Claim your Google Maps page. And be reasonable about reviews!
Hello again. Michael Byrd here with Home Services Digital, video number 21. In this video I’m going to talk about two things in particular. Well let’s say two things: claiming your page and making sure your data’s correct. They all kind of go together. You want to go in and claim your page and verify your page and look at all your data. It’s not a lot. It’s mainly name, address and phone number. Make sure that it’s correct. But verifying your page is another step where Google is going to send you a code and you are going to plug in that code and then your page will then be verified. This makes you the official owner of the page. And this is important. If you do this—search Google business—you will get two pages I showed you a minute ago: nice, clean, not too complicated, three simple tabs up here. Make the most of your free Google listing. How about that “free” right there. There are resources. Read everything in here.
Own your listing, and make it complete
But let me just jump to what I’m talking about. “How do I verify my business?” This tells Google that you see what they have on you. You are saying that it’s correct. You corrected it, and they can find out for sure that it’s you. Closing the loop, so to speak. Here are the various ways that it can be done you sign up—verify your business—very simple. You can also hire somebody to do that for you. You can hire us to do that for you. So make sure you claim—slash—verify, same thing, claiming and verifying, the same thing.
Now this other article that I referred to, How to optimize your Google My Business Listing, they all kind of go together. Optimize means mainly just completing your data to the fullest extent possible obviously making it accurate and making it as complete as possible, claiming/verifying your page. In this article the person brings up a really interesting point. If you go back to this example: Royal Heating and Cooling—I used this example in the last video—and you’ll notice. Here’s the Google Maps page right here, this rectangle right here. You notice, here is the link. It says “suggest an edit.” Well, that’s open to anybody. It’s possible that your competitor would go in and edit your page in a way that was disadvantageous to you. You want to check your page on a regular basis. Also on this page, you notice there’s no website. You want to add your website, if you have a website.
So read the Google instructions on optimizing your page and read this article as well on moz.com, How to optimize your Google My Business listing.
Reviews are good – up to a point
Let’s talk now about reviews. And reviews are kind of an interesting thing. When it became apparent that reviews mattered people went crazy with reviews. Let me just show you what I mean why reviews matter. I’m looking for air conditioning repair Leland. Let’s say I don’t go any further than this. I get to these three listings right here. Here’s one that has a five-star average. I might or might not notice how many reviews they had. They have four. It’s not the whole world saying they’re great. It’s four reviewers. This company has two reviews. This is a small town. This company has two reviews and they didn’t did so well. Three stars—not so good. Here’s one with no reviews.
It used to be that you needed five reviews before your stars would show up. You can have four reviews; your stars wouldn’t show up. But now you only need one, in some cases two but you get a review up there and if it’s five stars that’s going to help you. Studies show—you’re talking about this area being visual. Many studies already show people click the one that has the stars. You want your stars up there. I talked about people who went crazy with reviews. There are seminars on how to get your service techs to get a review every time they go on a call and they get one a day or two a day or you’re shooting for 10 a week or whatever. That’s ridiculous. You don’t need to do that. Spend that time doing something else. Once you’ve gotten to 20, 30, 40 reviews, if you get one or two reviews a month; if you’re getting four point eight to five stars average, you’re doing fine.
I need to show you a market sector that’s gone a little crazy. (There’s a search idea: how many reviews to get stars). The phone screen repair business, in our town especially, has gone crazy. Here’s one: 184 reviews. Oh my goodness and now they are No. 1, but there’s another one down here that has more reviews than that. Here’s one with 86. What a tough business that must be. Here’s one with 213. They’re just being cutthroat with each other about getting reviews.
Let’s talk about how to get reviews. You can ask for them. You can put a button on your website that says “give us a review on Google.” You can do an email campaign, and we help some clients with email campaigns. And you can actually do a little bit of filtering here if you’re slick. And that’s really about it. If you get a bad review, don’t sweat it too bad really. I mean, you need to run your business in such way that that’s not likely. We’ve gotten one negative review that I know of. Every other review is positive.
Don’t get negatives reviews. But 1 or 2 won’t kill you
The way to deal with negative reviews is to get positive reviews. The positive reviews will outweigh the negative ones. If you get enough of them it will push the negative ones down the page and you really won’t have to worry about it beyond that. Just run your business well. Do a great job. You know sometimes you get a negative review. Or let’s say not you. Some other business is getting negative reviews. Maybe they earned it. Maybe they deserve it. So don’t fight negative reviews. Just don’t get ‘em, OK. Make sure that you do such a great job, you have processes are in place and that’s not likely, or it is extremely rare. So claim your page. Keep it up to date. Get reviews but don’t go crazy. Don’t upend your whole business and devote hours and hours and hours with you and all your employees every week to just chasing reviews. It’s just not doing you any more good. There are better things to spend your time on.
And that’s our video for today. Michael Byrd with Home Services Digital. Be sure to subscribe and be sure to tell a friend. Thank you.
