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Make Your Presence Known: Get More Customer Reviews Online

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

Day in and day out, you’re churning out terrific work for seemingly appreciative customers. You have no shortage of confidence in the quality of your services. So how come your online presence doesn’t reflect that? Why aren’t your company’s customer reviews pages brimming with five-star ratings?
Unfortunately, it’s not enough to perform dependable dryer repairs or to install central air systems flawlessly. You also have to get the word out about your satisfying work. That’s why getting online customer reviews for your company is now a critical part of promoting your business. When prospective customers find your company online, they want to see how previous customers fared before they make an investment.
As David Streitfeld of the New York Times wrote in a recent article, “If you provide a service or sell a product and you are not reviewed, you might as well not exist.”
It’s simple: If you want to attract more customers, you need to get more customer reviews. Here’s how.

1. Make it as easy as possible.

Most people are short on time and patience, so make it as convenient as possible for them to leave you a review. After all, they’re doing you a favor. Don’t make them search high and low for your Google+ listing or Facebook page. Instead, there are a few ways to streamline this process for your customers:

  • Use an on-page feedback feature (like the Prospect Genius one!). Chances are, your customers are already familiar with your company website, so they’ll be able to visit your page, submit a review, and disseminate it to other review sites in a few simple steps—all without having to navigate away from your page.
  • Add a QR code or shortened URL to your business card and other handouts. Customers can use their smartphone to scan the code, sending them straight to your website or Google+ listing. This removes the steps they would normally take to type your URL or find your listing elsewhere. Alternatively, if you use a shortened URL (from bit.ly, for example), they’ll be able to type it into their navigation bar without much confusion.
  • Send an e-mail with direct links to your preferred platforms (e.g. Facebook, Yelp, Citysearch). When you send a follow-up e-mail to a customer to ask how their experience with you went, include a link to one or more of your business listings. This way, the links are already provided, and all the customer has to do is click their mouse to get to a review page. Plus, if you want, you get to influence where the reviews are posted.

2. Ask directly.

Most customers aren’t going to take the initiative on their own, so if you want a review from them, you’ll have to ask. You can call them, e-mail them, ask in person, or even put a reminder at the bottom of their invoice. This can all be done once the job or transaction is complete. However, many business owners have actually seen an increase in reviews by asking for a review before the job even starts. For instance, if you’re an appliance repairman, you could say to the customer, “If you’re happy with our work at the end of the day, would you mind reviewing us on Facebook?” With the idea in their head early on, they’ll be more likely to pay attention to your work and write a more thorough review.
Bonus: Directly asking for reviews also emphasizes your concern for customer satisfaction. When you call or e-mail a customer to see how their experience was, it shows that you care about them even after they’ve paid you. This helps to ensure repeat customers. 

3. Act quickly.

A customer is most likely to write you a review when the experience is fresh in their memory. If you wait even a couple of weeks after the house cleaning, car stereo installation, or gutter repair is complete, your customer might have already forgotten important details about the experience and therefore be reluctant to leave a review. Capitalize on their initial impressions and how they feel about the finished product before their enthusiasm wanes.

4. Offer incentives.

This tactic is pretty divisive, as many review sites forbid giving rewards or special treatment to customers who leave reviews. Sites like Yelp, TripAdvisor, and even Google all explicitly stipulate in their terms and conditions that they want honest, unbiased reviews that are free from any conflict of interest.
However, a major conflict of interest only seems likely if there’s a massive contest, prize, or future discount on the line. We recommend staying away from lavish incentives like that. Instead, you might consider offering a small, $5 coupon to the local coffee shop in return for a review (no matter what the review’s content). This gesture is enough to show that you value their feedback without it coming across as a bribe.

Two important notes when soliciting reviews:

  1. Don’t ask customers to create new accounts (especially on Yelp) just to leave a review for you. Strict spam filters will peg the first few reviews from a brand-new account as spam until the user proves his or her legitimacy. In the meantime, their positive review of your company will probably be filtered out, rendering it invisible to others visiting your page. In short, it will be a waste of a good review.
  2. Spread your reviews around. Don’t ask all of your customers to review you on Facebook, as that will leave your Yelp or Google+ listing totally useless to prospects who prefer those sites. Moreover, if you rely solely on one site, that leaves you completely at the mercy of that site. If there are any guideline changes or technical glitches, your listing could be ruined. So instead, give your customers options of where they can review you. Chances are, the reviews will stay pretty evenly distributed on their own. But if you do notice that one of your listings has significantly more reviews than the others, you can always stop asking for reviews on that particular site and let them pile up elsewhere.

Getting reviews isn’t easy, even when you’re consistently providing stellar customer service and results. But by using these fundamentals, you’ll be able to slowly and steadily pull in the quality customer reviews you want.

Customer Reviews and You

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

Got Reviews?

It used to be that just having a website was enough to set you apart from your competitors. But now, everyone has a webpage, and you have to set your site apart somehow… For many, the solution they choose is to make their website flashy and unique.
That’s good and fine, but when people are searching for a plumber, electrician, or other pro online, they’re not necessarily looking for the fanciest website or the one with the most bells and whistles. What they’re actually looking for is what other customers thought about your business. Whether you’re a roofer, car audio installer, or appliance repairman, online reviews can help show prospective customers what to expect from your company: the past satisfaction of other customers can predict the experience that future clients can anticipate receiving from you.
Customers can leave reviews for you in many places, including on Google Maps and on your business’s Facebook page. They can also e-mail them to you, and you can have the PG team post them on your microsite. In fact, the same review can do double duty if your customers put them on both Google Maps and your Facebook page, so encourage them to leave reviews where they can be seen in multiple places on the web. The most important thing is that the reviews are out there for prospective customers to find.
Perhaps you’re thinking that your customers aren’t going to take the time to write a review. While that might ordinarily be the case, you can make it worth their while to compose a review for you. Try offering them an incentive such as $10 off their next service. Not only will this help increase your stockpile of reviews but it can help assure repeat business!
Here’s an example of some great reviews on 919 Motoring’s website. Their reviews point out that:

  • Their prices are great.
  • They’re better than their competitors.
  • They’re honest and respectful.

Quite frankly, you probably couldn’t make up reviews better than these provided by their customers!

Faking It Isn’t Worth It

Speaking of making up reviews… Sometimes it might seem easier to just manufacture a few reviews and pretend they were written by customers, but that can get your company in serious trouble. It might look appealing to just dream up some reviews or “borrow” reviews from a similar company that’s, say, in another state, but this will end up biting you in the end.
Not long ago, the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) charged Legacy Learning Systems Inc. with disseminating deceptive advertising. This company, which sells a popular guitar lesson DVD series, settled with the FTC and will have to pay $250,000 to resolve the charges. The short story is that Legacy wasn’t even making up reviews: they were simply utilizing reviews written by a paid affiliate and promoting them as unbiased reviews. The full story is available here.
And the Legacy case isn’t an isolated incident: two years ago, a cosmetic surgery company got caught writing fake reviews. They were charged in New York State for forcing employees to write fake reviews raving about how fantastic the company was. They also settled, to the tune of $300,000 in penalties and costs. You can find the full story here.
In short, fake reviews equal real pain. When you’re obtaining reviews from customers, it’s probably a good idea to save a copy of the e-mail or at least save their contact info. That way, should you be required to prove the review came from a real customer, you’ll be able to!

One Negative Customer Review Is Better Than No Reviews at All

Last Updated: August 17, 2017

You know the old saying, “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all”? Sometimes you want to shout that at your computer screen when you read a negative customer review about your local business. But guess what? Customers who complain are actually doing you a favor.
Now, hear us out. Obviously, customers who write you glowing reviews are doing you the real favor. However, as it turns out, negative customer reviews can still be mildly beneficial to your overall web presence. Indeed, they’re better than no reviews at all!
Are you surprised to hear this? We were taken aback when we made the discovery, too. However, with one of our clients, we saw firsthand that a Google listing with a negative review outperformed one with zero reviews. So, how can you apply this new rule to your own online efforts? Keep reading to find out.

A Negative Customer Review Still Proves Authenticity

It seems kind of backwards, doesn’t it? Google has demonstrated time and time again that business listings with higher overall ratings will perform better than ones with lower ratings. In fact, on its Google My Business Help page, it states, “Google review count and score are factored into local search ranking: more reviews and positive ratings will probably improve a business’s local ranking [emphasis added].”
That’s why, when we saw a negative customer review come in for one particular client, we winced. They hadn’t prioritized collecting reviews, and this bad one was their only review. We assumed this lone negative review would surely hold back the client’s local ranking.
Yet, we were dumbstruck when we saw this client get significantly more phone calls than other clients who had zero reviews. And that’s when we recalled the first part of that quote from Google: review count. The number of reviews, in combination with the score of those reviews, is a factor in local ranking. Judging by our firsthand experience, your review count may even outweigh your score—at least, when the review count is one versus zero.
This is because your total number of reviews reflects how many customers you’ve had, and, therefore, how established you are as a business. Google cares strongly about credibility and authenticity. So, even though it’s a negative review, it at least proves you’re a real business with real customers. In Google’s eyes, that appears to count for something.
On the other hand, when you have zero reviews, Google has no proof whatsoever of your authenticity as a business. When you look at it this way, it makes sense that Google would favor a negative review over no reviews at all.

Get More Customer Reviews to Improve Your Ranking

Your takeaway here? Get more customer reviews. Period. Positive reviews are ideal, but, as we’ve discussed, any review at all is better than nothing.
Of course, if getting customer reviews were easy, every local business would have dozens of them. We know it’s a difficult task. However, as we’ve demonstrated, reviews are critical in improving your Google Maps ranking and increasing your new customer leads. In other words, gathering customer reviews may be time consuming, but it’s certainly worthwhile.
But, there’s also an alternative to doing all the work yourself. Do you have a little wiggle room in your budget? If so, we highly recommend using a professional service that will contact your customers on your behalf. They’ll ask these customers for reviews, direct them to your Google listing, and collect the reviews for you. In the past, we’ve successfully used Customer Lobby for our own customer review efforts.

How to Ask for Customer Reviews

However, if you decide to save money and get more reviews on your own, here are some tips to keep in mind:

  1. First, identify your best customers—the ones who loyally come back to you, and the ones who you’re confident will give you a good review. These people are more likely to help you out. (However, feel free to expand your list to include any customer from the past few months.)
  2. Next, contact these customers by phone or email and ask them directly if they would take a few minutes to leave you a review online. Tell them your preferred platforms: Google Maps, Facebook, and Yelp, in that order. This should give you an initial boost in your number of customer reviews.
  3. Then, develop a plan for future customers so you can start getting a continuous flow of reviews. Add an on-page feedback tool to your website (available through Prospect Genius). This way, customers can write a review in one place and the tool can disseminate the review to other platforms.
  4. In the future, ask customers at the very beginning of your service, before you’ve even started the job. Say, “When we’ve finished, if you’re happy with our work, please consider leaving us a review on Google.” This will plant the seed in their minds.
  5. Finally, remind customers again as soon as the job is complete. Attach links to follow-up emails, mention it in follow-up phone calls, and even add it to the bottom of your invoices. Customers are more likely to leave you a review while the experience is still fresh.

And, to make it even easier for you, here’s a handy infographic!

How to Get More Customer Reviews Just by Asking for Them

A Negative Review Is Better Than Nothing

By now, it should be clear that getting more customer reviews, even if they’re negative, is essential to your local ranking on Google. A negative customer review, despite its content and low score, will at least prove your authenticity as a real, local business. And, as you know, Google cares about authenticity first and foremost.
So what are you waiting for? Get out there and start asking for reviews. Your local visibility depends on it!

Scoring Reviews: Make It Easier for Customers to Review Your Business

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

I’ve mentioned in the past just how important it is to have customer reviews on your Google Places listing, but it’s vital enough that I can’t say it too often! Reviews are a great way for prospective customers to evaluate your business by seeing what past clients are reporting about their experience. But that’s not it. Reviews also contribute to higher rankings overall. To put it bluntly, if you don’t have reviews on your Google Places listing, you’re not giving your business a fair shot at reaching its fullest potential!
Which leads us to the age-old question, how can you get more customers to leave reviews for you? The short answer is make it worth their time and effort. This has two very important elements, offering incentives, but also simplifying the process of posting a review as much as possible. The easier it is, the more likely people are to do anything, including reviewing your company.
As you probably already know, your LeadTrax™ site from Prospect Genius comes with an optional “Review My Business” button. This handy button links directly to the Google Places listing that we already manage on your behalf, so it’s simple and straightforward for customers to leave reviews. That’s half the battle when it comes to persuading them to write you a review. In fact, since we debuted this convenient feature, countless businesses have already seen a dramatic increase in reviews after adding the button to their site.
If you don’t see the “Review My Business” button already on your LeadTrax™ site, adding it is easy. Just give your account manager a call and we’ll take care of it!

ScamWatch: Positive Reviews Used As An Offensive Weapon

Last Updated: February 24, 2025

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In the competitive world of local business, your online reputation is everything. A few great reviews can bring in a steady stream of new customers, while just a handful of negative ones can scare them away. Unfortunately, some people are exploiting this reality in the worst way possible—by weaponizing fake reviews ( both negative AND positive 😲 ) against their competitors.

That’s right. While you’re working hard to earn honest feedback, others are playing dirty, using fake reviews to damage competitors’ reputations or even get them penalized by platforms like Google. It’s a growing problem that you must monitor vigilantly or you risk the brutal result once the hammer drops.

The Two Types of Fake Review Attacks

There are two main tactics bad actors are using in these attacks and we’re primarily (so far) seeing this on Google.

1. Buying Fake Negative Reviews to Damage a Competitor’s Reputation
This is the most-common, least creative, and has been going on for the longest. In this scenario, someone hires a service or uses fake accounts to flood a competitor’s profile with 1-star reviews. These reviews are often vague, fabricated, and designed to scare off potential customers. For example, you might see reviews like, “Terrible service. Never using them again,” with no details or records of an actual transaction.

As you know, negative reviews directly hurt a business’s visibility on platforms like Google and reduce customer trust. Even a few fake negative reviews can impact your bottom line because a high star-rating can plummet quickly from just a few negative reviews.

2. Buying Fake Positive Reviews to Get a Competitor Penalized
This tactic is more underhanded, far more creative, less obvious, and MUCH harder to defend against. Instead of posting negative feedback, an attacker buys obviously fake positive reviews for their competitor. The attacker actually WANTS them to be obviously fake because the goal is to have Google detect and flag them as such.

Why would someone do this? If Google suspects you’re engaging in review fraud, they will very likely suspend your Google Business Profile (GBP). They may even take more drastic action on your account itself. The problem is that in this case, you’re the victim! So first you’re victimized by this bad-actor, and then you’re victimized again when Google punishes you for something you didn’t do. It’s a truly horrific type of sabotage that is hard to spot and even harder to get out from underneath.

How to Spot a Fake Review Attack

Whether the reviews are negative or suspiciously positive, there are some telltale signs to watch for:

  • A sudden spike in reviews, especially from accounts with little to no history.
  • Reviews with generic language like “Great service!” repeated multiple times without details.
  • Negative reviews that mention services you don’t offer or describe situations that never happened.
  • Multiple reviews coming from locations far outside your service area.
  • Positive reviews that seem over-the-top or too frequent to be genuine.

If something seems off, trust your gut. It’s better to investigate early before the damage piles up.

What to Do If You’re Being Targeted

If you believe you’re the victim of a fake review attack, you need to act quickly but calmly. Here’s some suggestions:

For Fake Negative Reviews

1. Flag the Reviews to Google:
Log into your Google Business Profile and report the suspicious reviews. Be thorough in your explanation, pointing out why you believe the reviews are fake.

2. Respond Professionally:
While you work on getting the reviews removed, post a calm and polite response. Something like:
“We take customer feedback seriously but have no record of this experience. If this was a genuine concern, please contact us directly so we can resolve it.”
This shows potential customers you’re paying attention and taking the issue seriously. Remember, as with all negative reviews, you’re not really writing a reply for the reviewer. That person is likely beyond saving so you need to salvage what you can, rather than try to argue with an obstinate opponent. Instead, you’re writing it for the prospect who reads the review. Keep that in mind and you’ll find it easier to craft an appropriate reply.

3. Document Everything:
Take screenshots, note dates, and track patterns. If this becomes a recurring issue, you’ll want a record of all suspicious activity.

4. Get Help if You Need It:
Dealing with review removals can be time-consuming. If you don’t have the bandwidth, our StarSaver service is designed to handle these situations so you can focus on running your business. You can even sign up online in just minutes.

For Fake Positive Reviews

If you notice a flood of overly positive, obviously fake reviews on your profile, it could be a competitor trying to get you penalized.

1. Flag the Reviews to Google:
Just like with the negative reviews, log into your Google Business Profile and report the suspicious reviews. Explain the situation you’re seeing as thoroughly as possible. Your story will be received as far more credible is you get out ahead of any action taken by Google, so don’t delay this step.

2. Increase Transparency:
Consider making a public statement on your website or social channels, acknowledging the suspicious activity and reaffirming your commitment to honest feedback.

3. Strengthen Your Real Reviews:
Yes, we sound like a broken record on this issue, but the best defense is preparing early. No one tries to build a fort only AFTER the attack has begun. Instead, the walls are built and reinforced in advance so that most attacks can be easily repelled. It’s the same here. If you have 10,000 positive reviews, even 100 negative ones will be a drop in the ocean. This takes time, but the best time to start is right now!

4. Keep Monitoring Your Profile:
Review attacks often come in waves. Stay vigilant and check your profiles regularly to catch any future attempts early.

Stay Proactive and Protect Your Reputation

The rise of fake review attacks is an unfortunate side effect of how important online reputations have become. While you can’t always prevent bad actors from trying, you can take steps to protect your business and respond quickly if you’re targeted.

Focus on building a strong foundation of genuine reviews from happy customers. Stay alert to any suspicious activity, and don’t hesitate to take action if something feels wrong. And remember, you’re not alone in this. If dealing with fake reviews feels overwhelming, reach out and we’ll be happy to help.

Your online reputation is too valuable to leave unprotected. Stay vigilant, stay professional, and don’t let scammers get the upper hand.

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