Going Beyond Google Reviews to Improve Your Online Reputation

How are your online reviews? If you're a local business and you're only focusing on collecting online reviews on the Almighty Google, then this episode is for you. 

On this episode of the Propel Your Practice Podcast, we're gonna talk about different places you should be focusing your efforts to collect online reviews. 

Hello, and welcome to the Propel Your Practice Podcast. I'm your host, Darcy Sullivan, with Propel Marketing & Design. On the Propel Your Practice Podcast, we talk about actionable strategies clinic owners and local businesses can take to help them improve their overall online brand positioning. And today, we're talking specifically about online reviews for local SEO. 

Does your company have a plan in place to collect reviews? Are you only focusing on your product and marketing? So, if you're a local business owner, are you only trying to collect reviews on Google, or are you trying to collect reviews on other sites? 

Today, we're gonna chat about the importance of online reviews and where you should focus your efforts to collect those online reviews. 

So, first up, I think most people understand the importance and the power that is behind online reviews. They really do reflect people's decisions on if they should come in to see you if you're a clinic owner or if they should do business with you if you're a small business. 

And the data behind this really is so compelling. Let's look at some statistics. The statistics that I'm gonna share are from ExplodingTopics.com, and they are current for 2023. I'll include the link to this in the Show Notes for your reference. 

• 93% of users say online reviews have an impact on their buying decisions. 

• Nearly half of all internet users post online reviews every month. 

• 81% of consumers use Google to evaluate local businesses. 

• Yelp receives 26,830 new reviews per minute. Hold on; I'm just gonna repeat that crazy number again. Currently, Yelp receives over 26,000 new reviews per minute. That is just crazy. 

• 75% of businesses do not respond to negative reviews. 

If you've listened to one of our previous episodes, which we'll include in the Show Notes again, where we went into detail about How to Optimize Your Google Business Profile Listing– we've also done a show and have additional resources on your Apple Maps Listing, your Bing Business Listing, all of these talk about how to optimize your listings, but also how to handle those reviews. 

If you do receive a negative review, you do want to make sure that you take the time and energy to look into the review, see what happened, why it was negative. Reply if it's appropriate, or report if it's inappropriate. 

Now, there are a ton of online review platforms out there, and we're going to talk about some of the bigger ones here, but in the beginning, I gave that little teaser of I hope you're not just collecting your online reviews on Google, and we're going to go into where the other locations are that you should consider including collecting reviews. 

Now, the big ones collectively are for review sites Google, Yelp, Facebook, TripAdvisor. And, of course, Google is the clear winner. 

I mean Bright Local has the statistic of 81% of customers use Google to evaluate a local business. I think we all can agree that Google really is the big and mighty here, but this is really what I want you to take in and understand that it isn't the end all be all when it comes to Google. 

There are other places where people go to to get information about your reviews, and there are other sites and sources that pull reviews that are not from Google. 

What do I mean by this? What I mean is that your Apple Business Connect Place Card,  that's what controls your Apple Maps listing, pulls reviews from Yelp. Then you have your Bing listing, which is your Bing Places for Business listing, and it pulls reviews from Yelp and from Facebook. 

So you want to, of course, focus your energy on collecting reviews on Google, but also consider the fact that you want to collect them from a few other locations, and, again, those include Yelp, Facebook, and there might be some other specific industry review sites that you might want to consider. 

So, as you go out and collect your reviews, make sure that you're not directing every single person to Google and that you're spreading out the online love and collecting some of the reviews in other locations as well. 

Well, hey, before we head out, I want to invite you to join in on a free masterclass I put together on the Five SEO Secrets to Owning the First Page of Google Without Buying Ads. You can find a link to sign up for this free masterclass in the Show Notes for this episode or by visiting PropelYourCompany.com/learn. 

During this workshop, we do a deep dive into strategies to help you improve your online presence. Including your Google Business Profile, that's what used to be called the Google My Business listing and what controls the Google Maps section, along with how voice SEO plays a big role in today's search and where you should be focusing your efforts online for the biggest impact.

All right. Well, that's it for today. Again, you can join the masterclass by visiting PropelYourCompany.com/learn. And if you have a topic that you would like to hear on an upcoming episode of Propel Your Practice, please send it in by visiting PropelYourCompany.com/podcast-topics or looking for the link in the Show Notes. 

Thanks so much for your time. I'll talk to you soon.