ambassadors to leave reviews once they see the emails bearing that signature. You will obviously get some negative reviews from those that were not totally satisfied with your service or product. Negative reviews matter in the overall local SEO New York strategy.
Negative reviews are the perfect opportunity to go above and beyond in proving just how customer-driven you are. They give you the chance to solve the problem the customer has. Once it is fixed, ask that customer to share their experience with your business, so that others are able to see exactly what you have done to turn a disgruntled customer into a satisfied one.
Your job is to make customers happy then positive reviews will follow. Speed up the process by asking customers to leave their feedback.
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