YouTube video (Phil Risher) explaining manual and simple automated methods for obtaining more Google Reviews for local service businesses. Covers using Google Business profile's custom review link, tracking requests in a Google Sheet, manual outreach by staff, and light automation options (CRMs, Zapier, Mailchimp). Emphasizes reviews' importance for user choice and local ranking.
All right, in this video we are going to discuss how to get more Google Reviews with Zero Automation. I'll also give you a couple tips at the end on how to automate. So first off, someone goes to Google, they search for a product or service that you offer inside of your service area. Digital Marketing AGENCY Germantown MARYLAND so inside this local service pack here, these are the three organic searches. Obviously you can tell this company has zero reviews. Zero reviews. And we have 28 Google reviews. Just off face value, looking at this, you're going to pick the company that has the most reviews to at least go to their website and check them out. If you don't know any companies, think about Italian restaurants or whatever, you're always going to go to this one. So Google reviews are really important. So how can you get Google reviews? I've shared in other videos. If you go to google.com business to your homepage on your share review form, you can they give you a custom review link and it looks like this. So you go to your homepage, you go to share review form, they give you this custom link here. And if you take this custom link, you can embed it into emails, you can have QR codes off of it, you can do a lot of different things, but just straight up without any automation, you can take this code, put it in email and send it out to people. One way that we've found this, a lot of the companies that we work with, they might not be transactional, so they might not be right in front of the company. And so it might be a long process, like a restoration contractor, right? This is going on for three months to three years of a restoration project. And so you're interacting with a lot of different people. And if you don't have any CRM or automation tools and you don't know if it was a good experience and you don't want to just blast it out to people. For example, we have a client like this. What you could do is create a Google sheet and have a review request. And so basically what you could do is have your customer service representative that's closing out the file, place the person's name in here, place their email address and then have a simple thing that says, yes, I emailed them, I called them, I left a message. So that way you can track what's been done on this. To take it a step further, without any automation tools, you could go through and email them as the business owner, for example, or from the customer service representative, for example, or you can do leave a message and email or something like that. So this is one way, no automation needed. It's a manual process I always try and automate with my clients. We try and figure out solutions to help them automate this process because it streamlines it and it just gets reviews. This is very antiquated. One way that we found to automate this let's say you don't have a CRM. A CRM client relationship manager like Service Titan, Jobber, Housecall Pro, ServiceMonster, something like that, where you can automatically trigger emails that can be sent out after the job is completed. Highly recommend doing that because then you can just automate the process of getting reviews. Once you click complete this job, it sends out a review request form. Let's say you don't have a CRM. What you can do is still do this strategy and and then use a tool like Zapier for example. What Zapier allows you to do is to connect multiple tools. So you could connect your Google sheet with your Gmail or Outlook and so you could say once this person is this row on Google is added and maybe you place a yes here for a review request. Once you place yes here, then it automatically sends an email to that person from Outlook. And Zapier is an automation tool that allows you to do that. Another tool that you could use is something like mailchimp. Mailchimp allows you to automate emails and people flowing into your database, which this also helps with sending out a monthly newsletter because it allows you to mass email people and track your open rates and your close rates. And Zapier again allows you to connect with this. So with some of our clients we use app here to connect different automation tools so that we can use a Google form to trigger other things to happen. So that's more of the high tech automation side of things, but low tech. What you want to do is go to your Google my business, get that link for your review link and then start sending it out to people to get reviews. Maybe you could create a Google Review Excel spreadsheet to start automating the process. But Google reviews are very important. It's about 15% of your ranking on Google. But more importantly, the way people think when they look at it, they want to see Google reviews, they want to read people's real case studies that are genuine. So I highly recommend that be sure to like and subscribe to this video. If you are growing a local service business, be sure to subscribe. We post content about that. We grow local service businesses. If you want to see a video in the future, Be sure to comment below. I'll see you on the next video.
