As Nicki Hicks, over at the Maine SEO blog reports, good reviews may improve your local search visibility. Before we talk about how to get these reviews, let's talk about how to leave them for other businesses.
Start with Google maps and enter in the business name, town, and state. My example is: "market street eats, portland maine".
Hit "search maps" and you see:
If the business has a particularly generic name you may have to search through some results. Once you've found the business you want to write a review for you should see a link called "Write a review"; click on it.
You can give your review a title, choose from 1 – 5 stars, and leave a detailed review. Then click "save." A few seconds or minutes later your review should appear.
That review is now available to anyone searching for the company in question, and can appear in Google maps as well as Google's local search. (And who knows where else, down the road.)
Whether reviews impact the search engine visibility of your business (seems to me that it's pretty easy to game the system), or if it just encourages some prospects to contact you, positive reviews are a good thing. Here are some suggestions on how to get your customers and clients to write them for you:
- Do a good job. Seems obvious, doesn't it? But if you're not doing a good job, then there's little chance people will want to go out of their way to write a recommendation or a positive review.
- Ask for a recommendation. Talk to your most satisfied customers, engage guests at the front desk, include the suggestion on a takeout bag.
- Show people how to leave a recommendation. Either write up your own how-to, or just print this post in part or in whole. Your call.
Also, don't lose sleep about a couple of mediocre or even bad reviews. Recent studies have shown that products and companies with mostly positive reviews do better than ones with only positive reviews. A perfect record can come off as authentic as astroturf.
And, if you're feeling generous (or even if you're not), feel free to review flyte new media. Let us know how we're doing.
Rich Brooks
Market Street Eats Fan
