Video Transcript:
We are always encouraging our clients to get Google reviews, and in this video I will go into detail about why we do so, what the benefits of Google reviews are, and how to go about getting them.
Why Google Reviews are great for your Landscaping Company
So first up, why put effort into getting these Google reviews? First of all, they help your search ranking in Google and they will improve it in your local area in particular. Google reviews are very visible and they stand out on the search page, in the search results.
They will increase clicks through to your website, I’ll show you why that is in a minute, and they create trust in people that don’t know you. If you’ve got a number of five star reviews, people can read through what other customers have said about you and get a feeling for what sort of company you are and the quality of your work.
Lastly, linked to that, they help conversion because they validate the quality of your work when people are looking at you and one or two other companies.
How do Google Reviews show up?
So this is a search for a landscaping company in Leicester as an example. The area where the reviews show up is here in the Google Maps 3 pack. They’re very, very prominent. A lot of people, when they search something on Google, will scroll past the adverts, which are at the top here, and they’ll come to this area, and in landscaping and garden design areas, we often want to use someone that’s quite local to us.
So we’ve got three companies here that are local to wherever I am when I’m searching. The reviews are very prominent on all of these. There’s a line of text from a recent review, and then there’s a button here to click to the website. Interestingly, it doesn’t really matter whether you’re the first listing or the third listing because they’re all very visible.
But what does matter is the average review out of five, and the number of reviews, because if one of these has only got one and the other’s got 50, chances are people are going to go to the one that’s got 50. Also, if one of these has got a lower score then it is likely to get ignored.
You’ll often find that the companies with the most reviews are the ones that are listed first in the search results. So these top three here, we’ve got between 40 and 90 reviews. As I scroll lower we get to companies with a bit less. So as you come down the rankings, you tend to find ones that have less reviews. There’s always exceptions – this company has got 90 reviews but they’re quite a long way down the listings, in part because they’re here a bit out of the centre of Leicester.
Just coming back to the actual reviews themselves, there’s a couple of things to note here. One is that if clients leave reviews with photos, that always looks much better because Google will tend to show those first. So this one here is six months ago, but because they’ve put some photos it’s coming up pretty high, above those with just text. So if you can get clients to leave photos, that will help the reviews to no end.
Why you should reply to Google Reviews
It’s also important, as this company has done, to reply to all the reviews. There’s two reasons for that: firstly because it shows that you are a good company that cares about customer service, and secondly it is putting into Google a register that you are responding to your reviewers. So it is another thing that helps with your search ranking.
How do you get Google Reviews?
In terms of how you go about getting Google reviews, one of the downsides is that you have to have a Google account to be able to leave one. Trustpilot reviews are much easier because anyone can leave one, whereas with Google you have to actually have an account which a lot of people do not. Having said that, at Landscape Marketers we always favour them over Trustpilot because they have real visibility and add value to your business.
The first way that you can get Google Reviews is by having a link straight to the page. Don’t ask someone to go on Google and leave you a review because that requires them to search for your company name. In this example, we’ve got Leicester Landscaping Company and we’ve also got Leicester Landscape Center. So if they have to search for the name they may end up finding the wrong company. Having a link that goes straight to your review page is a much better option.
Here is an example of one of our clients. When you log into your Google business profile, there’s this button here which says ask for reviews and you can copy that link and give it to people and it will come straight into your review page. This makes it much easier because it bypasses everything else and they can click on the stars, write some text, add some photos and it’s all done very efficiently.
The second way you can get Google Reviews is by directly asking customers to leave them. The most obvious way to do this is when you finish a project, to mention verbally to your customer that you hope they are happy with the work and would be grateful if they would leave a review for you on Google.
Ideally you want to leave them a card with a link to your review page – the easiest way of doing that is with a QR code. Lots of sites will give you a QR code, bitly.com is one of the simplest ones. They will do a free QR code that you can set up that links to your review page so you can have it printed on a card that you can give to somebody to scan and, and leave a review after you’ve left.
The other thing is to remember that a lot of people have good intentions and are thinking, yes, I’ll leave you a review, but then they get busy and forget all about it. So it’s worth sending a series of follow up emails and/or text messages just to remind them, again linking back to the review page. This gives you a greater chance that they will actually do it.
How to ask for Google Reviews
The best process we’ve found for asking for Google Reviews is to verbally ask at the end of a project and leave the card I mentioned, and then about a week later to send an email that links to the review page. Within that email, don’t just say, ‘Please leave us a review’, but instead say something like ‘I hope you’re happy with everything, if you have any problems please give us a call. By the way, would you mind leaving us a review on Google? Here is the link to do it.’
It’s good to ask if there are any issues and encouraging them to call if so, just in case something has happened as you don’t want to be left a four star rather than a five star review because there’s something that you weren’t aware of that you would have otherwise have sorted out.
Following up with a text message is very good. A few days after the email goes out, a quick text message saying ‘Hope you’re okay. If there’s any chance you could leave a review for us I would be very grateful. Here’s a link to it.’ And then a final reminder, one or two weeks after that tends to work very well.
So we’ve got the verbal one and then three follow ups. Generally, if someone is going to leave a review, they will do so within that sequence. It does require a degree of persistence, but the flip side is that the value of these is huge so it’s well worth trying hard to get them.
This company, ALS, which is a customer of ours, work very hard at their reviews and they’ve got 125 with an average of 4. 9. It makes a big difference to the company in terms of how prominent they show up in their local area and from the perspective of a new client that’s looking for a landscaping company.
There’s ALS with 125 and there are their competitors with 5 or 10. People are naturally going to lean towards them just because they’re obviously doing a very, very good job.
Why Google opening hours matter for Landscaping and Garden Design Companies
I’m recording this at five o’clock and obviously in the garden design sector a lot of people are looking when they get home from work as it is a business to consumer industry rather than business to business. So people are looking in the evenings and at the weekends, and there’s a very obvious problem with these three that have come up in the top results which is that I may have just got home from work in the evening and I’ve searched for landscaping because I’m thinking about doing my patio and these two are close ann this is showing as open.
Chances are I’m going to look at the website of the one that says it’s open and have a look at it and possibly fill out a contact form just because I’ve seen that they’re still open, whereas the other two are closed.
So a small side point is always to make sure that you’re opening hours are until 9 or 10 in the week, and during weekends. It will increase the number of people that make an inquiry. There’s no point putting the work into getting all these reviews if when they look you are closed and therefore they don’t call you.
So for ALS here, we have them open all day. We’ve got them closed on a Sunday, partly because they’ve got a showroom that people can visit so we just want to make sure they’re not going to the showroom outside the opening hours.
Having said that, for most clients we’re going to have them open all day, seven days a week on the basis that if someone goes to the website and fills in the contact form, they’ll follow it up the next day or on the Monday morning and if they phone, it will go through to an answer phone and be picked up when someone comes in.
So I hope that has been useful. There’s a huge value to Google reviews, and it’s well worth asking every single customer to leave one for you.
