Getting Local Businesses Found on Google - Online Review Systems and Services

This is the 7th, and last, post in our series about Getting Your Local Business Found in Google Searches. You can see our previous posts on our Geek Notes blog.

If you've read our two previous posts regarding Online Reviews, you should have reached the conclusions that:

1. Online Reviews are extremely important to your business.
2. You CAN manage the Online Review portion of your business, but it's a LOT of work, and can take a LOT of time.
3. 
   

This is precisely what creates a business environment for services to help SMB owners manage & navigate their online reviews. As usual, some are straightforward & responsible, while others attempt to "shortcut" the process with questionable strategies and tactics. For a more in-depth discussion on this see our previous blog post here.

So, do you need a review generation or management service?

It depends. 

What IS clear is that you want as many published reviews of your business as possible.  AND, you want to reply to all, or nearly all, of them. 

What this requires is both a highly efficient, automated system, and the necessary time & effort to setup and maintain the system and workflow. 

As is often the case, you can either attempt to do it yourself, or you can hire someone else.

If you decide to use a review service or system, you'll find a wide array of offerings, capabilities, and costs. We can help you navigate through the jungle of what's available, and we have our own proprietary online review system/service as well called ORIGIN. Here's our general recommendations:

• Only deal with a company/service that uses strictly "White Hat" methods. Don't get tempted with "Black Hat" methods like buying fake reviews, (either positive for your business or negative for your competitors), use of spam-bots to seed reviews, use of review gating systems that filter out bad reviews, etc, etc, etc. These bad-guy methods can have significantly adverse long-term consequences.
• Use a company/service that makes it super-easy for customers to access your integrated review platform by any number of different methods.
• Use a company/service that allows a customer's review to be posted on multiple review platforms easily, without redundant typing.
• Use a company/service that can consolidate reviews from multiple different sites onto your website for all to see.

If you need help getting and managing online reviews, give us a call. We'll try to be helpful for your specific needs.