It’s no secret that online reviews can make or break any business. We all look at reviews before we decide to buy something or do business with someone, from restaurants and hotels, to dentists or even a gift on Amazon. Reviews matter.
But how can you really take advantage of those reviews? We’ve all been to restaurants where the owner has hung up photographs of famous people who have visited the establishment. Why not take this concept to your business? You don’t need a photo (although it okay to add one), but simply take an online review, print it out and frame it, then hang it on your wall, perhaps right behind the cash register.
Now let’s do the same thing digitally. Put up your reviews on your virtual wall – your website! Proudly display your reviews to everyone who visits your site. There are two ways you can do this:
- Scour the web looking for reviews and copy and paste them onto your site, or
- automatically pull reviews in real-time from various sources such as Google, Facebook, and Yelp so they are always current.
The latter, while better, is a little more tricky, but I’ve found a great way to do this.
Start by going to: https://elfsight.com/all-in-one-reviews-widget/?ref=cdff0543-0426-42ca-8098-c80d119e80e2.(affiliate link). Scroll down and click on create widget.
Choose the content that you want to include on your site.
Start by opening up Google Place. Google reviews are usually the most important, so you will want to include them. In order to display Google reviews, you will need your Google Place ID. You can identify that here. This will display a map, and you can click on the location icon to get your place ID.
Copy this place ID and paste it into the elfsight program. Add in other websites from which you want to pull reviews. You can add in as many of the supported reviews sites as you wish. (Note: LinkedIn Testimonials are not supported, which is too bad. This is due to the LinkedIn API, not a limitation of elfsight.)
You may also want to filter the reviews. For example, you might want to only show reviews that are 4 or 5 stars, and not disply the negative ones. Or perhaps you don’t want to display reviews where no one wrote a description.
Now all that’s left is to embed the widget on your site. Copy the code provided and paste it as HTML where you want the reviews to be displayed.
Click here to see what this looks like on a page
Notice that there is a button right on the app that allows someone to leave you a new review here as well – all without having to go find the review site and locate your business. This makes it very convenient for getting new reviews, so you can just direct people to your review page.
Now if someone is going to say nice things about you, it is only appropriate that you thank them. I always recommend responding to online reviews, but you may also want to send a hand-written thank you note. Here is a previous post I did on how you can automate this.
Greg Jameson has been writing blog articles on ecommerce and internet marketing for over 10 years. Learn more about Greg at https://webstoresltd.com/about/
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