Google Reviews: Become a Local Guide

Level 6. Google sent me a pair of Google socks. Hey. All right, here's a quick video about Google reviews. We're all really struggling to get reviews these days. Google is causing all kinds of problems. And believe me, I work in Google a lot. And so I see a lot more problems than you do. And we're all suffering with the problems with reviews, though. But that also, I don't know. Do you believe in karma? Do you believe in what goes around, comes around? Like, how many Google reviews have you written for other people? And I think of that in terms of karma, but also just after this last few years of this pandemic bs Local business owners need our help. And Google is far and away the best place for a local business to have a profile. And it doesn't matter how much search engine optimization you do, if you don't have reviews, none of that stuff's going to work. So these local businesses need our reviews. And I wanted to show you something. I don't think a lot of people know about this, but if you go into your personal account, you can become a local guide. I don't know if you've ever seen that. Someone will write a review and it'll say they're a local guide level, whatever. So you can see here, I'm a local guide, level six. So basically, I've done things and I achieve points for the things I do within Google and I move up the local guide levels. There's 10 levels total. And I have been in level six for a while now. When I got to level six, Google sent me a pair of Google socks. Socks. I have a teenage daughter who likes crazy socks, so she got them. But the local guide thing is a good thing to look at and then possibly pursue higher levels because you're going to have more authority than a regular person because you are active in Google, you are actively writing reviews, you are actively, actively contributing to what Google's trying to do with local businesses. So they're going to give you credit for that if you go into your, your Gmail, then go to your Google account and then click on your profile and then open up Maps. You'll see. I'll go to my full profile here and I'm just going to take you on a little tour of this real quick. So here I am, a level six. I'm on my way to level seven with 5,000 when I get to 5,000 points. But I wanted to show you these points. All right, so let's open this up. Move my face. Okay, So I get points for Writing reviews, giving ratings, adding photos to the reviews. This has been a hard habit to get, get going. So I've written 142 reviews. Only 77 of them have included photos. Well, actually I've included 77 total photos. So some places get multiple photos. I'm trying to get in the habit of that. So this morning I went to a new Mexican place to get breakfast tacos and breakfast burritos and took some pictures of the building, the signs, the menu, stuff like that, and attach that to my review. When I do that, I get points. So I think the review I wrote this morning I got 33 points for because of the accumulation of all the things that I added. But these are all the categories and if you mess around, if you get local guide, then it's going to prompt you, hey, are there pictures that you want to add? Do you know anything about this business? It'll ask you questions like, is there handicapped parking? They'll ask questions like that. Are these the hours? Is this the kind of business this is? Google will ask the community questions about these businesses. And again, what goes around comes around. I'm trying to be way more attentive to other local businesses and help them because Google reviews are far and away the most important thing you can do on Google. And I want the good karma, I want my reviews to stick. So I'm trying to contribute as much as possible to the rest of the community. Let's see if I want to go further here. If I click on learning more about points, this explains a little bit. Yeah, here we go. For every review you Write, you get 10 points. If it's more than 200 characters, they'll call that a detailed review. 10 more bonus points, giving some stars. You get a point adding photos. So that's easy to do. You could add a lot of photos and get a lot of points. I usually add two or three. Sometimes it'll ask you to tag the photo. The last few times it hasn't asked that. But you can put in just like you're doing SEO and you need alt image text to describe what the photo is. It'll ask you here as well to describe the photo. It hasn't asked me that in a while. You can put video in due to answering questions, responding to Q and A's. This will come up randomly. And then the harder stuff is adding places, adding roads. That's harder to do. I think I've only done that a couple times. But you get these and then you move up the level. So I'm at level six pursuing level seven and then level ten is a hundred thousand points. But. But yeah, I wanted to throw that out there because we're all struggling with Google reviews. It's very important. So if you need reviews that bad, then, you know, ask yourself how many reviews have you written yourself? And think of it in an altruistic way. All of us local business owners, we've got to stick together. So if you are patronizing local businesses, man, throw them a review. They need it. We all need all the help we can get these days. The big tech companies and their algorithms were at their mercy and they're clearly telling us Google reviews are what we want. So let's give it to them and let's help each other out. And if you want to write me a review, I'll take it. But try to get in the habit of this when you're visiting your local businesses and give them a little help. All right? Have a great day.