 Welcome to the journey. Have you ever gotten a bad review online? Well, today we're gonna talk about it and how to boost your credibility. Let's jump in. Hey, I'm Neely, your internal marketing specialist here at GoDaddy. Today, I have my guest, Emma. We're gonna talk about getting reviews for your online business. Hey, Emma. How's it going? Phenomenal, how are you? Are you ready to get some social proof? Absolutely. It's just the most important question I have is how do I actually just get reviews? Like if I'm sitting at zero, how does that start? Let's just first be very honest. Most people do not write reviews. Your customers? No, they're reading them. So you do have to be proactive. And one of my favorite ways to get people to leave you a review is by just simply responding to the ones you have, because that's gonna show everyone else just landing on your page like, oh, you're listening. But let's say you have zero reviews. Well, a great way to start getting more reviews is, of course, asking offline, but then encouraging on your social media platforms. So I've seen some great Facebook posts and tweets where the business is actually like encouraging to learn more about the customer experience, right? Like, hey, when you come into our restaurant, what's your favorite thing to order off the menu? And then, you know what happens? They start, right, their favorite menu items. Yep, I always see those. Like if I go to a restaurant, there's usually a sign, leave us a review on Yelp. Totally. And that's because it's today's word of mouth. Like that is gonna be more credible. Most people believe a complete stranger more than an ad. Right, so I've seen on there where there are some pretty bad reviews. If I'm a business owner, how do I handle that? First and foremost, I just wanna say I'm very empathetic to a bad review. I have, oh my gosh, I've heard some horrible stories, but I will say this, look at it as an opportunity. It's an opportunity to show everyone else that you have great customer service. So if you do get that negative review, which every business does at some point or another, take it as an opportunity to neutralize it. Respond in a personal manner, really highlight what it was that the customer was complaining about. And then there's this fine line between defending your business and apologizing. It's like there's some finesse there. Little balance. Little balance. And you really wanna sort out actual feedback versus trolls, right? Cause I know there's promise of trolls on the Yelp reviews that are just doing it to do it. Yeah, and the good thing is too, there is an opportunity for you to flag a review. So sometimes you're gonna get a review from a customer that maybe they use some poor language that violates the guidelines or maybe they were never your customer or an ex employee. So with that, that actually violates the guidelines for some of these pages. So I encourage you to look into flagging reviews and that's your potential to get them removed. But it has to violate the guidelines and definitely don't hold your breath on that. Still respond. Cause that new potential customer, they don't know that side of the story, right? Another thing too, I love this one of my favorite things that I see local businesses doing and not enough for taking advantage of this. So this is a little secret inside tip is when you get a great review on Yelp or a great review on Google, why leave it there? Cross promote, cross pollinate, turn it into a tweet or an Instagram post. You can simply just quote it and then make it look a little pretty using Canva. We were talking about Canva the other day. Love Canva. Yeah, put a good graphic. I saw this car wash on Twitter and they did a, they took a Google review and just quoted the customer, the happy customer. And then the background behind the actual text of what the review said was like rain droplets in a car. And I was like, oh, that's bringing it all to life. Yeah, it was very cool, very cool. I probably wouldn't stop at social, right? Like you have a website, people are going to that website, add that social proof, add those reviews to your website. Also have links to click there. So if I land on your website, it's really easy to navigate over to your Yelp Google Facebook. That just adds trust because anybody can write just a fake review but have a link to it, boom, instant credibility. Also with getting social proof, the other thing that I wanna bring up that comes up all the time is I'll get asked, what about the filtered reviews? Why are these reviews filtered on Yelp? And there's a lot of reasons for that in the algorithm but still respond to those as well because every customer that's taken time to write about you is a really, it's an opportunity to spread more word of mouth, protect your reputation and essentially get more reviews in the end which is social proof. So one of the cool things I saw when I was in the restaurant was just, it had a little flyer on the table and said, leave us a review on Yelp and we'll give you an appetizer. So if we don't have a restaurant tour watching this video right now, what else could we do to help just reward people for leaving their comments? Yeah, so I think of it like the old, almost the punch card style. Okay. You know, the boost customer loyalty. Had some of those in my wallet right now. Yeah, I'm impressed. He's such a tech guy. I'm surprised he has a punch card in his pocket. Yeah, restaurant's kind of a no brainer but I've also seen where for example, my yoga studio to encourage just getting in there, getting that zen. If you do so many visits, they'll reward you but also they'll do maybe a discount on their merchandise if you leave a review. So they really are incentivizing you without paying you directly. They're just encouraging you to leave feedback because you don't wanna solicit your customers. Oh, no, no. What you also don't wanna do is say, leave a five star review and I'll give you this. It's a huge no no and even I know that, right? Besides what I mentioned, responding to reviews while you get more reviews, cross-promoting. So posting about them on social media, quoting the customer. Another one too is actually, if you know you're gonna send an email receipt, I've seen this, this happened to me recently. And they send the email to you, your receipt and then they encourage you there, which makes sense because I'm already online when I go to my email and look at this receipt so I'm just one step closer to making that happen. So you don't wanna just rely on asking offline, offline, offline because you know what happens. Right. I leave your business, I go to a million other things. And you forget. It's gone. I did freelancing way back in the day where I just built websites. And the thing that I would do is after every build, I would say, quote, here's a great website, here's all the feedback you had and then when we're all finished, go ahead, if you could just leave me just a quick review of how I did. It would definitely be appreciated. And most of the time, having a personal tailored email like that, I got that review. So one thing I saw on a couple of accounts where they would get awesome reviews and either the business owner just doesn't respond or they respond with thanks. Yeah, it's a, you see why, right? Cause they're probably like, I got a great review. What else do I need to do besides pat myself on the back? I'm awesome, yay. Yay, yeah, I did a good job. But actually think about what that customer is doing for you. One, they took the time to recommend your business but also you can boost customer retention by letting them know, hey, I heard you. Thank you so much. But be very mindful about how you're responding. So I strongly encourage a couple of things. Personalize your response. You can do this simply by using the customer's name. Take something that they mentioned. Like Mike was amazing. He was the best server there. Then tell them, hey, we're gonna let Mike know that you think he's the best server here. And so really personalize it by using what they wrote about in a review in your response. It's like active listening. Do it just like you have the great customer service in person underneath the roof of your business. Make sure you're replicating that online. Cause that's where people are deciding if they're gonna do business with you first. They're on their smartphone, they're on the go and about 80% of people are gonna read online reviews before making a buying decision. And they're gonna read up to 10 reviews on average. How often should I be looking at these review sites? So anything could happen in the next hour or the next day. So as much as you can monitor it. But between 24 to 48 hours is a good timeframe. I know that's what we hold true over at GoDaddySocial when we manage Yelp and Google for thousands of businesses in the U.S. I've seen some businesses that on Yelp for example that say claim this business, is this yours? What's the deal with that? This is just taking ownership of your listing and you wanna do that because you can't do anything that we talked about unless you actually take ownership of your page which is claiming the page. And then you can actually update your hours, photos. You're about the business section and make sure everything there is accurate. You don't want your customers to have full control of this. You do want their word of mouth, you want their feedback but you wanna make sure you are managing that page you've optimized it and you're active on it. It's not a set it and forget it sort of platform. What are some other advantages, maybe the one last tidbit that you can give the audience on reviews? I'm glad you asked that. SEO, search engine optimization because the more reviews you have and the more optimized your page is you have all the correct information, those categories that you fall under the more likely you are to be found. So that's all we have for you for getting reviews for your business. If you like what you saw, go ahead and leave us a review below. Subscribe to the channel so you know what's happening in the future and you're first to get those videos. This is The Journey, we'll see you next time.