Introduction

People rarely stumble upon your business by chance. Today, most buyers won’t click past the first page of Google—or go beyond the top 10 recommended local businesses they come across. In other words, when it comes to growing your business, it pays to be #1.

According to Moz, several important factors make up local search algorithms—one of which is online reviews. After all, you’re not going to rush out to a 1-star furniture store to outfit your new living room.

No, when you want high-quality items and a top-notch experience, you’re looking for those 5-star businesses. When your business ranks higher on Google, it builds trust and credibility—and improves your searchability.

So, what does it take to become a 5-star business on Google? We reached out to our community of local businesses to find out. And we’re sharing their best practices so that you can find your path to Google stardom too. In this guide, you’ll learn:

• The in’s and out’s of Google reviews and how to set up a stellar profile
• What consumers look for in best-in-class businesses so you can hit all the marks
• How to get more customers to leave reviews and how to respond to improve their customer experience

Creating a 5-Star Local Brand on Google

Approximately 97% of consumers use online search to find a local business or service—and the vast majority of those searches happen on Google. 

The top organic search result in Google receives 25% of clicks, and the top three receive 75% of clicks. If you’re not in the top three, this leaves little opportunity for your business to be discovered.

One way to propel your business into the top three is through 5-star reviews. While Google doesn’t factor star ratings into web search rankings, Google acknowledges these star ratings influence local search results and ranks.

“We started in 1995 and grew an office from no customers to the largest in the city. We did it the old-fashioned way—knocking on doors and advertising in the Yellow Pages. Today, if you can’t rank on Google, you’re in trouble.” –Ted Byrt, Owner of Ted Byrt Insurance

So, the more 5-star reviews your business has, the more likely it is to rank higher in search results, and the higher you rank in search results, the more people will find and purchase from your business.

But how do you get these elusive 5-star ratings? It all starts with the customer experience.

Going Above and Beyond Customer Expectations

Customers today have high expectations from businesses. Though price and location still matter, today’s consumers want to feel like their interactions with businesses go beyond a basic transaction. 

In fact, 84% of customers say that their experience with a company is as important as the products and services offered.

So what makes a customer experience good or even extraordinary? Customers want seamless, personalized experiences. It might sound like a tall order, but over 70% of customers say one extraordinary experience will automatically raise their expectations of another company. So, if you want to stay ahead of your competition, the experience you give your customers matters.

How to Improve the Customer Experience

Here are some easily implementable ways to create a more seamless, convenient, and personalized customer experience.

• Build a relationship with customers: Stay in contact through personalized messages that offer value to the customer.
• Ask for feedback: Show customers you value their opinions and learn what you can do better to improve the customer experience.
• Be responsive: Respond immediately to customers when they have a question. If you don’t have an immediate answer, it’s okay to say you don’t know and you’ll find out, but be sure to get back to them as soon as possible.
• Personalize interactions: Let customers know you care about them by offering a personalized discount or checking in with them and offering small gifts on special occasions like a birthday or a one-year anniversary of doing business with you.

When you do these things consistently, these small touches add up to a better customer experience overall. And happier customers lead to more high-star reviews on Google.

Building a Strong Online Presence

Local businesses are 1.4x more likely to have an average star rating of 4.5 or higher if they are proactive about their online reputation than if they are passive.

Maus Family Auto, for example, noticed that prospects were looking much more closely at customer reviews. “The car business has changed dramatically in the last two years,” says Devin Stotts, the Director of Online Sales at Maus Family Auto. “And our reputation as a dealer is one of the biggest things that people look at.”

Devin realized that Maus would need to not only increase their average star rating, but also respond to reviews—both positive and negative—to show prospects that they care about their customers and will work to resolve any issues. 

In addition to all of his other responsibilities, Devin was trying to manage the online reputation of all four Maus locations. He needed to find a solution that would make gathering and responding to online reviews much easier. 

With Podium, Devin’s team could send out review invites via text to customers. In their first full month with Podium, they received almost 100 new customer reviews. 

“If you look at most of our stores, we’re 4.3 to 4.5 [average star rating] across the board, which I can attribute primarily to Podium,” says Devin.

To ensure a strong online presence, it’s important to invest in the following:

• Create an engaging website: Every business needs a website. It establishes you as a credible business and is one of the first places people will look to learn more about your products and services. Make sure your website is professional-looking and reflects your brand.

• Build brand awareness with content: Once you have your website up, you can use it to increase brand awareness, educate customers, and improve your search rankings by creating content, such as blog posts and ebooks. Consistently creating content will help you build a much stronger online presence.

• Use SEO to drive more traffic to your business: Search engine optimization (SEO) is the strategy of using keywords in your content and website copy. Keywords are the most likely terms customers will use to search for the types of products or services your business sells. You can use Google’s Keyword Planner tool to figure out which keywords are most popular for what your business does. Then you can optimize for SEO by using those keywords in your headlines, subheads, website content, and any other content you create.

• Stay active on social media: While you don’t have to be on every social media channel, you should determine which channels your prospective customers are most likely to be on, and engage with them by posting content, following customers, and commenting on other people’s content.

• Update your profile on all online directories: Today’s online business directories are like the Yellow Pages. People rely on these online directories to find local businesses selling the products and services they need. According to Search Engine Journal, some top online directories are Google Business Profile, Bing Places, Yahoo, Yelp, and Foursquare. In addition, if your industry has industry-specific directories, such as Houzz or AutoGuide, be sure to keep an updated profile on those as well.

• Encourage positive reviews: The more positive reviews you have online, whether that’s on online directories, your website, social media, or elsewhere, the more you build trust and credibility with prospective customers. Make it easy for your current customers to post those reviews by texting them a review request after a positive interaction with your business.

Getting Customer Feedback and Reviews

Most consumers (77%) say they’re willing to leave a review, but only 10% do. One of the main reasons is that consumers simply aren’t asked to do so. As many as 76% of consumers will leave a review after being asked to do so.

The other barrier is that leaving reviews often requires too much effort. Your customers may not know where to leave the review, or there are just too many steps in the process, and they quit. If you want more customer feedback or reviews, you have to make the process as frictionless as possible.

One of the simplest ways to make this process easier is to use an online reputation platform that can streamline the entire feedback and review process by:

• Texting feedback or review requests with a link to where customers need to go to leave feedback or a review.
• Collecting all feedback and reviews in one centralized location for your employees to review and respond to.
• Monitoring review postings so you can see what reviewers are saying and respond promptly.

Mattress Firm Makes the Review Process Easier for Customers

“After we expanded our offering with Podium, the biggest area of opportunity that we solved was just making it easier for our customers to leave a review,” said Steve Barnes, Senior Manager of Omnichannel Integration at Mattress Firm.

The Benefits of Google Reviews

Today, reviews influence 88% of consumers in discovering a local business. But their importance in local search rankings continues to increase by more than 20% year-over-year.

In fact, getting regular Google reviews is one of the fastest ways to improve local SEO while also boosting your online visibility and reputation. Traditional SEO activities, such as using keywords in your content, are effective, but they can take a while.

Google reviews can work much faster, helping your business show up in Google’s Map Pack, which is the location-based results you see on a Google search results page for local businesses. While Google doesn’t openly share details about how they calculate local search rankings for their Map Packs, Google has claimed that they give attention to (1) Relevance (2) Prominence and (3) Distance. Reviews impact the first of these.

Google reviews also create more trust, and that drives more business. 72% of consumers say positive reviews make them trust a local business more than they may have. And the majority of 18-34 years have an even stronger trust in reviews—91% say they trust online reviews as much as recommendations from family and friends.

Another advantage of reviews is that they can help you grow click-through and revenue. A good collection of positive Google reviews increases the click-through rate when you show up in a search engine because your review rating will show up next to your business name in Google, increasing clicks through to your site.

Google reviews can also increase the revenue of local businesses significantly because of the increased visibility, SEO, feedback, and trust. And because collection methods are so much cheaper than other forms of marketing, a Google reviews strategy is one of the most cost-effective campaigns you can undertake, delivering maximum return on investment (ROI).

Google Review 101: How to Build a Strong Google Business Profile

A Google Business Profile is a free online tool that allows you to manage how your local business appears on Google Search and Maps. Not only is it simple to set up, but it’s a critical part of getting your business found on Google. According to one survey, 64% of consumers have used Google My Business to find contact details for local businesses.

Setting Up or Claiming Your Google Business Profile

Here is the step-by-step process for setting up your Google Business Profile:

1. Go to https://www.google.com/business.
2. Sign into your Google Account or create one. Then, click Next.
3. Enter your business address and create or claim your listing.
4. Fill out basic information about your business.

If someone else has already created your Google Business Profile listing, there are a few ways to take ownership of it.

1. Search your business on Google. Google will display what it knows about your business, such as your address, phone number, and a brief description of your services.
2. Select “Own this business.” You’ll receive a prompt to sign into your Gmail account. You’ll be prompted to create one if you don’t have one.
3. Once you’re logged into your Gmail account, select “Manage now.”
4. Google will send you a verification code by phone, email, or postcard.

Once you have your Google Business Profile, you can optimize it for reviews. We’ll show you how to do that in the next section.

Optimizing Your Google Business Profile

Optimizing your Google Business Profile for search results and converting customers to take action, such as calling your local business or visiting your website, can’t be understated.

According to recent research, 56% of actions on Google My Business listings are website visits, 49% of companies obtain +1,000 monthly views on Google Search, and a typical business gets 59 actions from its GMB listing every month.

To ensure your Google Business Profile is optimized, here are the most important things you need to do:

• Make sure your service area is as precise as possible: This is how Google will determine your search relevancy.
• Write your business name on your GMB profile identical to how you write it in other online locations: Make sure it matches your website and other online directories so customers and crawlers can identify your local business.
• Add your logo: This will provide a recognizable visual for customers who have previously seen your branding.
• Use call-to-action buttons: These will help you instruct customers on how to interact with your business, whether that’s calling you, visiting your website or something else.
• Add a business description: Use your business description to illustrate how you stand out from the competition and what types of products or services you offer. Keep your description clear and straightforward. Use keywords, but avoid keyword stuffing.
• Highlight any special services offered by your business: If you offer delivery, curbside pickup, no-contact delivery, etc., these are all great to call out on your GMB profile.
• Upload high-resolution photos: Google has found that listings featuring photos receive 42% more requests for driving directions from Google Maps and 35% more clicks through to a business’s website.
• Collect reviews for your GMB profile: Reviews are one of the top three features people look at when visiting a local business GMB page. A high frequency and volume of reviews will perform best.

At the very minimum, you need your hours, location, and reviews, as these are the three features on your GMB that consumers most often use.

How Google Reviews Impact Your Profile

The more reviews you get, the faster you get them, and the more diverse they are, the better your rank will be in Google. This means you want to strive to have a good mix of high-star reviews, new reviews, and high-quality reviews.

Strong Google ratings make customers 38% more likely to visit your business. And for those businesses considered “near me” by search, the top three results get the most site traffic.

While you want to ensure your reviews are highly positive (which goes back to delivering a great customer experience), expecting your business to achieve a perfect five-star rating is probably unrealistic. Instead, try to consistently generate high-quality reviews and respond immediately to any negative reviews to see if you can improve those ratings.

“We’re now having customers tell us that they chose us simply because we had the best reviews on Google. We got more reviews from Podium in one month than we had gotten in five years through our old method.” –Stephanie Glenn, Customer Service Manager at Paul’s Pest Control

Getting More Google Reviews

The vast majority of consumers leave a business review once a quarter or less. And a fifth say they’ve never left one. While not everyone is going to respond to your request for reviews, there are several things you can do to increase your success rate—and they all include making it easier and more convenient for people.

How to Ask for Reviews

Here’s how to ask for reviews—and get more people to say yes:

• Use text to make the request: Text invites can result in significantly higher response rates and enable businesses to collect as many as 15x more Google reviews than traditional email-based platforms. Over a third of consumers who receive a review invite by text leave one. Moreover, approximately 41% of consumers prefer text to communicate, while only 18% say they prefer email.

• Create a Google review link shortcut: By creating a Google review link shortcut, you can send customers text messages with a short link that they can click to review your local business quickly and easily.
• Add a review link to as many channels as possible: You can use your website, email, or social media channels to encourage satisfied customers to leave reviews. Most review sites offer widgets you can add to your homepage. You can also include a link and a call to action (CTA) for people to review your business in your email signature. On social media, you can post a screenshot of your best review and ask customers to leave their own feedback with a link to your Google review page.
• Use QR codes: In your local business locations or through direct mail, you can create a CTA for customers to leave reviews by scanning the QR code, which can take them directly to your Google review page.
• Ask partners and vendors: You can collect reviews from others who work directly with your company. Positive reviews by other vendors and partners reflect your business values and can help build greater trust.

“The biggest thing was the fact that we could send reviews via text message. Text message is a much better way to reach the customers than an email.” –Stephanie Glenn, Customer Service Manager at Paul’s Pest Control

How to Respond to Reviews to Become a 5-Star Brand

Unfortunately, not every review will be positive. However, all is not lost when you get a negative review. 56% of consumers say that a business’s responses to reviews have changed their perspective on a business.

Here’s how to keep positive reviews flowing and turn negative ones into positive ones.

• Read every review thoroughly: You should read every review and respond to as many as you can. The best practice is to read and respond within 2 hours for negative reviews and 24 hours for positive reviews. This helps you stay engaged with customers and allows you to quickly and proactively address any negative reviews.
• Responding to positive reviews: Thank the reviewer and invite them to return in a way that is engaging and relevant to them, such as offering them $5 off their next oil change.
• Responding to negative reviews: Make sure your tone is friendly and approachable. Apologize for the poor experience and do your best to resolve any issue. For example, you can welcome customers back for another visit with a discount or special offer. You may also want to invite the reviewer to move the conversation to a private channel to discuss the issue further and see how it can be resolved to their satisfaction.
• Flagging a review for removal: While it is rare for Google to remove a review simply because it’s negative (they take the word of user-generated reviews very seriously), you can flag a review for removal if you feel it’s fake or inaccurate.

Tips for Getting More Reviews

To keep your Google profile optimized, you must constantly get new reviews. To help you further increase your review numbers above and beyond where you are, here are a few other tips that can help you improve your response rates.

1. Consider the timing of your review requests: Determine when is the best time to invite customers to leave a review. One of the best times to ask is when there’s downtime in the sales process. For example, a good time for a dental practice or physical therapist might be after the appointment but before the customer has received a bill.
2. Set customers’ expectations for the review: Train your employees to ask in person during their interaction with the customer. Have them use active language that focuses on benefits, such as “leaving a review helps us create a better experience for you.” Then, let them know how they can expect to receive an invite to review your business—whether that’s text or some other channel—and when they can expect that request to come (later today, in a few days, etc.).
3. Incentivize reviews: While you can’t incentivize customers to leave a positive review—that’s against Google’s policy—you can incentivize them to simply leave a review. Consider creating a rewards system or promotion of some kind for when customers leave a review.
4. Reach out to previous customers: It’s not too late to reach out to past customers and ask for reviews. Start the request with a personalized interaction and a prompt about how they did business with you. Also, be sure to emphasize how quick and easy it will be.
5. Manage your reviews: It’s crucial to show your customers that reviews matter to you. This means responding to both positive and negative ones. Google’s Google Business Profile support page explicitly says responding to reviews “shows that you value your customers and their feedback” and helps “build consumer trust.
6. Use a reputation management platform: Collecting, responding, and analyzing reviews can be a lot of work for any business. The right platform makes managing reviews much less time-consuming and more efficient. 94% of local businesses using reputation management software say it provides enough ROI to compensate for the cost.

Why You Shouldn’t Game the Google Review System

Honesty and transparency is always the best policy for any business. Not only can your customers and search engines often easily spot fake reviews, but Google has a specific process for detecting Google business pages that engage in buying reviews or posting fraudulent reviews.

The consequences of getting caught can be dire for your business. Even though Google doesn’t take legal action as some review sites do, they can and will shut down your site and possibly your account. Without a Google My Business profile or page, it will be very difficult for your business to get found online.

4 Local Businesses Winning on Google Reviews

Now that you know why Google reviews are so important to your business and what actions you can take, here’s a glimpse at how other businesses have turned their own Google reviews fate around—and seen some amazing results.

Dunn Tire Revs Up Reviews

Dunn Tire is a locally-owned, regional tire store with 29 locations in New York and Pennsylvania. Despite a loyal customer base, they weren’t getting positive exposure or experience online. In fact, nine of their stores were under four stars, so they wouldn’t even come up in certain Google searches:

“We didn’t have any way to try to push people to leave reviews. So in a lot of cases, the only ones on there were bad, and we didn’t have many at all,” says Harry Schlyer, assistant call center manager.

Dunn Tires was able to steer its business to a better outcome by implementing Podium at each location. With Podium, the entire review process is automated. Everyone who visits any store location receives an invite the next morning. From this effort alone, Dunn Tires now has 4,500 reviews, a 41X increase in average monthly reviews—and the vast majority are positive, leading to a 5% increase in their average star rating.

“Now, we only have two that are under that, so it’s made some of our locations more visible in a broad search and just allowed more of the good experiences that we more often provide to be out there for the public to see,” says Schyler.

Gallery Furniture Lowers Paid Search Costs and Boosts Inbound Leads with More Reviews

Gallery Furniture set itself apart from competitors by offering same-day delivery, but as this has become standard among many large online retailers, they realized that their digital marketing and online presence needed some attention, especially their online reviews.

Using Podium, they began to combine sending invitations manually with an automated Salesforce integration to ensure each customer can leave feedback. This became such an integral part of their process that the owner built it into their compensation plan, making getting reviews part of the pay matrix for the sales teams. Since then, reviews have increased “exponentially,” according to Gallery Furniture.

“Podium has really shown us that we had a huge gap in the opportunity to receive online reviews. We have so many fans out there, but we just weren’t inviting them to review us. Podium gave us the venue to do that. Now that we are, we’re just seeing tremendous results,” says Daniel Marchione, Project Manager/Systems Administrator at Gallery Furniture.

“Our organic search results online now are incredible. It is amazing how we show up without even having to pay for Google search results. We’re not spending nearly as much on paid search results as we have in the past. We’ve had a ton of inbound calls as well because we always show up number one when people search for furniture in Houston. They could be searching for another store, and we’ll show up on top of the list, so they will call us.” –Daniel Marchione, Project Manager/Systems Administrator at Gallery Furniture

Valley Roofing’s Reviews Performance Goes Through the Roof

Valley Roofing & Exteriors recognized how critical positive customer reviews were to their business, but they didn’t have a great way to capture testimonials, let alone get them online.

Prior to Podium, Valley Roofing had collected a total of 22 reviews in 2019 – just under two per month. Once they allowed customers to leave a review by texting them, they immediately saw those numbers rise by 4.3x, garnering 182 reviews in just 24 months with an average 4.9 star rating. Best of all, customers now had a fast, easy way to share their thoughts on Valley Roofing with the community.

“Making sure that at the end of the job the customer is going to refer us—that has really kept us head above our competition in the area.” But in order to sustainably capture the fond favor their customers have, they implemented Podium to drive an impressive 182 reviews in just two years.”—Valley Roofing & Exteriors 

S&R Insurance Leverages Reviews for More Leads, Improved Client Retention, and Greater Growth

S&R Insurance serves a mix of consumers and commercial clients with property and casualty, home, and auto insurance products. However, a weak online presence made it hard to find new customers.

Without the knowledge of how to grow the business online, growth was flat. Reviews weren’t a priority and the results reflected that. “I think we had five reviews on Google. We really needed something to change,” said Jon Spaugy, co-founder and president of S&R Insurance.

With Podium, “it’s easy to request and collect reviews,” said Jon. Implementing a standard review ask has increased the quality and frequency of reviews. Plus, the business is responding to every negative review to see how they can turn it around and make the customer happy.

Reviews have also helped S&R improve client retention. “We estimate that when a customer posts a review, we keep that client 3x longer than we would if they didn’t write a review,” said Jon.

Today, reviews and the S&R Insurance Google Business Profile are the best lead sources for the business. “Even though we still pay for leads through lead services and we’re working in the community, our best lead source is Google. And it’s all from reviews,” said Jon.

Google Business Profile actions have also increased significantly. Clicks-to-call, directions to the business, and website visits have all been impacted by an influx of positive customer reviews. “The best business is referral business, period. We can’t generate that on our own. And today, referral business comes from reviews,” said Jon.

Make a 5-Star Effort to Get More Google Reviews

A strong Google review presence can provide incredible ROI for your local business. And the investment is often much lower than other channels, and you’ll see results much faster. Put what you’ve learned in this guide into action, and you’ll see the fruits of your efforts pay off with greater credibility, trust, and visibility for your local business.

Start getting more high-quality reviews with Podium.

• Collect more reviews: Use text to invite customers to review your and watch your response rate dramatically increase.
• Manage the review process more efficiently: Be able to review and respond to all reviews from a central location.
• Get found more often and get more business: By generating more high-quality reviews on your Google site, you’ll see a direct impact on your customer and revenue growth goals.

Start a free trial today.