Get at least ten Google reviews or Google treats your business as invalid. After that, beat your top four competitors' review counts. Use a CRM to email clients one at a time with direct links to your Google review page, never in bulk, to avoid looking like you're gaming the system.
probably the most significant thing that you can do on Google that will help you more than anything else that you do, any, any other one thing that you do, and that is ask for and get reviews. And you need at least 10. If you have under 10 reviews, Google does not look at you as a valid business. So 10 is your initial goal. If you already have 10, then I want you to look at your competition within Google and see how many reviews your, like, top 4 businesses that you're competing with, um, have. And your goal is to have more than whatever that number is. So if it's only 20 and you have 10, you're halfway there. If you're in a highly competitive business and you've got somebody that has hundreds of reviews, literally your goal is to have the most of your competition. And it's not something that you want to do overnight. So like if, if Google sees that you've had, I don't know, 20 reviews added in one day, they know that's not realistic, and they figure that you're kind of doing something to game the system, and they'll take them down. So don't do that. But just add this as something that you're going to work on. And the way I ask for reviews, especially in my website business is when I complete a website, I have within my CRM a campaign already set up for reviews, and I just add that completed website business owner to that campaign so that they get an email. And that way I'm not sending out, you know, like a massive amount of emails and people respond more than what would be a natural thing. And Google would flag it. I just do it like one at a time. And in the email that I send out, I list in order of importance to me, um, different places where people can leave me a review. So I naturally list Google as number one because that's the most bang for your buck. Um, if you are a Yelp fan which I am not, um, you can put Yelp on there. Uh, I put Facebook, my Facebook business page on there because people can leave reviews on the pages. And there's a few other places online that I like to gather reviews, so I put those in there. And then at the end I put, if you want to leave a review but you don't want to do it online and you want to just email it to me, then I will add it to my website. And so that's kind of how I handle it. And when I put a— in that email, I don't just say, get, you know, give me a Google review, but I actually link to where they would leave a review so that all they have to do is click a link and it's easy to find. Instead of having them, you know, look for my business online and trying to figure out where to leave a Google review. You want to make sure that you're linking directly to it, so make it as easy as possible for your clients.
