So when it comes to the Google review system, we need to understand reviews, we need to build a review strategy. And we also need to think about how we're going to deal with bad reviews when they ultimately come to our business, and how can we deal with that online. So let's just think about understanding reviews, reviews impact search, plus, they provide social proof. So we can create reviews on a local page, we can ask people to review build a good review strategy. And that's going to help our rankings if they're good reviews. Now, however, they also provide social proof.

So when a customer is coming to look at your local business, and they see lots of positive online opinions from other people, they are going to be much more inclined to visit your business or deal with you. Because people don't care what we say about our own businesses. They do however, take seriously what other people say about the business. So one of the first things we want to do is we want to Try and get five reviews so that our visibility in that local search box or on map search for our reviews starts to show Now typically, we're going to need 10 if we want to rank start ranking, but you have to check your business in your local area. Because if they've got 20, you need 20. Now, remember, we talked about earlier that reviews are important, but sometimes it can be our website holding us back.

And we can't always figure out map search. So these are general guidelines of the best things to do in terms of getting reviews and getting some SEO ranking. Now the other thing we have to understand is that there are niche industry review sites so like for travel, we might have TripAdvisor save your hotel, you might want to consider building a review strategy there as well. And the way to check if it is worth doing that is do a search see which of the directories appear high in search and focus on building a review strategy there. So here's some review strategy do's and don'ts, regulated industries. If you are in the health industry or the financial industry, your review strategy will be regulated, there will be certain things that you're allowed to do and you're not allowed to do.

So you'll have to check your industry for that information to make sure that you stay within the regulation. So, check if you're a regulated industry, if there is anything, it's not just health and financial consultancy. There are many, many industries that have issues with how you gather reviews online, especially if you belong to a professional body or an organization. Just go and check what the review policies are. So you don't get caught out later on. Don't pay for fake reviews, don't fake reviews yourself.

A lot of people think I'll just get my friends and family to leave a few reviews on my business and I'll be good to go. Google are really really good at picking up fake reviews. patterns. So it's not just they can pick up fake reviews because they can they can figure out if it's a local business and you get 50 reviews from India, it's not hard to figure out actually, these guys aren't in India and what will happen to hammer your local page and also your website will probably be affected by the algorithms, because they will treat you as a low quality provider of information. And you'll get hammered. Don't do it not worth it.

Don't be tempted. Absolutely, never go down this route. Now, here's the thing. don't collect reviews at your business. When Google see the reviews, they're going to look at where they're coming from. So you might think, oh, I've got a little coffee shop and I just get people to leave reviews and give me a little iPad and I can type a quick review.

I'll have their Google look at the IP address and go that's a local business. All the reviews are coming from that address. This is not good. And again, you're going to get penalized. bad reviews always deal professionally. Give yourself 24 hours before you reply a lot of places on blind will allow you to actually respond to bad reviews.

So Make sure that you give that time to think to calm down, don't enter a review. While you're emotional. We had 12 years of this. And we still do it. Now, because we sell online courses, and we sell on third party sites, we will get reviews. And we have to respond to them.

The way you respond to a review will tell a potential client more about you than the actual review itself. So sometimes you get really bad reviews from people are just not reasonable. And that could be wrong, but the way you respond professionally, online will actually often turn that negative review into a positive. So make sure that you do that and we don't like being told we smell and we don't like being told our business smells, but we do have to remain consistently professional. So top tip there for you. So let's talk about building a review strategy.

And what we need to do is we need to manage the review process as much as possible. So if we can split the feedback process, from the review process, we can I manage a lot of our online reviews. So the way we might do that, we would create a landing page where we can split that. And we're going to show you a simple example. So you can get the idea in a moment. The other thing we can do is as they leave the business, we can give them a feedback card.

And then we can point them to the specific landing page and ask them to leave feedback where So again, we control in the process, if somebody leaves your business and you give them that, can you leave some feedback if you especially if you're b2c, very powerful, great way of doing it, even if your b2b is really good, for helping people to feel that they can actually comment on your business. So let's go and have a look at how we might do that. Now, so a real simple one here, you might want to put a bit more copy and text in there that people are very clear, but this is more for you than actually for me, I don't use this myself, because this is not a local business. I just want to show you how you do this. It's really simple. So the landing page, thank you for your custom prompts.

You might have some images, a little bit more text, but what was it Okay, so we're going to put it was a good experience. Now. What What often happen is you would make this one more prominent than this one. But we've the Squarespace platform, the same size buttons, you can't vary the color. So I can't show you that here. In that sense, I could create some custom buttons, but I just wanted to create something simple for you.

Now they've got two choices, it was a good experience not as good. So it was a good experience. Now the language there is really, really important. I'm not asking them if they enjoyed the food, I'm not asking them to be very specific. I'm asking them if they enjoyed the general experience. And if they did, they're going to click this.

And then they're gonna come through, have you got time to leave a review, leave your review, and I'm going to take them through to my maps page where they can actually leave a review. And as you can see, they've come through this is a dummy listing I've set up so you can see and then they can write a review here and you might have to explain that on the text. It might not hurt even to just do a little screen share. Do we show them how to leave a review because Google, don't make it easy to find the place where you can actually leave a review. Now, if they are not happy, and we can take them to notice, because as expected, now we can actually start managing the customer relation issues that might have developed a name, last name, email address, subject, some information. So when did you engage with our servers, please tell us what we can improve.

I would like to speak, pick that leave your phone number. So we can give you a call. Now you can actually start managing the bad customer experience. And then once they're happy, you can then point them back and say, Would you mind leaving a review, so we're just trying to manage the process, we're just trying to split the process, so that if they're happy, they can go straight to a review page. If they're unhappy, they can go to customer feedback for and now we can do our customer management. And now we can take them through a customer service.

Process