When you've got 20 reviews, it's easy to have a perfect ranking of five stars.
It becomes harder and harder as you get more and more reviews because you have to maintain that standard of excellence that puts you up at that top level. And what businesses need to understand today is
that it's no longer good enough to deliver your products on time and to a
good standard. That's exactly what the clients paying you for. They're expecting
that. So just simply delivering that is not going to get you those amazing
Google reviews that go above and beyond. How important are online reviews? And I
ask that because there's plenty of companies
that really ignore them.
And I can tell because I look at the reviews
and they clearly ignore them, they don't respond,
they don't really care if they're bad.
And I've actually had people tell me they don't care.
So tell us about the importance in reality.
In reality, 98% of people read reviews.
Only 2% of people on the internet don't read reviews.
So from that perspective, the prevalence is quite large.
If we look at whether it's a deciding
or influencing factor,
the statistics are also quite powerful,
which is about 94% of people will consider a review
prior to making a purchase. So realistically when people say to me, you know, I'm not sure
whether this review thing will be for me, I always say, are your clients human and
do they use the internet? If the answer to either one of those questions is yes,
then absolutely this works. And it doesn't matter whether you're in procurement or
whatever, you're always going to check out the reviews.
Even if you said to me,
and this is always a massive red flag
when I hear a business say this,
but we get 90% of our business
coming from word of mouth referrals.
That is a really big red flag.
At the end of the day, word of mouth referral
is not a strategic form of lead generation.
If I was a financial advisor,
I would tell you that it's really important that you have multiple income streams. And I guess in some ways as a digital
marketer and helping businesses market their businesses online, what I say to them is you
want multiple lead streams. So this is something else that can happen. And yet I'm astounded why
some businesses think that even though they do it themselves, they think that their clients won't.
So there are more and more people every single day that are reading reviews than they
have before and that's definitely not going away.
SEO, companies want their business to come up. How do online reviews affect SEO?
Yeah that's a great question Lyall. Now, when you're talking about SEO, there's two things that you need to understand. Your Google business profile alone is worth about
33% of your SEO, and your Google reviews are worth about 16%. So these two things together
are nearly 50%, I'll say that again, nearly 50% of your local SEO, and most business owners
out there are just simply not touching it.
Can any business get a five star review and if so, can you give us some steps, some practical
steps that business owners can take to achieve that?
Yeah, sure.
Absolutely every business can do it.
Google is training people like sheep to leave Google reviews.
Now why is it doing this?
Well, if you look at where AI is going, right?
In the near to distant future,
all of your top of funnel searches
will pretty much disappear.
How do you turn a negative review into a positive one?
How do you turn the one star or the two star
who's upset into a five star?
Is that possible either?
Yeah, well, I mean mean you can't physically change it
yourself but you can you know get the client to change it by doing the right thing. So
the three elements that I teach people to do is...