How to Ask for Reviews for Your Business | Vicinus.ai
The power of reviews is not a secret. With many consumers relying on recommendations to make decisions about products and services before purchasing, customer review is imperative to building trust and creating sales for your business.
This means that generating reviews for your business is critical for SEO, most specifically for local SEO. This is because recommendations from real customers build trust and reputation in your business, allowing potential customers to consider a sale from you. Most people trust what is said about you, rather than what is said by you.
Why Should I Ask For Reviews?
As mentioned above, gaining recommendations for your business is critical to building trust in your business and developing the reputation of your brand.
Where Should I Ask For Reviews?
Gaining recommendations from your customers can be a difficult and time-consuming task, however, it really is worth it!
The best way to gain reviews is by making sure that they’re spread out across different platforms and not just concentrated on one specific area. However, this is because customers tend to trust recommendations spread out across various platforms as it is difficult to fak these types of reviews.
Unfortunately, fake reviews are common in many industries, however, this is usually quite obvious as many of the recommendations are concentrated on one specific platform. This means that spacing out recommendations over a few platforms is the best way to add recommendations about your business.
What Are Some Benefits of Reviews?
Showing Star Rating in SERP’s: This is even better if you are listed in the local pack. For more information about the local pack, please check out our blog post.
Showing More Prominently in SERP’s: GMB (Google My Business) counts as a ranking factor in searches. This means that the more positive recommendations you have, the more likely you are to rank above your competitors. GMB recommendations also surface in the Google Q&A section when customers are searching for answers too.
Customers Read Reviews Before Purchasing: As mentioned above, customers use recommendations in order to gauge whether your brand is trusted as well as to see whether the products/services you sell are recommended and suitable for them. This means that recommendations are necessary for sales.
CTR (Click Through Rate) Will Improve: Positive recommendations have an influence on CTR rate for your business.
Where Should I Ask for Reviews?
Having recommendations on various platforms will build your business’s trustworthiness (as mentioned above).
The places you should get reviews for your business are:
- GMB (Google My Business)
- Yelp
- Your Website
- Other Social media Platforms
- Other niche review websites in your industry
How Do I Ask For Reviews?
Asking for recommendations can be easy to do, but you might be unsure of what will be effective.
Below are a few ways you can ask for reviews:
Create a Template
Creating a template for reviews can be effective and time-saving too. Rather than explaining the review steps individually to each customer, having a review template is easy to do and is an effective way of communicating with your customers too.
2. Using a Review Tool
These types of review tools allow you to set up either an email template (as suggested above) or even a review page. This is a streamlined way to gain recommendations for your customers and allows you to focus on other areas of the business instead.
3. Using Links Across your Platforms
Providing links to your review sites on your emails, business cards, invoices, website and even social media channels is a great way of prompting reviews from your customers.
4. Email Customers After Purchase
This is an obvious way of asking for recommendations and is a great way of gaining a fresh and trustworthy review from your customers. A template can be used for this too.
How Can Vicinus Help With My Reviews?
Machine learning for customer reviews: Machine Learning-led sentiment analysis gathers location-specific consumer insights and assists with review auto-respond to build customer trust in business.
