Even if the odds are stacked against you, you have to get positive reviews. Here are a few things we do at Matador Solutions to help your business get positive reviews.
1. SEO, Ready to Go!
You don’t need Yelp. Say it with me once: “We don’t need Yelp.” Sure, we like to have the tool on our side, but we can outsmart the system. Matador Solutions helps small businesses leverage the tools at hand to boost their reputation.
Do you have a page on Google Places? If not, get one, or have us do it for you. And make sure it’s completed and accurate. As customers use smartphones and other mobile devices to search, local search is playing a larger role in what turns up in search results. Google Places is integrated into Google Maps. The more the information is verified around the web (your business location, the services you provide) the more often you’ll show up in relevant searches. Make sure you’re cited on other pages, such as YellowPages.com and SuperPages.com, and that the information you provide is consistent. Google pools this information. If there are contradictions in the information you provide, you don’t show up as much. Customers can review you in Google Places much like they do in Yelp, and Google pulls reviews from third-party sources too.
It’s important to be on Yahoo Local and Bing as well. Neither are as powerful as Google, but both are valuable, free, and will help you gain credibility and exposure.
You also want to optimize your website for local search. Try to use geo-targeted keywords in your URL, page titles, meta descriptions, and throughout your site. That said, don’t stuff your site with keywords! Google uses tasteful algorithms.
2. Surveys
Surveys are one of the most effective tools a company has to connect with its customers. They allow you to see your business through your customers’ eyes and move forward proactively and lucratively. If you respond to your customer’s desire, your business will thrive.
Matador Solutions uses best practices to help you stay in tune with your customers. We use surveys that elicit a high response rate so that the data gathered is valuable.
When building a survey, you want to have a specific goal in mind. If you want to learn more about the shopping experience, focus your questions on that. If you have a physical location, ask your frontline workers about the issues most often raised. If you are online, reach out to web supports.
After your customers complete the survey and you analyze the results, tell them what they and their peers said. Let them know what you will do. Then execute.
You don’t want to use this survey as a marketing tool. It will come across as disingenuous. You want to focus it on making your service better. And if you do so, it translates into good organic marketing.
A good survey buffers your business from bad reviews. For the most part, a customer would rather speak to you than the community on Yelp because you are listening and asking their opinion to make a difference.
You’ll also gain candid, invaluable insight into your customers which will help your business keep up.
Matador Solutions helps your business develop surveys and a strategy to stay connected with your customers and turn the relationship into profit.