It’s in your best interest to leverage your responses to the Google reviews you receive. You should also be using the Google My Business listing (GMB) tools to help ensure that you’re listed above your competition. There are a few things you can do to make sure you’re using local SEO to your advantage here.
Encourage Your Customers to Leave You Reviews
One of the best ways to grow your Google My Business listings is to get people to review it online. Not only is this free but it’ll help with your organic local SEO. People who visit your listing want to know that what you’re saying is true and third-party confirmations are the best way of proving this, especially if you have at least a dozen 5-star reviews. To get your customers to leave these reviews you’ll need to send them emails or postcards or you can verbally communicate your need. Along with their written review, you should ask them to also post original photographs as these will provide even more visibility to your profile.
Don’t Engage in Spammy Tactics
Google is smart enough to know when you’re trying to cheat them by engaging in the creation of automatic content or doorway pages or by stuffing your page with keywords. You don’t need these things anyway since customers trust real, honest reviews more. When a review site catches you doing any of these things, they’ll flag your website as dishonest and users will see a popup warning them of your dishonesty. This also happens when you offer incentives for people to leave you a positive review. Things can be even worse if someone mentions in their review that they received this incentive for writing the review.
Always Respond to Negative Reviews
You should always do best to preempt any negative reviews before they occur. If you can’t do this, make sure you respond to them once they’re posted. Of course, this means that you must make sure that your business is running well and that you’re always catering to your customers. When something does go wrong, be understanding in how you address the issue. Your main goal here is to make your customer happy in the end. Oftentimes this requires you to reach out and make an apology – something that will show you care about your clients even after they’ve conducted business with you.
Make use of new Google My Business Listing Tools
Make sure you take advantage of the recent additions Google has made to their Google My Business listing tool. For instance, the marketing kit lets you create stickers, posters, and social media posts advertising your business’ promotions and events for free. This tool will also let your users follow your local profile will have access to your social posts, offers, events, product updates, and blog posts. You can also use Google posts to creatively advertise your coupons, deals, and events.
The best part of using this advertising tool is that it offers you great analytics, showing your users have interacted with your posts. With this information in hand you’ll be able to create better posts for the next time. This is why many people are anxiously awaiting Google to roll out even more tools such as their upcoming “local favorites” feature.
Conclusion
With all the effort Google is putting into their new tools it’s no wonder they’re encouraging you to use them to build up your business’ local SEO. Doing so will help customers find you then when you encourage them to leave positive reviews, you’ll gain even more customers. For help with any of this, contact the Local SEO Company today.