Three Ways to Get More Google Reviews

As a business owner and operator, you already know that getting online local business reviews helps build your customer base. Reviews are a way to build trust with new customers while figuring out what is or isn’t working. Based on feedback from reviews you’ll be able to iteratively improve your service and resolve future customer pain points.

Naturally, something this valuable doesn’t come easy. Unhappy customers are far more likely to leave a negative review than happy customers are to leave a positive review. To make matters more challenging, manually managing your own online reputation — reaching out to individual customers and directly handling every single review — often does nothing but cause headaches for business owners who could be better spending their time actually running their business.

In this article, we’ll look at how to get more Google reviews, why fake reviews won’t help you, and why your best option is automated customer review management.

Are Google Reviews Really That Important?

Think about the last time you shopped online for a product or service. You probably did the exact same thing that your own customers do: you did a Google search to look up reviews before you made your purchasing decision!

In fact, 92% of new customers check a business’s reviews and 87% won’t even consider working with a company with a low overall star rating!

Essentially, reviews are responsible for 9 out of 10 of your potential customers’ purchasing decisions! Reviews matter!

With the overwhelming majority of people relying so heavily on online reviews, you obviously want to make sure you’re getting as many positive ratings as you can. At the same time, you also want to minimize your negative ratings.

Method 1: Getting More Google Reviews by Hand

To get more online reviews, many local business owners — electricians, plumbers, shop owners, etc. — attempt to reach out to their customers manually. That is, they try to follow-up with each and every person that does business with them on a case-by-case basis, one by one. This is slow, unpredictable, and takes way too much time.

If you like, imagine an incredibly long line of customers, single-file, extending all the way down the street from your business’s front door. This long march wraps around the corner and then around another, until you literally can’t see the end. Each person requires your business’s time and attention, just for the possibility that they’ll leave a review.

This line represents the manual approach to dealing with your online reviews. If you personally tried to get to all of these people on your own, you would never have any time to actually run your business and get more customers — the very reason you want to have the good reviews in the first place!

Here’s what the manual approach looks like in more concrete terms:

  1. You can directly reach out to loyal customers and ask them to write you a review on Google.
  2. You can find their email address and write a personalized letter to them, asking them to write you a Google review.
  3. You can print off hard copies of postcards or flyers that you leave behind when you do business in someone’s home or
  4. office, on which you ask for reviews.
  5. You can add a bunch of pop-up windows and calls-to-action all over your website to encourage people to write reviews.
  6. You can respond to every single review that appears by writing a personalized note that thanks them by name, accompanied by a long and thoughtful post.

At first blush, these probably sound like great ideas — at least on the surface. They strike most business owners as the most reasonable route, which is exactly why most local business operators try these methods for themselves.

The problem with all these approaches mainly comes down to the amount of time and energy it takes to put them into effect. Think again about that line extending from your business all the way into the next county — that’s essentially what you’re dealing with here. If these manual strategies are how you get new reviews, you can’t get more without putting in a lot more work.

Another major issue with a few of these methods is that customers simply hate them. Have you ever seen a pop-up appear on a website and said to yourself, “Oh, how nice! I’m so glad this window appeared to block what I’m reading, so that I can be offered something I didn’t want or ask for in the first place. What a great turn of events. My lucky day!”

Didn’t think so. And your customers probably have the same reaction.

Method 2: Buying Fake Google Reviews

People often have a lot of questions when it comes to fake Google reviews:

  • What is a fake review? (In a word: spam.)
  • Are fake Google reviews illegal? (Potentially, believe it or not.)
  • How much do fake Google reviews cost? (It varies, but it’s never worth it.)
  • Will fake Google reviews actually help my business? (Almost never.)
  • Will fake Google reviews actually hurt my business? (Almost always.)

Most of the time, groups that operate in the ersatz review business will post ads that offer to provide “cheap and fast” Google reviews for less than the cost of a decent lunch. They may or may not be “cheap” or “fast”, but they will most definitely be fake.

These fake reviews are intended to look just like actual reviews written by humans, except they come from a third-party company that has never bought anything you sell or any service you provide.

They’re often written by a computer algorithm to make your brand sound incredible and appealing to potential (real) customers. These reviews glow and gush about how great you and your company are. But, this apparent route to quick success turns out to be nothing more than smoke and mirrors that evaporate almost as soon as you look in its direction.

How to Buy Fake Google Reviews

It’s a very straightforward process:

  1. Click on the cheapest customer review management ad you see.
  2. Pay spammers to post fake Google reviews of your business.
  3. Potential customers or Google algorithms mark the fake reviews as fraudulent (which they are).
  4. Google punishes you for spamming people with reduced rank and traffic.
  5. Customers either choose someone else or never see your business at all.

(Optional step: Have the FTC come after you.)

Here’s our professional advice: don’t waste your time, energy, or hard-earned money on spam reviews. They nearly always come back to bite you in the end. Google’s policies are incredibly clear on fake reviews: they are not welcome and using a combination of user reports and algorithms they will be detected, removed, and punished.

Method 3: Automated Customer Review Management

If you’re thinking that there must be a better way to get more Google reviews, you’re right!

The manual method doesn’t work well enough and it takes far too much energy, leaving you with no time to run your business. The fake review approach, by contrast, is a “quick and easy” solution that only creates problems. Thankfully, there is a much better way to get more customer reviews online, which has been proven to deliver reliable results with less effort.

Automated customer review management blows every other method of getting more Google reviews out of the water.
Essentially, a review management system takes the manual process of soliciting reviews and automates the process. The best customer review management tools, like Birdeye, allow you to have access to (and manage!) customer reviews across every touch point, from every review site, all in one place.

Collecting customer feedback goes from a daily chore to a painless, automatic process. Simply connect your existing customer management software (CMS) to your review management tool to automatically import your contacts and begin collecting reviews.

Automated Review Management by Cut Throat Marketing

At Cut Throat Marketing we provide our customers with three different automated customer review solutions: self-managed, professionally-managed, and our complete Google Business Profile package.

Self-Managed Automated Review Management

We’ve tried all of the leading review management tools and have found that Birdeye is by far the best solution. When you sign up for a self-managed BirdEye account with Cut Throat Marketing you get a software solution which:

  • Seamlessly connects to most customer relationship management tools (CRMs)
  • Automatically monitors reviews, responding to positive reviews and notifying business owners about negative reviews
  • Offers highly customizable review request templates and review responses
  • Is completely HIPAA compliant

Professionally-Managed Automated Review Management

Taking the process of automated review collection one step further is a professionally managed service. For this service we take the work of setting up and maintaining your Birdeye account off of your plate, and let our team of professionals handle it for you.
For this service level you get:

  • We create and manage your Birdeye account
  • Seamless connection to your customer relationship management tool (CRMs)
  • We create custom review request templates for your business
  • We respond to customer reviews in Google Business Profile*
    • For negative reviews we’ll work with you to ensure the messaging fits the circumstances
  • Complete HIPAA compliance

Complete Google Business Profile Package

Our complete GPB package is perfect for businesses which are looking to revamp their online presence. This package includes everything from our professionally-managed service in addition to an optimized Google Business Profile profile.

  • We create and manage your Google Business Profile Account
  • 4 GPB posts per month
  • Listing optimized to rank highly in Google Map Pack
  • Conversion Rate Optimized service pages
  • Conversion Rate Optimized product pages
  • We create and manage your Birdeye account
  • Seamless connection to your CRM
  • We create custom review request templates for your business
  • We respond to customer reviews in Google Business Profile*
    • For bad reviews we’ll work with you to ensure the messaging fits the circumstances
  • Complete HIPAA compliance

More Reviews, Less Work

No more manual email writing, postcard printing, annoying pop-ups, or (worst of all) badgering customers repeatedly for responses. Those days are long gone. Instead you’ll reap the benefits of getting more reviews with less effort than ever!
With Cut Throat Marketing, take the pressure off yourself, so that you can get back to running your business the way that you want. Automate your customer review management to get back on track and take the world by storm all at the same time. See our customer review management solutions page to learn more about our process and see which is right for you!