Is There a Limit to How Many Google Reviews to Get Each Month – 158

Transcript For Is There a Limit to How Many Google Reviews to Get Each Month – 158

Jesse Dolan: No, there’s no set number you want to stay under for getting reviews. You don’t want to come off as spammy, as artificial, that you’re astroturfing, so yeah, we want to meter those down, but then more so, we want to meter them down, so you can just drip them out over time now, instead of doing the big blast up front.

Welcome back to Local SEO Tactics, where we bring you tips and tricks to get found online. I’m your host, Jesse Dolan. Bob Brennan, Sue Ginsburg, here to tackle the tough questions about the world of SEO and digital marketing.

Sue Ginsburg: Hi.

Jesse Dolan: Sue, what have we got going on today? What’s our topic?

Sue Ginsburg: Today’s question is from a very smart business owner. Alison Krauss owns Shoreline Insurance in Minnesota, a broker for health insurance, and she asked me, “Is there a maximum number of reviews to get each month, to stay under Google’s radar?”

Great question, and this came up because we had recommended asking former clients, of which she has thousands, and they were coming in fast and furious, so … good question. I’m sure she’s not the only business owner who wonders that.

Quote of the day today, “The bigger, the better, in everything,” that’s Freddie Mercury, Queen’s champion.

A couple of quotes, because there were so many with the same sentiment. Mae West says, “Too much of a good thing can be wonderful.” Ayn Rand says, “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth overdoing.”

You hear that the sentiment in all of these, is that more is better without any caveats, and I think that what we may learn is that is not always the case.

So just a short marketing story about this. I’m commonly or frequently in conversations with business owners about the importance of reviews, to both customers and potential customers, as well as to Google. We get a lot of questions about this, and there are a lot of episodes already talking about reviews, due largely to the importance of them, to both Google, and to all human beings.

I’ll ask you, our smart listeners, when’s the last time you bought something online without reading the reviews first? It’s an integral part of how we shop today. In my discussions about the importance of reviews, I always share that Google places high priority on different elements of reviews, including the average rating. Is it five star, 4.7, 4.9? Whatever, of course, the number of reviews, the age of the reviews, because we know that Google and most people place highest priority on reviews that are within the last three months, so the most recent, and the owners reply to reviews, which many business owners are surprised to hear. These are all important elements that Google looks for, and also human beings.

What about having too many reviews? Is that possible? In a recent conversation with Alison Krauss of Shoreline Insurance, a very smart business owner, who does the legwork of choosing health insurance for you, thankfully, because it’s such a mess to navigate. Anyway, she shared how well something that we had talked about was working. That was, asking former clients for reviews. Alison has been in business for many, many years, has hundreds, if not thousands of clients, and in her first week of requesting reviews, they got 26 reviews.

Knowing that Google does not treat review dumps … I’ll call it favorably … I asked if that was sustainable over the weeks to come or the months to come, or if that was just an anomaly, and if it was going to go from 26 this week to five next week, and then three, and then one.

This got us into the sequence of questions of whether you can have too many reviews a week or a month regarding Google, and was intriguing. I didn’t know what the answer was. It may happen largely when a business is asking former clients, because you would think that if you’re asking your current clients regularly, that will trickle in steadily. But again, it’s something that we always recommend, asking your former clients for reviews, which will get you a big jump start to adding reviews to your GMB.

So question for the experts, Jesse and Bob, what do you have to say from an SEO and a Google standpoint, and a human standpoint, what do you think about getting too many reviews, or too many reviews at once, all of the above?

Jesse Dolan: Start off Bob, I think. Short answer is no, there is no set number, right? Just to be clear, there’s nothing in the Google guidelines like, “Limit yourself to X per day, X per week,” or whatever, right?

I do think there is a threshold, which we’ll explore here, and a way to come up with a number, but there’s no just static volume amount.

And then second, just to clarify for everybody Sue, when we talk about staying under Google’s radar, meeting a threshold, or whatever, are we talking again just to frame it up, that it would be potentially spammy or look fake if we go above that, or what are some of the pitfalls we’re worried about?

Is that the main crux of that there? Okay.

Sue Ginsburg: Yeah, exactly. Like, is this a red flag to Google? 26 one week, and three and five in the next two weeks? Are these spammy or real?

Jesse Dolan: So I think where some of that gets rooted is, Bob, we’ve talked about getting reviews for years, and go back even a few years ago, 2019, 2018 type stuff, you could buy reviews online, all day long.

Bob Brennan: Yeah.

Jesse Dolan: So people would get a ton of reviews to prop their business up. What the heck is the term? Astroturfing, we’ve talked about that before, right? Where it’s setting up a foundation of fake reviews for your product, your service, your business … if you think about it, right? Grass … organic, natural, over time, nurtured. Astroturf is artificial. You slap it in there, but it looks good, right? It’s where the term comes from. But yeah, you used to be able to just do that.

So I think Sue that’s part of rooted in your question is, how do you not look spammy? How do you not look fake? Because what would happen, and still does today … I don’t mean to make it sound it’s gone away … you can still go buy reviews, but that’s a way for Google to investigate you, right? To get audited, have an anomaly, have something that doesn’t conform to your normal pattern of reviews … boom, here’s 200 reviews on your account. Suddenly you’re going to get some attention on those, and Google can tell … was this a brand new account that left a review? Are most the reviews that this business gets from people that are physically nearby, tracking on your phone? Were these reviews that came in this week are all from Puerto Rico and Alaska, just all around the area?

So part of “staying under the radar,” is to not draw that attention, not draw that ire from Google, to potentially get in there, investigate your reviews, and then purge any it does not trust.

So I think that’s where that’s rooted from previous, to stay under the radar, but I do think there’s another reason for limiting the amount of reviews you have, if you will, right? Not hitting some huge number right off the bat, and that’s just to keep a pace going, right? Would it be great if you could get a hundred reviews tomorrow that are all legitimate? Real reviews that are going to stick and not be removed by Google? Yeah. That is really good, and your score would look incredible, but we have modified our recommendation, the last, I’d say, six months or so, based on what Google’s been saying and showing as well, which is they want to see, and they’ve been putting more weight, more authority on, user-generated signals for your Google business profile in recent months.

And what are some of the user generated signals? People leaving a review for your business, people using driving directions, people calling your business from your GBP profile link. These are ways that Google can track and draw correlation to you being a real effective and relevant business, so something Google’s paid more attention to, is the pacing of your reviews. If you get one a day or three a week, whatever it is, if that starts to trend up, and everything looks legitimate, all the other patterns are the same, Google can have confidence that your business is doing better, right? That people are choosing it more, for whatever the reason is. That’s going to help. Your overall score is going to look better. You’re going to get more click throughs, like we’ve talked before, Bob, plenty of times you can be in the third place in the map pack. If you have twice the reviews as your competitors, you’re going to get that click and that call from the map pack.

So getting those reviews over time is going to help in that sense, but also this has a little bit more of an impact on SEO than it used to now that Google’s giving more credit to these user-generated signals.

If you have twice the reviews your competitor does, but you go stale and you haven’t got any reviews for, whatever, the last nine months, but your competitor has slowly gotten reviews, even if their overall score is lower, they may be making traction on your rankings, because you went dormant on getting those reviews, and Google’s like, “Hey, how come people aren’t patronizing this business like they were before? How come they’re not interacting with this business they were before?” So that’s very important.

So a little bit long there, but no, there’s no set number you want to stay under for getting reviews. You don’t want to come off as spammy, as artificial, that you’re astroturfing, so yeah, we want to meter those down, but then more so we want to meter them down, so you can just drip them out over time now, instead of doing a big blast up front, and something I would challenge everybody here is, so it’s like, “Okay, that’s cool guys. So I’ve got a bunch of reviews I can get, I got this inventory of people I can tap into.” Question would be, “What’s my pace? What would be a good pace? How many reviews should I get?” And I think here’s where you start to think … put the inventory aside. I think there’s two main streams of reviews. Your current clients, people that are coming into your store or patronizing you day-to-day, there’s a steady flow of new business coming through, more business in general coming through, try to put some thought into that and say, “How many reviews can I get from that stream? How many people can I ask? How many reviews can I get from that?” And then take a look … and then that’s going to plot to you, “Yeah, I think I can do one review per week. That’s pretty consistent, right? That’s my pace for my business.”

Then look at your inventory, and we’ll talk in a second about who you can include in that, but let’s just say you had a hundred people you could tap into, that you’re pretty dang confident will give you a review. If you’re going to be on pace for getting one a week for your business, if you’ve got a hundred people you can ask, I’d say, spread those out over the next three, six months, or even more, so now you’re getting two or maybe three per week over the next six, 12 months.

Don’t get me wrong. There’s no math. It’s not a bad algebra problem where you’re going to screw something up by suddenly getting seven next week, right? And then two, the next week after.

So what I’m illustrating isn’t an exact paint by number situation, but just trying to apply some logic to see what you want to do. If you want to get 10 a week for the next 10 weeks, and then fall down to getting one a week going forward, cool. It’s not going to be the end of the world. I’m just trying to provide more of a level … you know, math … when I say getting a couple a week, but really just do that exercise. Think about how many you can get on a regular basis. Think of what inventory you have, or how many people you can ask for reviews, and then just try to plot that out over the course of X months, and then develop your system on how you’re going to ask those people and reach out to them, which is a whole nother episode. We’re not going to get into that here today, right? But for sure, I would meter them out with that.

Sue and Bob, I’d to throw out to you guys a challenge for everybody to help brainstorm on where can we dip into these pools of people? What is our inventory as business owners and marketers for people that we can ask for reviews?

One thing I’ll throw out there overall, and then I’d to hear you guys for ideas, Bob, we can start with you, but is the fact that it doesn’t have to be one person per transaction. You know, if I sell something to a family, right? A horse, if I have horses. Guess what? The mom, the dad, can both leave me a review. Maybe if it was a pony for their daughter, their daughter can leave me a review if she’s got an account. So it doesn’t have to be one review per transaction. We’re getting reviews from people who’ve experienced our business, right? And as long as they’re telling the truth in their review, and giving their own review, their own testimony, it’s legitimate. It should be fine, and I think that can multiply.

We’re going to go through a few scenarios that can multiply the amount of people, if you think about it, in that sense. You can ask multiple people there.
So Bob, does anything come to the top of mind for you on who to ask for reviews, right? Not your current clients that walked in today, friends, families, previous clients, what are some places people can go to?

Speaker 4: Hey, everyone wanted to take a quick second to talk about Review Lead. You’ve heard us talk about it on the show before, Review Lead is a product that we support and service that we represent. It’s a tool that’s going to help you get more reviews for your business, manage your reviews, be aware of those reviews, and maybe even deflect some of the negative reviews, before they go live online. Check it out at localseatactics.com/reviewlead, or go to our resources page and look for Review Lead on there. This is a product that we support and that we resell, so this is not a third party or an affiliate link or something like that.

Now what Review Lead’s going to do is help you automate getting more reviews from your clients, makes it very easy to get reviews, and get more five star reviews, whether you want those on your Google business profile, formulate Google my Business listing, maybe the BBB, maybe Facebook, anywhere that you can get reviews, you can connect with Review Lead, and promote this to your clients and customers, and get more reviews quick, easy, and in an automated way.

Some other cool aspects of it is it does have a mechanism there to, I guess, deflect, if you will, one star reviews. If somebody is not happy with your service and asks them that, and then rather than asking them to leave review, it’ll say, “Do you want to fill out this feedback form, and give that feedback directly to us?” And hopefully that can help deflect some of those one star reviews before they go online, and also alert you if something bad is happening in your business … if you have a client or a customer that is disappointed … so you can rectify that and make changes in your business to keep them happy and prevent that from the future. So that’s a really cool feature.

Also, it has great reporting in it, to make you aware of the amount of reviews you’re getting, where you’re getting them from, who’s leaving them, things like that, and you can also promote those reviews on your website or through social media, with some of the integrations built into this product as well.

Learn more, go to localseotactics.com/reviewlead, and check it out.

Bob Brennan: Yeah. If you’re part of a … let’s say a Rotary group or a Chamber group … that people know your business, they know as a business owner, you’re legit. You say, “Hey, you know what? I know you own a funeral parlor, let’s say, or whatever. Hopefully I’m not going to use you in the near future, but you’re-“.
Jesse Dolan: Expecting service to be great here at Brennan Funerals.

Bob Brennan: Yeah, I don’t know, but, “I know people have used you. I know you’re part of the Chamber. I know da, da, da, da. I’m willing to leave you five star review,” or whatever.

I don’t know how you spin that in both directions, but you get the idea that you’re … at the end of the day, it’s networking, and it’s validation verification that you’re a legitimate business person, and I don’t think, on my mind, there’s nothing wrong with that.

Jesse Dolan: I think on your example-

Bob Brennan: If you’re not comfortable doing that, obviously, then it’s not a good fit, if that makes sense.

Jesse Dolan: Your example of the funeral home, I think, is a cool one to parse out real quick. If a loved one dies, of course, when you’re managing it, and facilitating it, and working with the funeral home, of course you can leave a review for your experience there. But to your point, if you just go and attend somebody else’s service there just as a guest, as a visitor, I think you’re still fine leaving review for that funeral home, like, “Great professional place. The staff was amazing. They did a great job with your tribute,” whatever, right? It doesn’t have to be that you personally gave that business money. You can still review that business, the business owner, the people involved with the team, things like that, so-

Bob Brennan: Yeah, and I would hope friends and family that know you and know that you’re a good business owner … if they’re not wanting to do that again, we can talk about barriers, but it’s basically, I think, that they may not leave a review, because they actually don’t know how to do it, or they don’t have a Gmail or whatever the case is.

Jesse Dolan: Right.

Bob Brennan: We can go into that, but I would throw out one other thing with the volume of reviews. There’s a couple dynamics I’ve experienced.

We’ve had a client that used a barcode in their retail establishment to leave a review, and they’re finding that reviews weren’t posting. So we couldn’t get to the bottom of it, so we basically told them that, “You need to have your clients manually do the review,” because there’s technology out there. You just point your phone and there’s a link, and then … you know what I mean? It’s kind of slick. Most of the time that works. This, for a reason, didn’t, in that they were able to leave the review, but it wouldn’t post through Google. So we don’t know if Google’s cracking down on that backend in terms of that-

Sue Ginsburg: Was that recently, Bob? Would you still say-

Bob Brennan: Yeah, and I’m not a hundred percent sure. I should say, throw the caveat out there, I don’t know if it was something on the technical end of the link, or if it was Google, but they just weren’t posting.

So a couple of things I would throw out there is, as you get your reviews and you know you’ve got five people that are definitely doing it, or you’ve watched them leave the reviews, and they’re not posting for some reason, you might have issues, but if they all post … and again, this takes what? Just 24, 48 hours for these reviews to post, would you say?

Jesse Dolan: Yeah, if it’s a brand new account, if it took a week or two even in some cases, I would not be shocked.

Bob Brennan: And by brand new account, that’s a brand new Gmail account, right?

Jesse Dolan: Yeah, if I left you, Bob, a review at your funeral parlor, and I’d never had a Google account before, if I set one up right now and then leave you a review immediately, that one’s probably going to be a little slower to post through Google, right?

Bob Brennan: Right.

Jesse Dolan: Because it may seem fake, you know?

Bob Brennan: Right.

Jesse Dolan: And things of that nature. But yeah, Google, the last few years with COVID, it was the first time we’ve really seen Google slow down in some of these provision of services, right? Posting Google reviews, maybe things to your Google business profile updates, indexing your website, there’s a host of things that Google has really ebbed and flowed on their speed, and the review posting is one of them.

Bob Brennan: Yeah.

Jesse Dolan: So yeah, I wouldn’t freak out if it doesn’t post right away.

Bob Brennan: So one of the things I would throw out, and I’m not … so when I say this, everybody needs to understand, this is total speculation, total … whatever you want to call it. But on at least on Facebook, when you’re marketing on Facebook, if I understand this, Jesse, if you try to double the campaign, you get penalized, right? You can only increase the campaign by 20 or 25%.

So what I would throw out is pure speculation, is you can increase your lead or your reviews. I wouldn’t go like … okay, if you’re averaging … let’s just use a number … five a day for a month. And you somehow have bandwidth to increase that even more. I wouldn’t go more than, let’s say, another two or three a day at the max.

Jesse Dolan: Yeah.

Bob Brennan: Right. But if you end up doubling, and then doubling that, and doubling … keep doubling, doubling … that’s where Google’s going to like, “Time out. Let’s really dig into this and see what’s going on,” if they have an algorithm, if they have a program that … and by that, I would say, any program they have … that again, guessing … is not a super-sophisticated program in that it’s just looking for percentage changes, and then when there’s some crazy percentage change, then my guess is, they get human eyes on it, to dig into it and look into it.

But I don’t think they have this crazy algorithm that thinks at all these levels to say, “Okay, these reviews … nope, time out, we’re taking this whole GMB down,” but that’s how I’d approach it. I don’t know if that makes sense, just go to town … or not go to town, but get a rhythm going, or a pattern of so many a day, but then if you have the bandwidth and capability increase it, I wouldn’t increase it a hundred percent. I would bring it up by percentages for month to month, and maybe six months from now, you’re actually getting 20 a day, but you built up to that. Does that story make sense?

Jesse Dolan: Yeah, and I think this is definitely a marathon, not a sprint type-

Bob Brennan: Right.

Jesse Dolan: … scenario here, where I think you’re going to be well-served as your business over time. If you have a slow and steady approach to getting reviews, versus I got them all this month, and then it drops off a cliff next month.

Bob Brennan: Right.

Jesse Dolan: If you jump through in the rankings, I would expect that to drop in the coming months, versus if you’re going slow and steady, maybe you don’t crack the rankings this month. Maybe you start next month and the month after, but it’s more sustainable, more organic.

Bob Brennan: Yep.

Jesse Dolan: And then to your point, yeah. Whatever level of sophistication there is, or isn’t, at Google for these reviews, for sure there’s definitely layering, and what you want to do is just avoid these outlier type deals to draw that attention.

Bob Brennan: Yeah.

Jesse Dolan: I think-

Bob Brennan: They’re looking for a rhythm, I think.

Jesse Dolan: Yeah.

Bob Brennan: When they see this-

Jesse Dolan: Normal pattern in business.

Bob Brennan: … or spike or whatever, they’re like, “Nah, that’s not going to work.”

Jesse Dolan: And then that goes true both ways, I think, right? Not only do you stay within that to not break tolerance, and then draw attention to maybe have things go slow or get penalized or whatever, but then that’s true the other way, is continued pacing of that shows them that you are a good business, with continual customers and things like that.

Bob Brennan: Persistent.

Jesse Dolan: I’d say there’s probably one asterisk to be fair that we should throw out there, which is, if you have … so we’re talking about jump-starting your reviews, to be clear. We’re talking about … you haven’t done a lot with reviews, you’re listening today, or otherwise inspired. You’re going to buckle down. We’re going to get reviews for our company, and you’re going to start asking your clients, and then again, you’ve got this inventory of people you can tap into one time. That’s the part we’re talking about metering out, is that the people we’re tapping into one time.

A scenario that’s running through my head here. I want to be clear about with people. Let’s just say you have a big open house event, or some kind of gigantic sale or block party. I don’t know, whatever it is, where you have a lot of people that are physically coming to your location now. They can all leave you a review today. That’s cool, because Google also is seeing the signal that they’re physically located there, right?

If Bob, Sue, and I are asking a hundred or our friends and family to leave us reviews, we’re probably calling them, texting them, or emailing them, and they’re leaving us these reviews from these remote locations, which again, adds that layer of how credible is it, or not, with Google, and these other layers of pacing and the frequency start to be more in play.

But again, if I got an event, and I’ve got a hundred people that show up, they’re all physically there, Google knows my address from GPS coordinates. Google is spying on everybody through their phones, they know they’re standing there.

Bob Brennan: Yeah.

Jesse Dolan: They’re going to have a high degree of confidence in a giant bump in reviews when people are physically there at that business, right? They can parse that out. Again, we don’t know exactly what they’re doing behind the curtain. They’ve got some logic, they’ve got some formulas to Bob’s point. They’re not as crazy as we think they are. They’re usually a lot simpler, but I guarantee, they know the proximity and the GPS parts of it, and that’s not going to hurt you.
So just to be clear in everybody, if you’ve got a big event, a lot of people there or a busy day in your store, whatever it is, ask all the people that are physically in front of you for reviews in those organic situations, even if they are anomalies for the volume.

Different scenario than what we’re talking about for launching a review effort here, so-

What do you guys got? Any other ideas on who to ask?

Sue Ginsburg: Well, I want to add something too, that since there’s no crystal ball that predicts who’s going to leave a review of all the people you ask. To Bob’s point earlier about both of you said, metering them out. I think the best we can do is whatever the number is, ask 10 people each week, 20 people, five people, and then whatever comes in will most likely follow a normal curve and be reasonably close to what the number is over time about that. So, one other idea that I always mention to business owners that is often overlooked, is ask your employees. An employee can review a business and say what a great place this is, how we love, how we’re helping other businesses. And it’s a great place to work. And it’s a great culture. We get great people, whatever. That’s a legit review, not scamming the system.

Jesse Dolan: What I think with that part of this too, is make sure they are honest and transparent in the purpose of the review, right? Don’t pretend you bought a product or a service, you know what I mean? Just be honest, speak to your experience, why you’re leaving the review, and things that.

And if you’re asking a bunch of people, they may say the same thing. Like, “Hey Bob, I’ve never died. I haven’t been at your funeral home.” Like, why would I leave a review? It’s like, “Well, do you think it’s professional? You know, you can just give me some good feedback. It doesn’t have to mean that you purchased anything here, right? Just did you experience it, or can you vouch for it? Things like that.”

So yeah, friends, family, past clients. We touched on it slightly earlier in the episode but, if you’ve got 15 people in the office at one of your clients, current client or former client, whatever, all 15 people can leave your review, if you can ask them all right, so that’s a multiplier right there.

I think we were talking about whether it be a lawyer again, or you’re no parlor, things that. If you’ve got a family there’s five family members in that, right. You know, the pony type deal they can all ask. So just challenge yourself on those multipliers. If you’re ever thinking about one person yeah, or their related parties there, you can also ask and your inventory’s going to expand pretty quick.

Bob Brennan: And you can just phrase it up. Hey if it’s a buddy ORs on the softball team, it’s like, “Hey Jim, do you think I have a five star business?” You know, I don’t know this type of deal, but if they’re like, yeah I think whatever, Hey, would you mind leaving me a review or whatever the case is? So yeah. I mean, anybody that you can think of that either knows you or your business in my opinion is fair game. So –

Sue Ginsburg: Yep. And of course, make it easier for them to do that.

Bob Brennan: Yeah. Yeah. Help them with that process. And again, a lot of people aren’t going to … we’re not going to get to in the weeds here, but a lot of people aren’t going to admit that they don’t know how to do it … and there’s definitely the human condition where we’ve talked about this before people have the right good intention to do it, but it’s, it might be something you’re going to have to remind them a couple times if they haven’t done it or whatever.

Sue Ginsburg: Or you could sign up for an automated review request platform with your favorite podcast, for example.

Bob Brennan: There you go. There you go.

Sue Ginsburg: Have it done for you

Bob Brennan: Works well, too.

Jesse Dolan: And on that, to be transparent and frontal, we are running as the promo for this episode, our Review Lead software, which you just mentioned earlier in the episode, cutting in here and to Sue’s point, that is something right. You ask people in person have some software to fill in the cracks for everybody else that you want to reach, how to get reviews is another topic we’ve covered in the past. We’re going to cover more, but we’re going to, we’re going to dive back in this for everybody for a 2022 reboot, that is a whole nother in depth deal. I want to add one more thing to it, which is when we are asking people in person, this is my advice here is predicated on literally asking people face to face, right? Not through a software system or things that. Although I guess it might apply is let them know you’re asking for a favor, right?

Like Bob, can you help me out? Yeah. Can you help my business? Yeah. I think that’s, we’ve talked before about like, that’s the Mr. Rogers approach we’ve, we’ve talked about it is not asking them for review asking them to help you, right. That like, that’s your lead. There’s a slight psychological connotation there. That’s just a little different we don’t want to leave reviews. We don’t want to be bothered with that crap in general, but we will help a friend out or help a friend’s business out. Right. That just has a different feel to it. And when we’ve implemented that, I know it makes a big difference. So we can take that with two.

Sue Ginsburg: Great tip. Great tip.

Jesse Dolan: You guys got any other tips or, or bits of advice on again, this inventory reviews who to tap into how to tap into anything else or you think that wraps it up? Pretty good.

Bob Brennan: No, I think that covers a lot of it. I think I know it’s a topic where we’ll be coming in the future. Yeah. You know, trying to help people –

Jesse Dolan: Yeah.

Bob Brennan: Better with the act of getting the review because it’s just not as straightforward as you would think so.

Jesse Dolan: Right on.

Sue Ginsburg: And when other businesses that you do business with ask you for review, be generous and say yes, and click the link.

Jesse Dolan: Hey, little pro tip, I guess, for everybody from an … bring it back to SEO. What you just said right there is Sue, I think is pretty important for everybody listening. If you’re a business owner, a marketer, if you’re focused on your Google business profile or you’re active in managing Google business profiles, leave reviews yourself. You’re going to become a Google guide. Google accounts are scored and rated based on how many reviews you leave, how active you are in that space for Google and your account has levels has grades to it, right. Has a rank. And so the more reviews you leave, the higher authority you have within Google, right? The higher, your level, the higher your position, the more they trust you that can come in handy as an SEO. If Google maybe isn’t accepting a certain change for your business, or maybe they’ve got your map pin in the wrong spot, and you’re trying to adjust it right.

If they’re just like, well, you’re just some random business owner versus a level seven Google guide expert, that’s left a hundred and some reviews. You they’re going to carry a little different weight to those accounts because they don’t know you as a business owner, as a person. Right. But if you’re in their system as a trusted expert for leaving reviews, the things you have the authority to recommend or, or give feedback to Google on are going to carry some extra weight. So you’re right. Sue, that’s awesome. Pay it forward. Use it both ways that helps the greater good and just the karma of things. But also it’s good to get internet points on your Google account as well. That’s true. Come in handy.

Sue Ginsburg: And on, on that note, Jesse, can we put the link to leave us a review in the show notes? So everybody out there who’s listening and gets value from the podcast. Can please leave us a review.

Jesse Dolan: Yes. Automatically on every page, go to localseotactics.com, scroll onto the bottom, click the button for reviews. And from there you can pick Google, apple, iTunes, Google play, iHeart radio, whatever your platform of choice is. We’d absolutely love to get a review.

Sue Ginsburg: We appreciate it. So, okay, if you remember one thing and one thing only remember this, reviews are incredibly important. Yes. Get reviews. Get a lot of reviews. Your goal is for two times, at least your competitor’s number of reviews or at least two times the number your competitors have. And don’t be intimidated if that’s a lot, you have your customers, you have your former customers and the other resources of people who know your business that we mentioned, you can do it. Keep reviews coming regularly and be aware of not review dumping. I don’t know what else to call it a huge onslaught one week and then radio silence for the next months. After that, just look at getting reviews and getting them steadily from all the sources and people who know your business. Well, it is important.

Jesse Dolan: Yep. Yep. That’s good advice. I think everybody listening, if you can take some tidbits out of this episode and leverage them, maybe you got some new ideas where to get reviews from the pacing part and all that. Google my business now Google business profile and thus reviews are a huge party. RCO go back to some of our first episodes on this podcast. That’s where we started. And I think this update should help out some people and we can bring it back to the surface if it’s gone dormant for anybody out there. So thanks for the topic Sue and the framing it up and know the quotes. Bob. I want to thank you for holding back any Fred Mercury jokes. I feel you are about to crack at the beginning of the episode, which we can do offline, because this is a clean show and all the other advice that you gave to everybody else out there listening. Hopefully it’s a good episode for you.