If a testimonial, a referral, and your best sales person could procreate they would have an online review.
Reviews are that important.
How you get those reviews can help you or destroy your online exposure.
The frustration of trying to get your customers to go online and comment about your business has led some owners to seek outside assistance. Some companies have taken it to far.
Lifestyle Lift will pay $300,000 in penalties to the NY state Attorney General. Company Busted For Fake Reviews
Other tactics that may be ethical but can still get you flagged include:
- Writing reviews on behalf of customers and having them sign it, then posting it.
- Posting reviews on behalf of customers from one account.
- Posting from different accounts but only 1 IP address.
- Paying a company that has IP addresses in several locations to post on behalf of your customers.
The serious business owner that wants to capitalize using online reviews and also wants to avoid big mistakes should start with the video series below then read on.
If you find yourself in a position to question whether your online review methods are going to work long-term, think like a consumer.
If your life was on the line and you had to find the right Doctor and you were reading the reviews, what would you want?
You would want every review to have been written by a customer/patient that was so happy they were inspired enough to take the time to go online, log in to their own account, and write a review from their own home with their own IP address. No trickery, no extra push from the Doctor.
Understand that Google thinks like the consumer and does everything they can to fight the unethical people and the businesses collecting real reviews get caught in the middle.
The highest level of reviews (Level 7) are the reviews that your customers write by going online, logging into their own accounts, and posting reviews, spread out over a period of time. This is totally natural and that is one way to think like Google…as Google tries to think like the consumer.
This may be frustrating again to most business owners because it sounds like the answer is to DO NOTHING and hope for the reviews to flow.
Not so…
You can still ask for reviews or encourage reviews and feedback from your customers on specific review sites. You can make it easy for them by providing them a direct link or a QR code that takes them directly to the page where they can leave a review.
Businesses that collect the most reviews are the businesses that have it as part of the system, sales cycle, or follow up.
There may be a Level 8 and at the very least, even more power to your Online Review System.