Why Review Building for Local SEO is a Must - KNB Online

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Posted by Kevin Brkal

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Why Review Building for Local SEO is a Must

You may be wondering what does review building have to do with local SEO, well its actually a big part of it. Google recently updated its Google My Business help section with this article. The article outlines what it essentially takes to rank for local keywords. One of the ways towards the top is “Manage and respond to reviews” which makes total sense.  Since that sends the signal to Google that this location is in fact real and is monitored so the chances of it being closed or a SPAM listing are relativity small.

Review building can honestly be the difference if you get a call for the job or not.  Just look at this screen shot below for the term “notary mill valley ca” and the Maps Pack listing are below.  Who would you call for notary services? I think its clear All Wrapped Up with the 5 star rating on 21 reviews.

notary-map-pack

As a local small business referrals and word of mouth are essential.  Now you can harness that and transition it online so you can have your business stand out in front of endless potential customers.

How to Get Local Reviews

The first thing you need to do is start capturing your customers email addresses.  If you already have a list then you are honestly a step a head of your competition.  You would be very surprised with how many small businesses do not have email addresses of their most loyal customers. Once you have a list you can signup for a service such as ReviewShepherd.com or email your customers individually and ask them for a review.

When looking at your local profiles in a pure SEO sense the most important is by far Google My Business profile (formally Google+ Local).  Since Google holds a majority of all searches worldwide its hand down where you should put most of your attention.  After that would be Yelp as they feed Bing Places (Yahoo Local) with data so by getting reviews on Yelp you are also getting reviews on Bing/Yahoo.

Helpful Resources

When starting a review building campaign it is important to make sure you are making it as simple as possible for one of your past customers to leave a review. Lets say you want to ask your customers one by one if they can leave a review what are you going to send them? You want to send them links that bring them right to the review page.

  1. Google – All you have to do is go here and enter in your business and then click “Generate the awesome link” and you will then copy and paste the link found in Variant 1 – in google search.  That link when sent to someone will automatically popup the review window.
  2. Yelp – Normally you can just send someone to your profile such as this https://www.yelp.com/biz/knb-online-mckinney but wouldn’t it be easier to send them right to the actual page where they leave a review? All you have to do is when you are on your Yelp profile to right click and view source. Now look for this <meta name=”yelp-biz-id” content=”X0HiE09sQNIUDlbpJRRWYQ”> and copy what is in the content area. Your link should look like this https://www.yelp.com/writeareview/biz/X0HiE09sQNIUDlbpJRRWYQ

If all of these sounds like its just to much work then go signup for a service like ReviewShepherd.com as its built to make building reviews extremely easy.

At KNB Online Inc. when we work on Local SEO for a client we always help with review building.  One of our clients came to us to help them with local SEO. We saw that one of their competitors left 2 horrible 1 star reviews on their Google Maps profile. Yet their Yelp profile had over 23 reviews and a solid overall 5 star rating. Clearly they were not paying attention to how important it is to also get reviews on Google Maps. With our help we were able to get their Google Maps profile to show a star rating at 4.6 stars on Google Maps in just a few months.

Feel free to fill out the contact form below and we would be more than happy to talk to you about Local SEO and how we can help with local reviews.

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