Are you listening? There may be nothing more important to a local business than online customer reviews. They are a big deal, as was stressed by Joe in his recent blog post. Not enough can be said to get this point across.
To help pound this home again, I wanted to share a great infographic from the PeopleClaim blog. You can click to enlarge the infographic.
Your business has got to get this right. Build in to your systems the soliciting of, monitoring of and responding to customer reviews. Empower someone to get it done. Start doing it now.
DO NOT do this because you think it will help your SEO. And most importantly, DO NOT try to game the system. If you try shortcuts or try to pull one over on Google, you are playing with fire. For most small businesses, averaging one review a month is plenty. Just do the real work.
A friend of mine owns a small business in Cincy. He posted some helpful tips on our blog last July. Kevin does a fantastic job with handling customer reviews. Of course, it helps if you’re on the ball with customer service. Check out a couple of their Yelp reviews here and here. Good “real world” examples. (Yes, Yelp is a priority.)
Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t plug a couple of my past posts about the topic. I’ll leave you with those. Get to work!