 Hi, everybody. It's so nice to follow Brittany. Isn't she just the most positive and enthusiastic person in our industry? So this is my ninth Moscon. I've been to nine Moscons and two Moscon locals. And Moscon's been such a permanent fixture in our life for the past decade that when my daughter was three, she thought I worked at Moscon. So in 2012, I got invited to speak as one of the community speakers. This is the first time I've been invited as one of the primary speakers. And so I'm incredibly thrilled to be here and incredibly grateful to Moz for all they've done for me in my career this past decade. And today is extra special because my amazing daughter and wife are somewhere out there in the audience. So hi, Violet. OK, let's talk about reviews. And the incredible power that reviews have to drive business for your business. Now, reviews are not just for local businesses. Any business can benefit from online reviews, Google reviews. Moz is a great example. They've got 50 Google reviews, 4.5 rating. These are all unsolicited. They're not asking for them. They just show up automatically. And when someone Googles a brand, that local knowledge panel shows for almost all businesses. This is a global SaaS company. Whitespark is another global SaaS company. And we actively recruit reviews. So we have 194 Google reviews. And they're all five stars. I think we got a trickle of not so five stars, but excuse to five. And we use these everywhere. They're super valuable for our business. We put them up on our website in like a testimonial section. We direct people to them. Whenever I send a proposal, I'm like, oh, check out our reviews on Google, see what our customers are saying about us. They're super valuable. And they're very visible. They show up all over Google. Whenever someone Googles your brand, and if you're a local business, they show up in the local finder as well. They're super valuable. So Mike Ramsey, he astutely pointed out that these entity panels, so if you're not a local business, you're one of these global businesses, you can now claim your entity panel. And so it's not a far stretch to think that a lot of these Google My Business features, like Q&A, Google posts, reviews, will start being added to some of these global businesses. And so the opportunity is there. We can see this coming. It's already there for most businesses, but even some of these more like super global businesses, we can see reviews coming in for them. Reviews become more and more important as Google sends less traffic to your website from the local listings. So the local packs, back in the day, they used to send your customers to your website. You click on a local pack result, and you go to the website. These days, they all go to what's called the local finders. You click a local pack, it's a local finder, and the finder is just packed with information. It has your questions and answers. It has photos, all of your contact info. It's got reviews, Google posts. So Google is specifically wanting to keep you in the local results. They don't want to send you to the website anymore. Sundar Pichai at the Google IEO, he specifically stated that searches obsessed about getting users to the answers quickly and giving them what they want. And this really ties into their move towards voice search. So they want to be able to have the answer at hand so that they can deliver the results via voice search, and that's why you're getting so much less traffic to the websites. Plus, reviews do impact rankings. So in the 2017 local search ranking factor survey, it was the sort of cluster of factors that had the largest increase, and we're gonna see that increase continue to rise as reviews have more and more impact on local rankings. This slide and plus one other is the only ones I ever talk about rankings because reviews are so much more than rankings. Reviews really drive business. It's a massive conversion factor, and that's where the huge value is. You should definitely do them for the rankings but also for the conversion factor. And think about it logically. When you're searching for a business and you see a result like this, which one are you gonna click, even though they rank number three in the local pack, that's the one you're gonna be drawn to. But this opportunity's not gonna be there forever. What, think about like two, three, five years from now, when everybody has 100 reviews and they're all five star, it doesn't become a differentiating factor anymore. Right now is the time that you can capitalize on this differentiating factor of reviews, and so you should really take the time and work on your review strategy. I wanna tell you this great story about Egerbeaver Moving. This is the moving company that moved us about four years ago, and then we started talking about SEO. And so when we first started working with them in 2015, they had four Google reviews and a 4.2 rating. So we got working with them on a review strategy, did a whole bunch of things with them. At that time, they were getting about 20 leads per month from Google. And so now, after working on all that review strategy they have 81 Google reviews and a 4.8 rating. But the reviews themselves are so valuable. They've actually, the reviews have become this business's sales team. If you think about sales processes and objection handling, all of their objections are handled by the reviews before the customers ever pick up the phone to call Egerbeaver. The reviews say things like everything was professional and the guys were friendly and easy to work with, they put down mat so they wouldn't mark up the floors, they stayed in constant contact with us, the price was fair and I could use my visa. Like all of these questions that customers might have in their head, they answer them by reading the reviews and so they become convinced that this is the company for them. Our move with Egerbeaver was without question the best we've ever had. And so it's amazing what it's done for them. Now, I asked him just recently how many leads do you think you're getting from Google? He says, I got over 10 to 15 per day. So that works out to like 350 leads per month from Google. That's a 1600% increase in the leads he gets from Google. And I asked him to send me a photo, but he didn't. So I decided I'm gonna use this one which I think represents how he feels about his reviews. All right, let's talk about how you can get more reviews. There's lots of tips and tactics for doing this but the number one tip and tactic is simply that. Ask every customer. If you just do that, like if you just get up and walk out right now that is enough for you to have a massive impact on your review acquisition. It's just doing the ask and you talk to lots of agencies. It's like pulling tea, trying to get their clients to ask for reviews. But it's so valuable, it's the one thing, it's enough. And if there was a rule that's even better, it's always follow up. And so you send the initial one and you always send the follow up. If you do those two things, you're 80% of the way there but I got more for you than just that. You're gonna need a link to your Google listing. Back in the day when it was Google Plus and prior to that it was Google Places, there was a direct URL that referenced your business on Google. They don't have that anymore. So it's now like if you do a search for your business with address, you're gonna get what's called the local, the local or the knowledge panel and in the knowledge panel has a writer view button. So we have a quick little free tool that you can use to just type in your business and it'll generate a link for you and shorten it that you can then send to your customers. So that's a free little tool. And then once you have that link now, you can just send it to everybody in many different ways. One way would be the back of your business card. So the front is your contact info. On the back it would be like, please check out our reviews and we'd love one from you as well. Here's a link. If it was a retail type thing, you could drop a card in the bag with the receipt. That would just say, please review us. If it was, let's say auto dealer or a mortgage broker with their closing of the sale package, you include a little card that encourages reviews. This pizza place has it on the bottom of their receipts, which is a smart way for restaurants to stick it on the receipt. You can put in your email signature. Hey, check out our reviews and we'd love one from you as well. That's a smart place to put it there, especially if you've already emailed them in the past and they never followed through for it. Every time you have contact with them, it's still there to kind of remind them that you'd really love that review. Automated emails, this one's pretty amazing because this is an email that I get from my hair salon and I was getting this automated email from them and I told my stylist, hey, you should add this little thing where you ask for a review right in that automated email. So he started doing that two years ago. He went from like 20 reviews, now he was 147. They did that one thing. It's all they had to do was just throw it into this automated email with the short link. So I generated the short link for him and that has really driven their reviews and this 147 in our city of about a million people compared to every other hair salon, they have like 10, 20, 30. He's got like far and away the most in the entire city just from doing that one little thing. So it can have a huge impact. A newsletter is centered a monthly, weekly newsletter. You can highlight one of your customers' reviews so Roxanna can feel good that her review got featured and then when other people see other people reviewing it tends to breed more of that positivity and they might be inclined to leave a review as well. You can put up a sign in your office and waiting room. So I always think about this because a couple years ago I left a review for my dentist while I was sitting in the waiting room and I always thought like, you just have a sign there. It just says, hey, please leave us a review and if you have that sign it can really, people are just sitting around doing nothing anyways so it really reminds them that that stuff is valuable. You can put a sign on the door, kind of like the people love us on Yelp stickers, that kind of thing, you can make a little sign like that. Ask for reviews on social media. Hey, we'd really appreciate a review. This small thanks with Google thing. I don't know if you've ever checked this out. I feel a bit embarrassed as a local search practitioner that I always heard about it when it came out. It's been around for a while but I never actually logged in and tried it until recently until I was preparing for this. It's amazing. They generate all of this awesome stuff for you. Google wants you to encourage reviews and they have all these awesome resources. They'll make posters for you, like that poster that I showed here, that's from Small Thanks on Google. They make these beautifully designed posters and table tents and all kinds of things and they're just ready, they're already print ready. They're PDFs and you can just print them off and so Small Thanks with Google is a really smart way to generate these kind of review encouraging materials. Of course you put a page on your website that has links to the various sites that you'd like to get reviews on and then once you have that page you can link to that page from all the other different parts of your site like maybe a little thing on the sidebar of your blog or in your header, in your footer, that kind of thing. It's good to feature some of your best reviews on these pages as well. And then of course there's software that can help you with acquisition especially in a high volume business. If you just don't have the time for your salespeople to make that personal ask, you have a high volume of people coming through or your company's so big and diverse. Software is really helpful for that. There's lots of them out there. There's Get Five Stars. We have one called Reputation Builder and it can automate the monitoring for reviews, the loading up of your customer list and then throttling through them so it can really help automate the process for you. So there's software systems. And then another thing is that software systems can collect direct feedback rather than only online reviews so that direct feedback is really great because when you get it direct you can use it and mark it up in schema markup which then you can put on your website and it will get these stars in the search results. Those stars are really great to drive more eyeballs and attention to your particular organic listings in addition so it's like taking that review and getting organic benefit from them as well. So it's too complicated to go into it. You can't mark up your Google reviews. You can only mark up direct feedback so this is an important tip and all the details and tips on how you would do that is in this blog post here. So if you just go to bit.ly, white spark dash schema, that blog post has everything you need to know about what the code is supposed to look like and the specific rules around it. And then another thing for high volume businesses, let's say you're a restaurant. It's kind of awkward to deliver the receipt or the bill and be like, oh and can I please get your email address so I can send you a review ask email. So in many businesses it doesn't make sense to do like a personal ask but these digital loyalty programs are amazing for that so when you have come this many times and you earn points and that kind of stuff, all these people register with their email address so this is a great way for businesses to collect email addresses. Keywords in the review, this is the next ranking thing that I talk about because keywords in your reviews will impact your rankings and it makes a lot of sense if you think about, you know, let's say a particular restaurant keeps getting mentioned for best steak or something. When people are, it's all in their reviews, when Google sees that data coming in, they can use that to help influence rankings for like best steak in Seattle. And so this is a rising factor in the local search ranking factors. In the 2017 study it was the number 26 pack ranking factor and it was the number 17 competitive difference maker so it was one of these factors that really sets you apart from your competition. So the way you can do that, so like a basic email would just be like, hey we really appreciated working with you and we would love a review online, here's a link, that's your sort of basic review ask. To set it up a notch, you can add a little blurb in there to help direct what they could talk about and it's like wondering what to write about, what service did we have completed for you? And so people are mentioning the service, that's the keyword, you're getting that keyword in the review, so just sort of prompting them, giving me a little bit of guidance is a tip for how you can get some of those keywords into your reviews. Now there are some, those are the sort of do's of reviews, there are some don'ts of reviews and some things that you should not do. One of the big ones that gets people is offering gift cards or running a contest, like so if you leave us a review we'll give you a discount or a gift card, that's explicitly against Google's guidelines and you can get penalized for that so you definitely don't want to do it. This is a great example that happened last February, it was a law firm that posted to their Facebook group and they said anyone that leaves us a review will get entered into a contest. They had like 120 reviews, they all kind of came in during the process of the contest and a competitor reported them on the Google Mind Business Forum and they got all those reviews wiped out. So incentives are not okay and not allowed to do them and you can definitely get your reviews wiped out if you do do it. But there's a smarter way to incentivize and that's to incentivize the employees, not the customers. So I've seen businesses really drastically improve their reviews by running internal contests so either like different stores will compete and the store that has the most reviews will that month will win some kind of pizza party or something or you can do it at the employee level, the employee that gets the most reviews, he gets a $100 gift card, that's an example of how you can incentivize the employees and not the customers and then not only that it has a side benefit because when you incentivize employees they're now also incentivized to provide extra good customer service. They're thinking about this, they know they're gonna ask for the review, they know it's gonna be public and so they really spend extra time thinking about it. So it's like a win-win, you're getting more reviews and you're kind of getting your employees thinking more about customer service. You can't review your own business, that's just the thing is you're not allowed to do it, it's part of the guidelines and it makes sense, Google wants businesses to be reviewed by their customers. Can't ask for reviews in bulk, so if you have a mailing list of 10,000, which is now probably 400 after GDPR, if you send out to your entire list and then all those reviews come in at one time, that's something that's against Google's guidelines. Don't get too many reviews from the same IP, so I've seen businesses, they'll set up like a kiosk or they have a tablet where you log in to your Google account right on that same device and leave a review, they just kind of pass it around to their customers. That's a bad idea because then all those reviews will be tagged with the same IP, same device signature and those will get removed, so don't do that. And there's this new thing that came out in April, it's called review gating, it's a brand new updated guideline, Google says you cannot selectively solicit positive reviews for customers. Selectively means this, so if you ask the question, how do we do, and then some people say oh you were great and some people say I wasn't so great, what you do to actually funnel people one way or the other, so anyone that had a good experience you send them to the review site, anyone that had a bad experience you send them to the how can we improve form. That's called review gating and Google, it used to be a big thing that all the software companies did, our software did it too, it's now not allowed, Google has specifically said don't do this anymore and so the software companies have kind of shifted gears and they've updated all their software, so all that's cool but just if you're doing it individually you can't do it anymore. So it's not all just about Google, it's valuable to diversify your review strategy and you wanna get reviews on more sites because when someone does a branded search for you there's all these extra sites that will show up in the organic results that people can learn about your business, so you wanna have a positive presence on all of them and we see this interesting dichotomy all the time where you've got 188 Google reviews, 4.9 rating and then a lower, I think it's this one, you'll have a lower rating on Yelp, no, I took that slide out, but all of these sites, and so the way that you find the sites that you should be getting reviews on is you can do a branded search and you can see well what are the sites that come up for my brand, those are clearly sites that I wanna make sure I'm getting reviews on, you can do a keyword search as well and so our keyword search will show you the sites that are important in your industry and city and so those are the other sites that you wanna get reviews on as well and then once you have them, you just wanna cycle them through, so if you've got these cards made that you're dropping into bags, just have one card says Facebook, one card has Google, that kinda thing, so you wanna cycle through them in your review asks, in your emails, that kinda thing. Yelp, all right, so Yelp is a big thing, it's pretty much the worst, everyone hates Yelp, so one of the reasons, the worst is because you're not allowed to ask for reviews, you can't, they have this asinine policy where they don't let you ask for reviews, so that makes it difficult for business owners who wanna improve their presence and not only that, it's like the people that are reviewing on Yelp seem like the grumpiest curmudgeons, whereas this is an awesome series, if you've ever seen this Jimmy Fallon and Aziz Ansari reading Yelp reviews, it's pretty exemplary of what Yelp is like, and so Yelp sucks, but it is super important, super valuable, it's very prominent in the search results, so if you've, this is the slide I was talking about earlier, you've got lots of Google reviews, but then Yelp, oh you're sucking on Yelp, and that actually looks bad for your brand, so it is worth it to spend some time on Yelp, and it's also prominent in keyword searches, a lot of people will use that, they'll actually go to the best terracelons, oh, 10 best terracelons, I wanna read that article, and so they'll go to Yelp, and they'll actually find businesses through that, so it's valuable, it's important, I got two ways for you on how you can improve your presence on Yelp, one is called a check-in offer, so this is so awesome, Yelp offers this thing called a check-in offer, in the Yelp business dashboard, you can create a check-in offer, which is for people that check-in on their mobile phones using the Yelp app, so it's just like a discount or whatever, and then anyone that has checked in, the next time they log into Yelp, Yelp does the review asking for you, you don't even have to ask, Yelp will do it for you, so ha ha, jokes on you, Yelp. Next thing is find friends on Yelp, so this is a smart way that you can kind of segment people, because of Yelp's very aggressive review filter, if someone leaves a review that doesn't have any activity on Yelp, so they just create an account, they leave a review, and then they never use the site again, that review will get filtered, it won't actually show up on your listing, so what you can do is, if you're trying to find the people to encourage to see your listing on Yelp, then you can first search for their email in that little box, which is great, but even better, you can connect your whole email list to a brand new account, so make a new Google account or a new Yahoo mail account, upload your contact list to it, and then Yelp will just show you everything and show you which people are active on Yelp, so people that have lots of reviews, lots of photos, that kind of thing, those are people, their reviews will stick, and so those people, after you've identified them, you can shoot them an email and be like, hey, did you know we're on Yelp? You can ask, but you can just say something like that and send them a little detail. So I'm gonna leave you with this four step process. I've talked to a lot of businesses, and when I see these businesses that have a ton of reviews, I often just pick up the phone and ask them what they're doing, and invariably, they all have some variation of this exact four step process, and it works like this. Number one, you ask in person. You look them in the eye and be like, hey, it's been great working with you, would you be willing to leave us a review on Google? Most times, people are gonna be like, oh yeah, sure. And then, you hand them a card to make it easy with them, it's got the short link to the review site, okay, thank you, here's a card that would make, you can just go to that URL and leave me a review. You also send a follow up email that same day, and you'd be like, hey, it was great working with you, here's a link to our Google listing, we'd really appreciate your review, and then, as I mentioned earlier, the follow up is the kicker. You send that follow up a week later if you haven't gotten the review yet, and that four step process will drive you more reviews than any automated software or anything else you can do, and then you'd be feeling like John from Eager Beaver Moving, getting so much extra business because of all those awesome reviews. And that's it, thank you. Thank you. Thank you.