When a water pipe in your yard bursts and you need immediate help, where do you look for assistance?

Seven out of 10 times, the consumers will turn to Google and ask it to find “plumbers near me” or “plumbers St. Petersburg.”

Once they have found a business–either in the local pack or search results, 90 percent of prospects will read less than ten reviews before forming a distinct impression of your business.

If you are a local service business, it is crucial to put your best foot forward because 87 percent of Americans trust online reviews to help them choose which local businesses or services will receive their hard-earned dollars.

A strong brand inspires confidence and brings more business. Nearby Now is a tool to strengthen your brand.

Enhance Your Brand’s Reputation with Nearby Now

Nearby Now is a powerful platform and ideal for service area businesses to build their reputation. It increases visibility in search engines and gives you unprecedented control over presentation and content.

Here are some tips to use this tool for maximum mileage.

1. Create Keyword-Rich Job Descriptions

Nearby Now has great advice on how to create job descriptions that exude credibility and impress search engines.

The descriptions should be succinct, clear, and understandable. Here is the official advice from Nearby Now with some edits:

1. 10–25 words (no more than 500 characters)
2. Include a product brand when possible (like “Duncan”)
3. Keywords or phrases that describe the actual job performed (like “fixed sewer line” or “replaced the pipes”)
4. Avoid abbreviations or industry slang.

Those points are essential. But if your field worker is willing to spend a few more minutes at a client’s place, he or she can include these items, too:

1. A monthly or seasonal descriptor when possible like (Jan or January) or (Spring or Summer)
2. Whether it was a commercial or residential job.
3. The neighborhood or subdivision (unless doing so would identify the specific customer)

2. Ask for a Review Immediately After the Job Is Finished

Four out of 10 customers will write a Nearby Now review if you request one immediately after completing a job successfully. The rate drops to 20 percent after 24 hours and declines further with delay.

Educate your workers to prep customers while they are still fixing things and send a review request to the clients’ email address as soon as the job is finished. Unlike Yelp, Google, and other review websites, Nearby Now does not require customers to log in before they can write about their experiences with a business. This little feature increases the chances of positive feedback.

3. Consider Several Factors Before Asking for a Review

Although Nearby Now eliminates the technical difficulties preventing your customers from writing reviews, your employees need to be alert to the human side of things.

The skill of determining when a client is a good candidate for a review request is useful, and your employees will be better off acquiring it.

Here are some tips from Nearby Now:

1. 1. Ask “Did I provide 5-star service today?” or “Did my service meet your expectations” or “Did I solve your (type) problem well?” or something of that sort.
   2. Wait for the response.
      1. The response is “yes.” This is a good candidate for a review request.
      2. The response is “no.” Provide a little more customer service, find the issue, and resolve it.

4. Create Service Pages for the Most Profitable Locations

Integrate Nearby Now with the most profitable geo-targeted service pages. Club reviews from several smaller areas into a bigger one.

It is not worth creating a service page for a sparsely populated town, county, or Census-Designated Place (CDP). Nearby Now automatically generates heat-maps. The heat-maps highlight the areas that keep you busy, thus are most profitable.

Cover the most populous and profitable areas. You can create service pages for as many locations as your business strategy and white hat SEO allows.

A lot of businesses fall into the trap of creating doorway pages—web pages sandwiched between what the appears in Google search results and content providing actionable information. The technique is frowned upon nowadays and your business website can be penalized for creating doorway pages.

5. Link Landing Pages to Nearby Now to Inspire Trust

Few customers are willing to take a leap of when they are searching online for local services. Often, websites and web pages focus on short-term persuasion tactics and create an environment deprived of face-to-face human contact. Do not do that.

For online customers, trust is a stronger inducement than price. To build trust, let your customers know what you are good at. Insert Nearby Now reviews into the local landing page to demonstrate consistency in providing high-quality jobs.

You can also use a familiar landmark image the locals can relate with. An image grabs attention and, when coupled with engaging sales copy, inspires trust. Some local businesses talk about their company and include an overlay of their star employees, thus providing more transparency.

6. Make Reviews More Credible

When one in four reviews on Yelp is a potential fake, it should not be surprising that 90 percent of people do not trust landing page reviews. Luckily, you can fix that.

• Don’t edit your customers’ comments, unless there are obvious linguistic mistakes. Let them speak. Slang, localisms will sound more natural.
• Don’t eliminate four-star or three-star reviews. Recent research has shown that people are more likely to trust you if they see both negative and positive reviews. The researchers were able to put a number on the effect: Letting your prospects read bad reviews can increase your sales up to 67 percent.
• Although Nearby Now lets you check in for your past jobs, a recommended strategy is not to go overboard. One hundred reviews in a day can trigger Google’s spam alert, and your website can lose rank. Let Nearby Now collect reviews gradually.

7. Work on GMB and Citations Before Optimizing Nearby Now

Last but not the least.

Location pages with content from Nearby Now are great, only if have done your homework first.

Thankfully, it is not difficult if you know search engine optimization (SEO) or have a digital agency to assist for you. It’s a simple two-step process.

First, claim your Google My Business (GMB) listing by telling Google that a business listed in their directory belongs to you.

Second, ensure that Citations are consistent across the web. A Citation is your business name, phone number, and address. Consistency in Citations is important because it is one of the ways Google determines your authenticity. Checking Citations on your own can be time-consuming. Work with a digital marketing agency to authenticate Citations for you.

Once you have claimed your GMB listing and verified Citation consistency, you are ready to integrate your location pages with Nearby Now.

Takeaway

If you are paying for Nearby Now, get the most out the platform. If you are not using Nearby Now, give it a try and use some or all of the techniques mentioned in this article to gather more reviews and business.

Before you spend another dime on internet marketing, find out why online reviews are the most cost effective way to generate revenue!

In this Article, We’ll Show You How to:

• Implement a “no customer left behind” feedback system
• Direct people to review sites that scream authority and build trust
• Make your competitors cry (and wonder how you did it)
• Avoid the most common mistakes that businesses make with regards to online reputation management.

You can buy your way to the top through pay per click or PPC, but there is no long term residual effect and your funds may run dry. Organic search strategies have a longer lasting benefit and one of the most effective approaches involve story telling. Share your expertise, what your  business does, and what your customers think about you. The trick to getting these stories told is to implement a customer feedback system.

The Story of Matt

(Also Known As “The Story of Every Other Business Owner I Know”)

Matt is a Certified Personal Trainer and owner of Krave Fitness in Campbell, CA. He’s your regular business owner. He works hard for the business and ensures all the customers are happy. The personal training industry is competitive and Matt was “off the grid” in local search results. In addition to a site redesign, on page optimization and directory management, we saw a chance to capitalize on the opportunities for managing Krave Fitness’ online reputation.

Matt is like 90% of all the business owners I know. They mean the best for their businesses, but they fall short in covering all bases. Online reputation management is an area commonly overlooked by small-business owners or those with limited web presence, yet it is considered a core marketing strategy needed in order to help build the trust of both search engines and potential customers.

Matt has since encourage his customers to leave feedback the search engines have taken notice. Krave Fitness is at the top spot in the 3-Pak with a nice set of five shiny stars to compliment this position.

Online Reviews Matter

According to the local SEO industry experts, online reviews comprise 8.4% of the 2015 Local Search Ranking Factors.  One thing to note about this survey and the review signals. It’s partly based on review quantity, review velocity, review diversity. In other words, make sure your reputation management program encourages feedback that seems to occur naturally. Don’t hold a contest that drives 5 sudden reviews to your Google+ or Yelp page in one day – Google knows when you start playing around with the rules.

Most Consumers Trust Strangers

A recent study by Bright Local found that 92% of consumers now read online reviews for local businesses (vs. 88% in 2014). On the case of hotels, customers read 6-12 reviews before they even consider booking a room..

If your service levels consistently produce positive reviews, you’ll see better placement in search results, more click throughs, and ultimately more revenue. For example, a one-star review increase for independent restaurants can lead to a 5-9% increase in revenue.   

Whether your business is retail, service or professional, online reviews won’t just fall into your lap. By virtue of human nature, you are more likely to get a negative review on a normal day because dissatisfied customers are more likely to leave a review than a satisfied one. You need to have a follow-up system in place, get your staff involved and utilize online tools to make it easy for customers to leave reviews. Don’t wait until you’ve upset someone to get feedback, build a system for gathering reviews into your business.  

Why the Stars Matter

We are in a hyper-fast, “I-need-it-now” world. Most Internet users have the attention span of a goldfish. According to Statistic Brain, our attention span is dropping which means online customers will quickly rely on available information or leave your site.  The average attention span of a goldfish is 9 seconds and as of 2015, the average attention span of the regular Internet-using human dropped to 8.25 seconds.

Just think about it this way. Your website might be first on the results list, but this still won’t mean anything if a customer sees zero reviews about your business.

Ultimately, businesses need to ensure that they have a good presence on Facebook, Yelp, or other directory sites, but first and foremost they need to ensure that they are creating a good impression on the customer. The rest will take care of itself.

The Best Defense is a Good Offense

We often hear from businesses that panic a little when they see a 1, 2 or 3-star review. They fear that not having all 5-star reviews is a bad thing. I’m here to set the record straight. Less than 5-star reviews CAN be a good thing!

When a customer is searching for a product or service, they are doing their best to make an informed decision. Part of that decision-making process involves reading reviews and making a judgement based on not only what the review says, but how honest the reviewer is being.

The customer wants to read honest opinions from real customers and can easily spot bogus reviews or people complaining just to complain. The customer knows that we don’t live in a utopian society, and not everything is perfect. When they see a product or service with hundreds of reviews that are all five-stars, they become skeptical. How does this business have only 5-star reviews? Are these reviews real? Are they paying customers to give them good reviews?

The truth is that honesty works better for you than 5-star reviews. Not everyone is going to be happy with your price – perhaps your prices are too high or possibly they are really competitive. A three or four-star review here and there is going to show potential new customers that you’ve got an authentic audience and that your reviews aren’t manufactured. That builds trust, and trust is how you win new business.

Respond to the Negative Reviews

If a customer was not pleased with your product or service and they leave a 3-star review, address the problem, make the customer happy, and respond to the review publicly. A negative review that has a comment from the business stating that the issue has been resolved almost has the same weight as a 5-star review in the potential customer’s eyes. This is probably the most authentic form of a review. Your potential new customers want to see that you are responsive and willing to solve problems when things don’t go perfectly. Without dialog like this, the customer will always have the question if if you actually listen to your customers or if you even care if your customers have a bad experience. If you’ve stuffed your site with nothing but 5-star reviews, they won’t have their answer and might move on.

The sobering reality is that negative reviews are inevitable. No matter how much your customers love you or how good your service is, someone will have a bad experience and use Yelp or Google+ to unleash their dissatisfaction.

You need to prepare by actively engaging with your customers directly after their interaction with you. This will benefit you in two ways.

1. You will allow any negative experiences to be dealt with straightaway and minimize the likelihood of negative reviews being left.
2. You will be able to use positive feedback to boost your current ratings and generate revenue.

How to Build a Simple Review / Feedback System for Free

Our most successful approach is to build a simple feedback page on your own website (you always want to drive customers back to your site as a starting point) and incorporate a feedback system into your workflow. This approach shows that you value their feedback and want to address their complaints and compensate for any dissatisfaction. It is very important that you make this straightforward and simple for your potential reviewers.

1. Identify the primary review sites on which you would like to be reviewed (IE. Facebook, Google+, Yelp).
2. Determine if there are any additional industry specific sites (such as Trip Advisor, Open Table, Zamoto if you owned a restaurant).
3. Build a review page on your website such as https://foxxr.com/reviews that will encourage clients to leave reviews on 3rd Party websites where they are most valuable. 
4. Have a feedback form on your website for those clients that would rather leave your company direct feedback.
5. Be sure to track the clients that leave you reviews in your CRM. 
6. Respond to each and every review online whether it’s positive or negative.
7. After they leave a review, be sure to thank them and consider asking them for a referral. This is the best time to ask for referrals! You company is fresh on their mind.

Get it Done with Full Contact and Zapier

If you are using Gmail, you can implement a simple and effective system to manage your contact record groups within Gmail using a Chrome CRM Extension called Full Contact. This extension resides within Gmail and pulls up your contact records in the right sidebar for quick viewing and editing. Think of it as the Gmail People Widget on steroids. Full Contact is a fremium product. My advice is to pony up and pay the $99 annual fee (or $9.99 monthly) to take advantage of its full potential.

Another tool to implement is Zapier, which is a tool for primarily non-technical users to connect together web apps. In minutes, you can setup a “Zap” to send an email to a customer that it triggered when you add that customer to your “Feedback Request” group. Since it’s a HTML email without the typical text editor, you have to use <br> for line breaks. You can even insert the customer’s first name field!

Here is a sample email:

Hi {{6941392__first_name}},<br>
<br>
Your satisfaction means more to us than a “job well done”. It exemplifies the level of service and commitment we strive to deliver to all of our clients. <br>
<br>
We would be delighted if you would post a quick review. It not only helps our online reputation, but helps others make a more informed decision about doing business with Foxxr. <br>
<br>
Please visit https://foxxr.com/reviews and select just one of the review sites. <br>
<br>
Thank You<br>
Brian Childers<br>
727-379-2207

Repost Reviews to Social Media

To give your online reputation management an even greater push, it is best to couple it with a sound social media campaign. You can easily repost the positive review you get from your customers into your Facebook page along with a small acknowledgement or thank-you note for them. This way, more customers will be encouraged to leave positive reviews for your business.

Get started today to make reputation management an essential part of your marketing strategy. Your customers can help shape your brand and affect your bottom line now more than ever.

In 2011, Urban Outfitters was hit with a social media storm when a Tumblr user who is also a seller on Etsy found out that a creation of her has been ripped off by Urban Outfitters. Albeit not being Urban Outfitter’s first case of gross disregard for intellectual property, this turned out to be one of the biggest. Within a few hours, thousands of Tumblr users went on to use their social media accounts to call for a boycott. The average daily mention of Urban Outfitters sits at around 1,470 but it topped at 15,000 within 24 hours. The sad part was that most of the mentions included the word hate, stealing, or boycott. Within the next few months, you can still see trails of the controversy whenever you do a Google search of Urban Outfitters.

Now you might be wondering what the story of a hipster apparel shop and an Etsy designer has got to do with you, right? Well. Imagine if it happened to you and your company. How long will the negative results last on your SERPs? Can you possibly stop the onslaught of negative rep? Can you clean up your internet reputation after such event?

Online Reputation Management should be a Process and not just a reaction

There’s an existing belief that really troubles me. It’s that most businesses see online reputation management as some sort of band-aid cure to their online reputation problems. They believe that you only need reputation management only when you already have a crisis on your midst. Well, unless you have a million-dollar budget like BP then don’t count on it solving your problem right away.

Online reputation management should be seen as a process. You don’t take your vitamins only when you get sick, right? It is true that online reputation can help you weather a crisis but it should not just be used for that purpose alone. It’s as if people know what ORM is but they barely understand the importance of online reputation management for their business.

So if you want to prepare yourself and your business before the big wave hits, let’s try to take you into a short crash course on how to do online reputation management.

Listen and pay attention to mentions

It’s always good to be a bit proactive in the world of online reputation management. You need to make sure that you are constantly monitoring what is being said about you, your brand, or your employees all over the Internet. To do this, you have to create a platform for social listening. There are a lot of tools out there you can utilize for this purpose. Google Alerts is a good start but there are also a good number of paid and free tools you can use. Some of these tools can just be basic monitoring tools while there are those that give you the capability to respond on a target channel. Some of these tools include the following:

1. Addict-o-matic
2. Buffer
3. Buzzsumo
4. Google Alerts
5. Hootsuite
6. Naymz
7. Rankur
8. Sendible
9. SocialMention
10. Sprout Social
11. Topsy
12. Trackur

How Should You Monitor and Respond?

Now that you have a whole list of tools you can use to monitor, the next question should be “How do I monitor the mentions and how should I respond to each and every one?” This is the part where you will create a “process” for monitoring and responding to both negative and positive mentions. Remember that you don’t necessarily have to focus on the positive as all kinds of mention affect your online reputation. Here’s a small checklist you can follow in molding your process.

1. Who are your customers talking to? – Really, who are they talking to? In the past, this was the job of a customer service personnel but now this responsibility is oftentimes given to a social media manager. The “owner of the dialogue” should be comfortable with answering concerns and responding to mentions across various platforms. Make sure to keep everything as personal as possible. Not only should the in-charge be knowledgeable about the business but should also be level-headed and sensitive to your customer’s needs.
2. What are you monitoring? – What exactly are you listening to? Of course you are waiting for brand mentions but you should get more specific. Are they talking about a specific post you made? A certain employee? Maybe a branch you just opened? You can even go as specific as figuring out the URL they are referring to in their mentions (if about your website or such). Think of all the possible ways your customers, followers, or fans will connect with your brand and expect them to be telling people about it online.
3. Focus on your channels and connect them to your service – There are a lot of communication channels you can use for your monitoring like Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Google+. You can also tap into category specific channels for your niche. This includes nich-specific boards and forums, Reddit for random information (although their subreddits can be really specific at times, or Houzz for home furnishings. This is important because you want to be in the same place where your customers may be talking about your brand.
4. Be “real” with your responses – How many times have you been disappointed with a business or brand because they talk to you as if they are robots? Like when you draft a 3-paragraph email detailing your concern only to be replied with a canned response. That really stings, right? So make sure you stay “human” with your replies. Giving canned responses can work at a certain level but when a customer gets it one after another, expect that customer to walk out of the door. Another thing to note is that you should keep some sort of process when dealing with mentions. Should it be handled by the social media staff? How about escalating it to the higher ups? Make sure you follow this process to keep a semblance of uniformity within your organization.

Proactiveness is the name of the game when it comes to online reputation management. Don’t make the mistake of relying on ORM as a reactionary campaign when you can use it as a preventative strategy.