How many Google reviews does your business have?
Are you leveraging those reviews in your marketing?
Do you post your Google reviews on your website?
Reviews are the lifeblood of an online business. Yet, few businesses take them seriously. Yes, if you get a negative review, you are likely to freak out, whether that review is posted on Google, Yelp, or Facebook. But how often do you actively pursue positive reviews? And when you get those reviews, do you 1.) thank the reviewer, and 2.) repurpose that review on your website and social media? WebStores Team Member, Peter Brissette wrote an article recently about online reviews and your reputation. If you haven’t read the article, I suggest you do.
A couple of years ago, I wrote an article about review gating that shows you how to get more positive reviews while limiting negative reviews. That technique is still valid.
Make it easy for customers to review you
One of the things I like to do is use a url shortening plugin like Short Links to create links that are easy to memorize that you can share with your customers. For example, https://webstoresltd.com/review can be used to leave a Google review for my business and https://webstoresltd.com/nextdoor can be used to leave a review on Nextdoor.
This is much simpler than the long url’s generated by these sites that no one can remember. It’s easy to leave these types of links in your email signature block or on social media posts. And, you can simply tell someone in a conversation, “Hey, if you were satisfied with today’s work, can you leave me a review on Google? Just go to mywebsite.com/review – I’d really appreciate it!”
And of course, if you find these blog posts valuable, I’d love it if you left me a Google review at https://webstoresltd.com/review!
Posting your reviews on your website
Certainly you can copy and paste your reviews and post them to social media, or even to your website, but wouldn’t it be great if you could embed them onto your website so that when new reviews got posted, they would automatically update? Using the plugin, widgets-google-reviews, you can do exactly that. Here’s how.
This plugin displays Google Business Reviews on your WordPress website through a public and approved by Google API without crawling and other unofficial methods. A great feature that you will notice is that there is a ‘Write a review’ button straight on your WordPress site, which can greatly increase the number of Google reviews.
First you will need to create a Google Place API key and insert it into the settings.
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The you will need to connect Google using the places id. Using the plugins “Widget” tab, you will create a widget and enter the places id. The standard way to find your Google Place ID is to go to https://developers.google.com/places/place-id and search for your company name. Click on the orange button in the upper right and copy the places id into the field.
From the menu on the right, you can select between grid view or list view to display the reviews. A shortcode is displayed (such as grw id=”8876″) which you can paste anywhere on any page and your reviews will now be displayed.
Displaying Google Rating and Reviews on your site is the easiest and most effective way to increase your customer confidence and, as a result, increase sales!
By the way, with the Business version of this plugin, you can get better results, because it shows all reviews, auto syncs these, supports other platforms like Facebook, Yelp which you can mix and has many other great features! The Business version costs $85 per year, but it displays all your reviews, not just the most recent ones, and it combines all the reviews into a single plugin.
If you don’t need to show all your reviews or combine them into a single plugin, the same developer also makes a free version of a plugin just for Facebook reviews, and another for Yelp reviews.
I really recommend the business version of this plugin, even if your company focuses only on getting Google reviews.
I created a blog post previously showing an alternative way of doing this using a widget called ElfSight, You can view that article here.
If you need help implementing this for your business, give WebStores Ltd. a call.
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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