Reviews: The Secret Sauce to Local SEO

Sheffield Pulley:
A couple little housekeeping items before we get started. We’re going to hold questions till the end. If you have any questions, you can drop them in chat or there’s a Q&A down there at the bottom and the guys will answer it towards the end of our time together. We are recording this so you will have a recording of it. We’ll also be sharing the deck and the resources that Tripp and Matt will be talking about and we’ll be sharing those as well. With that, I will hand it over to Matthew and Tripp. Thank you fellas.

Tripp Hamilton:
Thank you, Sheffield, for the great introduction. So, this is Tripp here. So today we’ll be doing a presentation and webinar on Reviews, the Secret Sauce of Local SEO. And Matt, if you want to handle what we’ll learn today.

Matthew Kay:
Yeah. So what we hope to impart upon you today is just a basic concept or a basic understanding of what reviews can do for local SEO, for your business, and how you can leverage them to learn things about your customers, to learn things about how you should change the way you’re serving them, change what you’re talking about on your website, and everything in between.

Matthew Kay:
We strongly, strongly believe that reviews, they can be almost the backbone of your local digital marketing efforts, because we live in a time where the cost of paid advertising is expensive. SEO campaigns can be very, very resource intensive. And so at the core of it, you need to have a good relationship with your customers. You need to have customer lifetime value that is positive, and your customer acquisition cost and how much you’re spending to get customers and to grow.

Matthew Kay:
It all has to be sustainable and reviews can help be one of the, I would say core levers that can help drive growth in that regard. So, yeah, we’ll be running through some background. We’ll be sharing some tactics, some tools, and all sorts of other cool stuff. So our hope is that you have some actionable takeaways, and maybe a new appreciation or a new mindset when it comes to reviews. And so without further ado, let’s dig in.

Matthew Kay:
So who am I? My introduction, my gateway drug, if you will, to digital marketing and this whole world that I now spend a lot of time in was actually YouTube. I’m a long time Lego fan and along with a friend, I built out and grew, I guess a media company, a YouTube channel from nothing to by the time I moved on, we had about 150,000 subscribers. So we also had a podcast and interviewed people all over the world.

Matthew Kay:
The one thing I learned was how to build something and how to grow something, and I took that and went and started consulting, and helping other people grow their businesses and media outlets and learning, apply some of the learnings from how to use channels and how to form brand partnerships, and all that kind of good stuff. And all that led me to join Hive Digital, where I sit on the SEO team. SEO is my title of course. But I definitely dabble and at least advise or work in other channels and greatly enjoy every aspect of digital marketing and really business as a whole. And Tripp, tell me more about yourself.

Tripp Hamilton:
So, yeah, my name is Tripp. A little bit about me. I went to NC State University. Plans to become a teacher, but really I came out of it with a love for writing and research, and with a lot of people in internet marketing, you kind of fall into it. It’s right place right time. So I started initially here at this company many years ago, and I got my start getting websites out of Google link companies. So people who built a bunch of spammy links, they’d get in trouble with Google. Their traffic would be essentially decimated by a penalty, and I would get them out of that, and I worked my way through that.

Tripp Hamilton:
Started doing, learning on the side of how to do web design, SEO, and really that’s got to me this point today. And I’m also a husband, a father, and I really love music. Very much looking forward to this vaccine roll out so I can start going to concerts again and festivals. So that’s really my goal at the end of this so I can introduce my kids to the things that I love as well.

Tripp Hamilton:
So really just to jump on into it. Really what we need to review first is, what are those local SEO must-haves? What do you need as a local business to be visible in local search? Now the thing about, at least, this section is this can also relate to not just local businesses, but a lot of other businesses. The same thing with reviews. Reviews can also relate to software companies, to large enterprises. So don’t just think that reviews only matter for local SEO.

Tripp Hamilton:
They matter for a lot of different verticals. I mean because you got to think of like Amazon. If you went on Amazon and looked at a product that has reviews, would you buy that or would you buy the one with 100 reviews? So just think about that like mindset going into what we think about reviews and stuff like that.

Tripp Hamilton:
So I think one of the things, at least, about marketing these days is that it’s very visual. Things with visual cues, videos, photos, infographics, something to catch people’s attention is really what you need for a website, for marketing, for a social post. Like if you’re just doing social posts with text, it’s not going to catch someone’s attention as opposed to something with an image, maybe with text overlaid on it.

Tripp Hamilton:
So those photos can build trust and photos can be representative of your brand and how you display yourself to your customers, to your competitors, and stuff like that. So Matthew found this tweet right here where this man’s mother-in-law opened a spa in Austin, and they insisted they hire a commercial photographer. So if you look, I mean it may be hard to see on mobile if you’re on mobile. But the photos are very high resolution, they’re very well taken.

Tripp Hamilton:
You got to think like, “Would you want to spend $100 on some great commercial photos?” I mean you could save the $100 and take them on your iPhone, but would they turn out like this? Do you have the editing wherewithal to color correct all the images, to make sure that you have the right lens? I mean if it’s an iPhone, you have lens attachments, but again, there’s something that comes with getting good photos.

Tripp Hamilton:
Also, videos too. Video, we don’t want to forget like other media formats as well. So photos can build trust and are a big part of local SEO, and just SEO in general too. And then also along with the photos, visual appeal is important. Yeah. We can take a photo of a croissant like we see here. But when it’s laid out almost like an art gallery, it becomes even more visually appealing. This place they wanted to become super Instagram-able. So they made their restaurant to be kind of a museum, an art gallery of sorts.

Tripp Hamilton:
I know Matthew, you found this photo as well, so I don’t know if you wanted to touch on this as well.

Matthew Kay:
Yeah. I think that the core of this and what we previously talked about with in regards to photos of your business, but to make sure that people can see what you’re doing, if of course, you’re a physical business. People can see what you’re doing and that people are, what they see is something that is so visually appealing. This layout of croissants on a bunch of risers, this looks like an art gallery.

Matthew Kay:
I think I would personally have a hard time looking at this and not taking a photo and maybe sharing it with people I know that love croissants or super into to bake goods, if you will. I think the core of it is that we want to engage with our customers, our potential customers and give them something to talk about. And visual appeal is part of that, because that’s what takes… These could just be a couple of croissants on a folding cart table, but that would not make that customer experience memorable enough that they would take a photo.

Matthew Kay:
I mean maybe they would take a photo of some croissants on a cart table and say, “Look at how depressing this looks.” But this just took it into the realm of, “Wow. This is incredible.” And there’s a quote from the business owner that said, “Straight up. We wanted to create a space that was super Instagram-able.” And so to see a business owner that understands that, and that’s just someone with… There’s so many ding, ding, ding bells going off when I read things like that. It’s fantastic.

Matthew Kay:
So, yeah, no wonder if you were to go visit the Layered Croissanterie in the review profile, you’ll see all sorts of amazing people sharing photos, talking about how wonderful everything tastes. It’s a big flywheel all working together, and these kind of core components, right? What’s your space looks like, your photos of it, the way you’re presenting yourself. These are the table stakes items that you need as a local business in 2021 if you want to have a good run from what I think Tripp and I see.

Tripp Hamilton:
For sure and kind of seguing from Instagram-able are kind of social profiles. So you got to think of where is your business showing up? Where do your customers hang out? I’m kind of including Google emphasis in here because it is more or less a social profile. It’s a profile of your business that has a panel and not, call a knowledge panel whenever you search your brand name in Google. You also have Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, unfortunately, we don’t have Google+ or Vine anymore, but all of these kind of work together in that they create this like your story.

Tripp Hamilton:
Again, where do your customers hang out? Maybe you should focus on Facebook if you’re catering towards more adult audience. Maybe if you’re catering towards younger kids or teenagers, market on TikTok or something like that. And you really got to determine where you want to, at least, make these posts. And again, utilize the videos, utilize the photos. And one thing here is you can use namecheck.com to find good usernames or find the same username to make sure that there’s kind of uniformity across the board.

Tripp Hamilton:
So if someone finds you on Facebook, they can also find you on Twitter with the same username and all the above. And I’ll also include NAP listings here. So that’s name, address, and phone number. So think Yellow Pages. That could also be considered a profile, where someone might look something up on Yellow Pages. But all of these kind of send signals when it comes to ranking locally is having things consistent across the board, having the same logo on all of these, having all your business hours up-to-date, your website, all that information just kind of up-to-date and accurate on all these platforms.

Matthew Kay:
Table stakes, Tripp, right? Table stakes.

Tripp Hamilton:
For sure. And I guess the last thing, and I would say most important is a website. All of these things kind of commingle into where do you establish your online footprint? There’s plenty of businesses that exist solely on Facebook, solely on Etsy and stuff like that, and they use their social profiles to boost those pages. But if you’re serious about marketing, you’ll want to have complete control over your marketing efforts, because with Facebook, with Etsy, with any of those platforms, you’re at the mercy of their quality team.

Tripp Hamilton:
A lot of times you can get your, these accounts banned for certain reasons. If you anger someone and they get a bunch of people to mass report you, you can have your account taken away. So you always want to make sure that you have full control over your destiny, and creating website is part of that, and there’s plenty of ways to do this. Squarespace and WordPress are great platforms that we’ve used in the past for building websites affordably. It’s only a couple hundred bucks a year for hosting for these, and really you can get an out of the box theme for pretty cheap as well to make sure that it’s not just a plain white background, black text WordPress site to make sure it’s something that’s visually appealing.

Tripp Hamilton:
And one thing that me and Matt like using for WordPress is Divi Builder, and it at least provides a lot of different tools to make sure that your website is responsive, because you definitely want a website that appears and renders properly on mobile. Since a lot of local businesses rely on mobile search. And then if you look over here on the right side, we have search results page.

Tripp Hamilton:
So Pest Control Denver. So we have local service ads up here. So these, again, cost money. Search campaign ads cost money, but require a website. Map Pack doesn’t always require a website. You don’t have to necessarily have a website to show up in a Map Pack. But it does kind of lend towards having that online footprint. And then organic listings. So if you don’t have a website, the only place you’re really showing up is the Map Pack, and this is solely dependent on one particular thing is your physical location. If you are located say, if you’re locating in one of the suburbs of Raleigh, and you’re wanting to show up in the heart of Raleigh, you’re probably not going to show up because your competitors might be in that area close to your customers.

Tripp Hamilton:
So making sure that you can provide, be providing these organic listings and ads if you want to spend some money on ads, definitely you don’t want to kind of put all your eggs in one basket for the Map Pack. And this kind of moves us to why reviews matter. Is it worth all the hassle, all the trouble to get reviews for my brand? I mean in short, yes. It is worth it. And really like why should you really care about reviews?

Tripp Hamilton:
BrightLocal does this survey every year of local consumer survey and like this graph right here, do consumers read online reviews for local businesses? We can see right here, 13%, never. But here’s a huge swath of people who always regularly or occasionally read reviews for local businesses, and this kind of rings true for products as well. So if you’re selling a product, if you have no reviews for that product there might not be that consumer trust to buy it, because you got to think of a review like someone’s, like your friend or your family member saying, “Hey, I know this plumber. He does really good work.” That is someone personally telling you about their service and that it’s good. That’s what you got to think about reviews as sort of.

Tripp Hamilton:
And people read reviews, so what? Why should it matter to you? So really it matters on how they feel about online reviews. So again, taking some information from the survey, positive reviews make people more likely to use a business. I mean this is 94%, a huge percentage of people. So if you have a lot of negative reviews, you’re essentially going to lose out on a lot of this. And again, negative reviews make me less likely to use a business. And I would say it’s also important on how you respond to those negative reviews, which I’ll talk about a little bit later.

Tripp Hamilton:
And then like I was saying, I trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations from friends or family. So think of that plumber, that carpenter, whoever it might be that a family or friend member or a family member or friend suggested, think of that as like that’s a review right there.

Matthew Kay:
I think in a day and age where you have more and more people aware of algorithms and aware of digital channels and digital platforms, how they can be manipulated, reviews are still seen, of course, they could be manipulated as well as a caveat, but they are still seen, right, Tripp as like another real person saying the thing, because that’s what they are at the core of it.

Tripp Hamilton:
Yeah, and honestly, there’s a lot of people out there with, that will do fake reviews and you can buy fake reviews. I know Amazon had a big issue with people sending out free products and asking for a five-star review for that free product. So there’s ways to game the system, but that all ends at some point, Amazon finds out, Google finds out, accounts get banned and stuff like that. So making sure you get real legitimate reviews is definitely important.

Tripp Hamilton:
And this builds credibility with customers. So I have a SERP right here of pest control services here in Virginia Beach. So we have Terminix. Obviously, a huge brand with 844 reviews. They’re probably using some sort of service to gather these reviews. This doesn’t just happen organically, and we have Bah-Hum-Bug Pest 10 reviews. This probably happened naturally. They don’t do any review gathering, they don’t do any follow-up. It’s just someone leaving a review, probably someone upset. That’s why they have 3.8. A couple of those reviews might be one or two stars.

Tripp Hamilton:
So you got to think like, would you rather use a brand with several reviews, an average of 4 stars or above or a brand with no reviews. So think of this AntX Pest Control, no reviews. We don’t have anyone saying, “AntX Pest Control is the best.” None of their customers have gone in here and reviewed it. So credibility is everything when it comes to a purchasing decision and increases exponentially with cost of a product or service. So think of like when you go out to buy a mattress versus buying new sheets. Buying new sheets might just be you and the store feel the sheets and you’re like, “Oh, this looks cool. This feels good or this pattern matches my bedroom so that’s great.” Then, you get home and it rips apart in a week.

Tripp Hamilton:
But mattresses, it takes a lot more time, because there’s a lot more money that goes into a mattress, several hundred dollars, maybe a couple thousand dollars depending on if it’s one of those ones that angle up and down. So you always have to think of how reviews and how this appears to your customers, because you definitely always want to be building that credibility with them.

Tripp Hamilton:
And really reviews can help you understand how to improve your service that you’re offering. If you’re getting a lot of bad reviews, maybe it’s not your customers, maybe it’s you. Maybe there’s something that you’re doing wrong, maybe you’ve set expectations too high. So think of that, the croissants. If the croissants look really good in the window, but then their croissant on the plate, and it looks like a deflated balloon, what are they going to say?

Tripp Hamilton:
They’re going to write a bad review and they’re going to say, “Hey, these guys have really good pictures online, but everything’s a lie.” Or maybe you have a bad product or service, maybe if someone that works there that’s kind of being not so nice to the customers or something like that. Think of-

Matthew Kay:
I think Tripp and I have probably, at least come across or heard or talked amongst ourselves about examples of businesses. Pizza shop, for instance, that maybe spends a lot of money on Facebook ads to try and drum up business or wants to spend a ton of money on paid advertising, but it has terrible customer service, terrible delivery. The product and the quality of the thing, whatever it is, maybe the pizza. It’s just terrible and all of those things.

Matthew Kay:
There is no amount of marketing that can fix something that is structurally bad, and if you really are not tuned into that, once again, reviews can help sort of guide you towards where you can improve, where you can correct things, and create a better business, serve your customers better, all of that.

Tripp Hamilton:
Yeah and more so into that, I think it goes on the business owner or management to know when they get a bad review, drop everything you’re doing and figure out how, what can I do to fix this? And that kind of leads into the next slide is about responding to reviews. So reviews can happen in a lot of places. They can happen like here, Google My Business. They can happen on Facebook, it can happen on Twitter, hopefully, you don’t get trending on Twitter because that typically is not a good thing.

Tripp Hamilton:
So think about responding to your reviews, whether they’re good or bad, especially when good reviews are put forth. Make sure that you are knowledgeable about who is leaving that review. Now, sometimes you can’t, maybe they have a username that isn’t indicative of what their identity is. So that might be an edge case. But always leave a natural, not a copy-pasted response, because me personally, I go on Google My Business, the knowledge panels for a business I might be using or might be visiting, and I look at the reviews.

Tripp Hamilton:
I look at how they respond to reviews, don’t respond at all then. It kind of is a ding in my book against them, because they’re not paying attention to the people leaving them good reviews. In the same way, bad reviews, always, always, always respond to a bad review. Make sure that whoever is leaving that review, you can identify them, and maybe you can link it back to their account, so you can say, “Hey, we know this went on. We’re doing this, this and this to fix the problem. Hey, we’re giving you a call.” Something like that.

Tripp Hamilton:
And in the same vein, make sure the bad review is legitimate. There’s a lot of services out there that will leave bad reviews, but it’s not a real person. And a lot of times you can do that by clicking on this person’s profile and seeing where do they leave reviews? Most of the time, more 99% of the time, people will not have their account locked down and have privacy enabled when they’re leaving reviews on Google. It’s just really you can see a fake review account will have them all over the map.

Tripp Hamilton:
Like in Seattle, in New York and North Carolina or their account will be private. So just make sure that you are doing your due diligence and making sure you’re not just reacting emotionally to a bad review and react respond, rather than react. And then another thing to think about, so not just reviews in the sense of people leaving them in your group, my business profile or Facebook. But there’s also technical ways to get reviews to show up.

Tripp Hamilton:
So Review Schema is a good way. So look over here for David’s Sunflower Seeds. We have Amazon search result. We have Wikipedia, and then we have Walmart. So using Schema, you can pull in reviews into the search results and it makes this a lot more clickable. Now, again, Wikipedia is not going to have a rating. But think if this were a competitor, and they didn’t have that, what would you rather click on? Would you rather click on the one that has these stars? I mean it’s a completely different color than anything else on the page. Everything else kind of blends together as opposed to these ratings.

Tripp Hamilton:
You can also pull in price, whether it’s in stock. There’s a lot of different things you can do with Schema. And one thing to note about Schema and the appearance of Review Schema is that has been removed in many local searches, because it’s been abused a lot by law firms, by pest control companies, stuff like that. So they’ll put reviews and say that they have reviews. But for this to work, reviews have to appear on the page itself. You can’t just write in the back end that, “Oh, we have a 5-star rating with 10 reviews.” You can, you might get dinged for hidden Schema markup.

Tripp Hamilton:
Also, it’s available for search ads as well this Review Schema. So just always something to think about. This is a little bit more technical, but there’s services out there that can get this implemented like Trustpilot and Yotpo that essentially gather reviews from Facebook and Google and put it all in one place, and you can essentially install their plugin or a snippet of code. And then it automatically appears on your site.

Tripp Hamilton:
Yeah. Really this kind of all culminates and Google has specific documentation about review count and review score factor is a local search ranking. So whether you have these reviews, whether you have a lot of reviews or a few here with the support article, they have noted that this is a ranking factor. Whether or not it’s a large ranking factor is still something that’s theoretical, because they’re not going to be up front and say, “Well, if you have… Reviews are 50 of the pie.”

Tripp Hamilton:
They’re not necessarily going to say that or be forthcoming about that, but you also have to think about like there’s a lot of behavior that goes around reviews. There’s a lot of trust. There’s a lot of different things that can go into making a purchasing decision and Google has integrated that into their local search algorithm and making sure that you have a lot of reviews and a lot of positive reviews is definitely an important piece of that puzzle.

Tripp Hamilton:
Now, the big question, how do we get reviews? Matt?

Matthew Kay:
How do we get reviews, Tripp? If I give you $5, would you leave a review in my Google My Business profile?

Tripp Hamilton:
I mean that’s a pretty good incentive.

Matthew Kay:
Yeah.

Tripp Hamilton:
Whether or not that abides by the guidelines, that’s a whole other thing.

Matthew Kay:
Yeah. If I give you $4 and two Captain Crunch cereal boxes, will you please leave me a review? Yeah. The gist of it is that the easiest way to ask for review is to simply ask. Now granted this requires maybe some nuance, right? In the way that you do it. I’m always amazed and noticing these kinds of things makes it really time-consuming or at least mentally taxing to go out shopping. When I encounter a sales associate or someone at a store or someone out in the world that has a very eloquent, well-phrased something, something, something, and if you add, “Please leave us a review dah-dah-dah-dah.”

Matthew Kay:
It can be very eloquent. It’s easy to do. It puts it in the customer’s mind. That’s a great way to do it. You can also give a little card. If you’re giving takeout, for instance, orders. You could slip a little flyer in the takeout order that says, “Let us know how we did. Go here to leave us a review.” And maybe you want to incentivize that review, and that’s where you could enter for a [inaudible 00:29:33] or something in that vein. But the easiest way to get a review is to just ask for one.

Matthew Kay:
It is something that a lot of people do. You can do it. I’ve been in the room many times I feel like where I’ve basically raised the point. Well, we could just ask the customers for review every so often, and they’re “Whoa. Whoa. Really?” And so I think it’s just a matter of codifying how to ask and all that sort of thing.

Matthew Kay:
I think the big caveat I always have asking for a review directly onto a platform, you might be getting someone that has negative sentiment or does not have, did not have a totally positive experience. They could go leave a negative review. If you don’t want that, we have some systems for you to potentially avoid that down the road. But yeah, manually, that’s the easiest way. However, for a lot of people automation is necessary.

Matthew Kay:
There are only so many things that a sales associate can say or there is no direct, may be interaction with the customer at all, and you’re serving them digitally or they’re in e-commerce [crosstalk 00:30:46]

Tripp Hamilton:
Also, only so many hours in the day and-

Matthew Kay:
There’s so many hours in the day, right? Yeah. And we very, very often encounter people that are using, let’s just assume you’re a plumber, right? You might be using software that helps you manage your jobs and gives you this is the address, this is the time you need to be there, and this is the customer, and when you’re done, that plumber, he’ll go in and log it, and it helps him with billing, and it tells the plumbing company owner what’s going on. These sorts of systems.

Matthew Kay:
The term I to tend to use is something like end state or a terminal state. So the customer has reached the end of service or the end of their service or the end of their engagement or something. There is usually an event. That can be programmatically sent out to say, “Job completed.” Something like that. And systems like, we have a screenshot here for a system called Endorsal and another called Get Five Stars. There’s also similar ones like BirdEye, Podium.

Matthew Kay:
We, strongly I, I guess strongly recommended Endorsal. All these others are functional as well, but the core idea here is that with automation, we can go into our, essentially our, the way we’re running our business, whatever system we’re using, we can go in and say, “Hey, this person has now finished.” Let’s wait 6 hours, 12 hours, 1 day, and then follow up and say, “How do we do?” And take it from there.

Matthew Kay:
So automation can greatly reduce the burden of manually asking for it. Automation can be facilitated through a service called Zapier. A lot of these CRM systems, you might be using one for your business right now. CRM system or client delivery system, there’s probably some way that you can capture that service completed, order fulfilled type of an event and send a request by a feedback system using Zapier, which can help tie these software systems together.

Matthew Kay:
So this is a tool that we’ve used to integrate all sorts of different systems into a review generation system, feedback gathering system like Get Five Stars, Endorsal or so forth. The flow, and to go back to the earlier point about filtering for sentiment. You maybe want to establish good or bad, good, great. And so anyone that says bad or good, we can assume that they’re neutral or negative at best or neutral at best and negative at worst, and if they’re positive, we can ask them for a review, however, if they have bad sentiment or they’re just neutral, we want to learn from them.

Matthew Kay:
This goes back to our earlier points if you, as a business owner more and more, if there’s some disconnect between the way you’re delivering and serving, you probably want to find out what’s going on and learn how you can improve, because fixing those sorts of issues can really have a very, very high ROI for so many different things. So with that in mind, these automation systems they really can do a great job of it’s not about just getting reviews.

Matthew Kay:
I think anyone I’ve had broached the topic with or had the discussion with, if the focus is on let’s talk about how we can get some reviews on these profiles? That premise is almost wrong. The structural, that viewpoint, yeah, that’s maybe one of the results, but at the core of it with a system like this and with automating and really the only goal to implement is to learn from your customers and figure out how you can improve, and what you can do to better your offering, better yourself so you can better your business. Yeah. It’s very clean, and it’s really, really amazing to see how it works and the kind of insights you can get from just learning more from your customers. It’s as simple as that.

Matthew Kay:
So now that we know why we care about reviews, the kinds of things that we want to have in place before we even consider good photos, beautiful space, a great offering, doing the most that we can to have a unique and wonderful business and a nice offering, and we know how to get reviews. We now are at the stage where we want to learn how can we use our reviews? What are the things?

Matthew Kay:
And we’ve touched on this just a minute ago, but how can we use them? What are reviews good for? I think the important part is that there is a good review and a bad review if you want to look at it that way. But a bad review, you can learn from it if it’s a legitimate bad review, however, if it’s not a legitimate bad review, there’s no reason to not make some lemonade from lemons and this is something I saw at a coffee shop here in Raleigh.

Matthew Kay:
I was walking out, and notice the direction. This is facing for people that are leaving the coffee shop. This is what you read on the back of this kind of flip board sign. It says, “I’ve been trying to find the best coffee in Raleigh, but I definitely found the worst. Simon from Google Reviews. So Simon’s not really giving much of anything helpful or useful there. I guess he’s just saying he didn’t like the coffee. But no reason why or anything in that regard. But this business, they kind of get it, right? It’s just funny and to just put that on a board and kind of chuckle at it.

Matthew Kay:
This is the same coffee shop where the this sucks sign came from earlier in the presentation. But just an example of like someone probably came in and said, “This place sucks.” And they just kind of ran with it. That’s like their Wi-Fi password. So, yeah, have fun with it. I think if you’re the CMO or the director of marketing at a puzzle company, I would run an entire marketing campaign based off of Amazon reviews that people leave for puzzles, and you can go find these today.

Matthew Kay:
Just go to Amazon, type in puzzle and start reading through the most negative reviews. There are people that are literally complaining about the puzzle being a puzzle. I think it’s just hilarious that someone would buy a 2000 piece puzzle, and then go leave a four or five sentence review about how the puzzle had a lot of pieces and they had to put it together, and it took time, and it was hard, and it challenged them, and the sky is also blue, and water is wet. It’s just a lot of fun or can be to just view it in a light-hearted kind of way.

Tripp Hamilton:
So that’s almost like weaponizing your reviews, whether good or bad. And I would say this is a really good example of how you’ve kind of weaponized a bad review to be kind of tongue-in-cheek. We can make fun of ourselves, because maybe that was a day where, I don’t know, there was a bad batch of coffee. Who knows? Who really knows? A business owner should know why this review was left or maybe why this person was the way they were.

Matthew Kay:
Yeah. Good review or bad review, I think the thought is there is no such thing as a bad review maybe. Ad reviews on the website is a wonderful way to sort of prove legitimacy of your business. And this is something, another reason to have a website. I am a big advocate or a fan of a business having a wall of love or a reviews page or a testimonials page that just shows a bunch of people, all their reviews of the business, like what are people saying about this business? What are customers saying about us?

Matthew Kay:
This is what customers are saying about us. Here, you read. Don’t take it from us. Take it from our customers. So let’s just say like you’re on the fence about maybe signing up for a new course or a new class with a company. If you go to their website, you’re thinking about registering, you see a slide, it has some good reviews in it, it says, “Read more.” And then you just see example after example of people talking about how it was great taking a class with this company. I really enjoyed it. They’re really great instructors. That would probably be enough to sway you in a positive direction.

Matthew Kay:
And this applies to anyone that is operating an entity, a business, trying to make money from customers, probably has customers, probably has things that customers think that they’re saying, and they should probably share them with their other potential customers if they want to get more. If you’re a digital agency like us at Hive Digital, we have clients that leave reviews for us on platforms like Google and other.

Matthew Kay:
I think we use one called clutch frequently. But we do in our proposals, and our website, and in other marketing collateral, we share comments and reviews from our clients, and this is what they said about us. Don’t take it from us, here’s what they said. So build trust, and yeah, share what your other people are saying about your business. It’s a no-brainer.

Matthew Kay:
So for a lot of social business or a lot of business and social media profiles, you might go to the average law firm’s website and click over to their Facebook page or their, if they have a Twitter page or whatever social media outlets they’re using, and you’ll see maybe the occasional blog update, news update, something about the firm. But something I am a big advocate for just suggesting that you throw into the mix is sharing your reviews on social media.

Matthew Kay:
We just talked about ways to use reviews on a website, how we have had to go put it in our proposals. You could also, it’s a great excuse for a social media post. You’ve got a really great glowing client review, “Hey, we’re really happy to be able to serve people like Albert Einstein in this screenshot. Great physicist. Maybe he’ll finally do something great one day. Anyway, just really happy Albert’s a client of ours. If you’re interested in being a client too, go to this link and learn more about us.”

Matthew Kay:
Something as simple as that. It’s just a nice way to share something that is relevant, cool, and maybe give a nice nod to your customer. This once, again, this is a screenshot, a live, a real screenshot from Endorsal, and what Endorsal looks like in the back end, and they allow you to take the reviews you’re getting through their platform and share them out to social automatically in a really, really cool sort of streamlined automated way.

Matthew Kay:
To go back to some things Tripp and I boasted on the SEO team here in Hive Digital, and we spend, I guess you could say a lot of time basically reminding people that there is the language, and there is what you think that makes… There’s what you think that makes you different, your positioning different than a competitor. And then there is a language that you use to describe your business and what you do and how you think about things, but then there is the other side of that. There is what your customers think of you, what they think you do, what they like about you, all of the things that they, they, they are doing, thinking, saying about you.

Matthew Kay:
Reviews are a window into that, and the insights from that can… Let’s just say this is an example, this is a restaurant in Raleigh called Stanbury, a great restaurant. Have only good things to say. I really hope they open back up at the end of April like they said they were going to three months ago. In any case, if I was doing a new website for them, and I was tasked with the copywriting for the home page, what would I do to make that copy better?

Matthew Kay:
I would go look at the reviews and see what are people saying about this restaurant called Stanbury, what do they like? Google does a great job of this. They sort of look at all the reviews and they try to come up with, usually it’s just like this. You have three, and then they’ll look for words that reoccur over and over again. I’m sure they have a great algorithm for this. And then they will pull out occurrences that are over and over again. And then highlight them just like this. So this is like a very basic example of this, but I could use that to say Stanbury, something about service, maybe atmosphere. Our menu includes, there’s a mention of a marrow appetizer.

Matthew Kay:
So that appeared in a lot of reviews and book now, make a reservation or place an online order or something like that. Obviously, if you have a large set of reviews that you could analyze, maybe you have 2000 reviews, you can really start to almost form like statistically significant insights or if 400 people said the same thing about great communication, that means that they probably experienced people like you or they went to another vendor company business and had terrible communication.

Matthew Kay:
So if you highlight great communication, boom. You’re winning. These are really, I think they’re tremendously cool from just the most basic business level. But also from a SEO standpoint, from a digital marketing standpoint, it is almost everything to just know what people think about you, how you can improve, and all of that good stuff. Absolutely.

Matthew Kay:
And I think we have, what was it? Yeah. So I mean we touched on this just now. But I think that this is the same as before. We just want to use these reviews to improve our content, to improve our website, improve our offering. It is that really a golden window into what customers are thinking about you, and if you can do a better job of talking about what you do in the terms that your customers want to hear it and understand it themselves, how can you do anything but win? It’s like looking into someone’s brain and only good things can come out of that or at least growth, from a business standpoint, from a digital marketing standpoint can come out of that.

Matthew Kay:
And this is an example, this is once again from Endorsal. But this is what the Endorsal review embeds on a website look like. So the one on the left it’s like a wall of love and the one on the right, that’s like the slider. So to go back to tactics, right? And actionable things, obviously, there’s a lot of pieces here. There’s a lot of context or a lot of background. But from a very tactical standpoint, Endorsal can help you do something like set up a customer review wall and allow you to share things in a slider format, and it all looks it looks good, and it’s clean, but it’s most importantly something for people to evaluate, look at, and read as they consider you as a person to be a potential partner.

Matthew Kay:
And I think with all of that said, I think, Tripp, we’ve gone through the basis, where you need to be before you even want to consider reviews. Then, we’ve talked about why reviews matter, why you should even care. And then we’ve gone on to talk about how to get some reviews, what systems you can use, strategies, and then the uses and applications of those reviews. So one, two, three, four, and that’s sort of sums it up a bit.

Matthew Kay:
I think, hopefully, as you’ve been listening to Tripp and I, you maybe have some more insight into what to consider before caring about reviews, where you should be, and then how you can get them, why you need them, and everything in between. So with all that, I think that is a wrap. And we are up for any questions.

Tripp Hamilton:
Yeah. So I’ll take this first question. So an anonymous attendee says, “Let’s say you’re a pest control company, and you don’t have a physical location or a website or social media platform is my only option to increase local awareness. And is it really that big of a deal to not have a website, especially of cost where a new company is a factor?”

Tripp Hamilton:
Now, I would say if you don’t have a physical location there are ways to get a Google My Business account. So there are search service area and hybrid businesses that you can utilize. So I’m just going to drag something over here real quick. So you can set a service area. So say you have on the map, you can essentially draw a box, set different zip codes and stuff like that as your service area. So there’s definitely ways to get a Google My Business account, so that you appear in Google search.

Tripp Hamilton:
Now, again, I will say a website, the hosting cost of website for starter is $150. So also, think that it isn’t that expensive, and if you use your free time and make the website yourself, you’re saving a lot of money. I mean it can cost thousands and thousands of dollars to make a website depending on how complicated it is, how many photos you’re getting, if you want to hire a professional photographer.

Tripp Hamilton:
So there are a lot of costs that go into making website, but you can get something started make a one-pager on Squarespace. It just has your service offerings, your brand name, your logo and stuff like that for like I think their starter package is $150, $200 or something like that. So there’s definitely ways to make it affordable if you need a website. But, yeah, I would say social media is a big way to increase local awareness. You also have to think mailers might be a good option. So physical mailers in your service area.

Tripp Hamilton:
So like really [crosstalk 00:49:23]-

Matthew Kay:
Trip, what’s the one that we were discussing recently is the United States Postal Service they have something that’s called Every Door Direct Mail. And so I saw one, an example of this the other day, and it was basically someone running a tree service. They just sent a letter I guess to everybody in the neighborhood saying, “Hey, I’m going to be in this neighborhood in two weeks. I’ll be here with my entire crew. I know it’s expensive to hire a big tree company or big tree service to do work, but I’ll be around. Just let me know if you want me to come by and do some work and I’d be happy to talk with you. Here’s my phone number. Sign, first name, last name, business owner, and yeah, direct mail like that, right?

Matthew Kay:
That’s just instant distribution to an entire target demographic for the right business. Yeah. That’s a super cool angle to kind of just get yourself in front of some very, very high potential customers I would call it, but, yeah.

Tripp Hamilton:
Yeah. For sure. And I think the next question… I guess less of a question, but more of a statement by Darrell, my insurance guy from State Farm it looks like. So he’s provided something that he sends to his clients that has gotten really good response and something along the lines of, “Hello, this is your Farmer’s agent. We’re so happy that you’re a client, appreciate your business. Would you be so kind to leave a positive five-star review?” And he has a link to his G page. So it’s G.page-

Matthew Kay:
[inaudible 00:50:53]

Tripp Hamilton:
Yeah. It’s a username that you create in Google My Business and it essentially links directly to that review modal so it pops up. Whenever someone clicks that link it pops up, that text box where you can leave a review. You can select the number of stars, you could… Making it as easy as possible for your users to leave your review, whether you use a automated service. So like Podium or BirdEye.

Tripp Hamilton:
They can click connect right into your CRMs, and they’ll send text messages out that have these links, that have links to Facebook, have links to Google, not Yelp, because Yelp is a little different, and they have a lot of red tape. But then, again, the ones that matter really, at least, in my opinion are Facebook and Google, because [crosstalk 00:51:40]-

Matthew Kay:
So that’s really good stuff, Darrell. You’re like light years ahead of so many people just by doing that. I think if you have customer service agents, right, Tripp, you want to empower them. Give them that g.page/review link and allow them to say, if someone calls in or they’re dealing with someone and they’re really happy, “Hey, I’m so glad you’re happy. Go leave us a review. Here’s a link to go do it.” It is that simple. Just manually asking sometimes.

Tripp Hamilton:
Yeah. All right.

Sheffield Pulley:
Actually, I think we have another 30 seconds or so, which hopefully [inaudible 00:52:17] but I had someone reach out to me directly that relates to this, and she asks, “I know you can’t pay for reviews, but can you offer other incentives?” Either one of you want to take that?

Tripp Hamilton:
It does violate their guidelines. Google’s guidelines to offer incentives. I know it does for Amazon too. But again, if you’re offering incentives and no one reports you. I mean that’s on you to take that risk. I would always be cautious when doing something like that and I would never really suggest offering incentives, because if you’re offering a good enough service, you shouldn’t have to incentivize those reviews. Just give them an easy route to do it like what Darrell was providing a G page link.

Tripp Hamilton:
Reaching out and saying like, “Hey, can you leave me a review. I know that I provide good service or whatever.” A personalized email also works too. If you don’t have a lot of reviews, making a really personalized email saying, “Hey, I really appreciate your business. My technicians really love coming out to your house and you’re really nice. You give them water when they need it,” whatever. Make it really personal, especially when you’re first starting out. And then once you kind of build those reviews and build up the business, then you can hopefully have enough capital to move into that automation space.

Sheffield Pulley:
Great points. Great points. All right. Well, that just about wraps up our time. Thank you fellas. This was fantastic per usual, really, really appreciate you guys and all these insights. We will be sending out an email in the next week or so, sending out the recording, list of resources. It’ll also include the webinar page where you can view our previous webinars.

Sheffield Pulley:
Tripp now is showing you some of those resources again. We’ll send that out to you the next week or so with the recordings. Okey-dokey. Oh, yeah. This is our team. Tripp, if you want to go through the slide. This is what we do. Website analytics, search engine optimization, paid advertising, and social media management, and marketing. If you have any questions about our services, please feel free to reach out.

Sheffield Pulley:
I hope you found this helpful as I have. Again, thank you so much, Tripp and Matthew. Next month’s webinar will be on the 20th of April. Jay Patel, who will be speaking to his experiences at Google. He’s a former googler. He’ll be speaking to some of the lessons he learned as a result of his time there at Google. We’ll be sending out some information about that as well.

Sheffield Pulley:
All right. Hope everyone has a wonderful rest of their afternoon, and I look forward to seeing you next month.

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