[MUSIC] It's also really important to encourage users to leave reviews of your business. Reviews are one of the most important areas for your business to focus on in local search. Reviews help your business listing stand out because the prominent review stars on each listing, so that really helps increase click through rates. People see those stars and they want to click on it. This also helps you indicate to Google that you're a legitimate business. Helps you provide social proof to potential shoppers. Helps you rank higher, especially when people are filtering by highest rated, which they really commonly do. And it will help answer questions customers may have about your business and cut down on may be unnecessary phone calls to your shop or email inquiries. So it'll save you a lot of time as well. Now in addition to the benefits we just covered about reviews, it's important to note that 63% of consumers will check reviews on Google before they visit a business. And Google currently has a 57.5% share of all online reviews. So people will generally leave reviews on Google before leaving reviews anywhere else. It's important to always encourage reviews. According to research, businesses that proactively request reviews, have a higher rating at an average of about 4.34 stars than those who simply wait for unprompted reviews, which is generally about 3.89 stars. Asking customers for Google reviews tends to produce reviews that have a higher percentage of five star ratings and then these reviews are likely to remain steady over time. Unprompted reviews on the other hand, tend to claim a larger share of one star ratings over time and that causes your overall ratings to drop. Included a link to this study in the reference notes. If you want to check that out. Now, please note, while gaining reviews is critical to business success and in local search, you must be careful about how you encourage reviews. If Google finds that you're offering a discount or an item in exchange for reviews, you may have all of your reviews removed. Even you may even have your Google my business listing band or more. I'm including some links to Google's rules and regulations about soliciting reviews, so you can make sure you follow their best practices. It's really important not to have the appearance of basically soliciting reviews for free product discounts, services or anything else. So keep that in mind. So remember to keep review quality in mind. It's important to respond to all reviews, both positive and negative. As a business, you can't delete a negative review. Customers can change or remove their reviews. So if you're able to respond to a customer and help improve their experience, you can then follow up and ask them to modify their review. If you believe you have a fake review maybe from a competitor or someone else. You can flag it for Google to consider removing. If you're sure a review left violates Google's review policies then also make sure you flag it. So Google will become aware and potentially remove it as well. All Google my business pages have a Q& A or questions and answers feature that allows the public to ask questions to the business. These questions and answers are added to your profile and are visible publicly. It's debatable whether or not the questions or responses will help with your ranking. But regardless, it's a great best practice to respond promptly to any questions asked. Would you want to go to a business if you see a bunch of people asking questions and no response when the business ever happens, I don't think I would. You can also ask and answer questions yourself to proactively answer questions your customers might have. One thing Google has been testing is providing an answer through AI by matching keywords to the question to keywords in your reviews. So if somebody asks a review, so sorry, somebody asks a question about do you have this item on the menu and then google finds reviews that state I really love this item on the menu that they had. Then google will provide that review as an answer to their question for you. This makes ensuring you have reviews and product feeds even more important. Now let's discuss links and citations. Links and citations are important for local SEO. Just to go back to some basics, a link is anything where one website links to your website or links to your Google my business listing. A citation is a reference to your business that includes your business name, possibly your address and possibly your phone number. For a time Google started placing less emphasis on citations but studies show they are still useful. At this time it's unclear how the future will look in regards to the importance of citations. But for now considered a best practice and make an effort to stay on top of trends regarding local search. Let's quickly discuss Enterprise Considerations. So sometimes there's a franchise or a lot of different stores exist across the country or you just have a lot of different locations to manage. For businesses with hundreds of locations managing your Google My Business listings can get overwhelming. It's really important to ensure you have accurate name, address and phone number across all of the locations. Make sure all locations include a photo of the storefront, select 2-3 relevant categories within your profile for each of these locations and find ways to scalably monitor and manage your listings. To do so there are a number of enterprise level tools like Mazoko, Brightlocal, get5stars and more that will help you manage your listings at scale. This will help alert you to reviews questions and answers, help you build relevant citations and more. Something to keep in mind when managing your google my business listings that will really help you succeed are ideas like creating a template for support representatives and they can then use this when responding to feedback. You can encourage your support representatives to customize it is needed so responses don't all have the same format as this can look a bit disingenuous, but your support team should be actively looking at reviews left by your business and responding to them. Also if your customer support staff by phone gets a positive customer or somebody who's really happy, they should be encouraging those customers to go back to Google and leave a positive review of your business. So really make sure you educate your support team, create templates for them to easily respond to people in a variety of situations. Next, you should create a monthly editorial calendar for updating features, such as adding new posts, adding relevant questions and answers, answering relevant questions and answers, adding new photos to your business and more. If you have a calendar where you know what you're doing on each day of the week, then you don't have to necessarily worry about overlooking something because there can be a lot of moving parts and it can be really easy to forget a particular feature. Also within your business, encourage a culture that analyzes the local search space and competition regularly so you can proactively respond to any issues. And another thing is educate your team in creating citations. You can also use services like Yelp and Trip Advisor that are not typically part of enterprise citation building tools to monitor your reviews there, add citations to your business and more. So really rely on your support staff to help you out with this. Now, this is mostly discussed Google My Business directly. Let's not forget Website Optimization, for optimizing your external site you should ensure that your website includes something like a store finder or other way to display a landing page for each physical location you have. If you only have one location and one website, that's fine. Just make sure you have something like a find us page that features the business address, phone number, any relevant contact information. This should include complete contact information for every Google my business listing you have. And then this contact information should be marked up properly with schema. You can get that from schema.org and that will help ensure that Google understands the context of the information in relation to your business. So when it sees an address, for example the markup language around that will directly tell google this is an address and it will be able to quickly match that to your Google My Business listing or to people who are searching for specific information about your business and help you rank in normal local search results that way. Also make sure you link each Google My Business listing to their respective landing pages dedicated to that location. This helps increase trust and transparency and helps, and the linking helps earn authority as well. We discussed a little bit about support staff, so you'll also see better success when training your in store staff in the importance of Google My Business as well. It's a good idea to ensure that all public facing staff are equipped with understanding Google My Business and the training they need to help implement your brand's customer service policy in store. Help answer frequently asked questions to customers or escalate problems is needed. In store staff should have the ability and the resources they need to resolve complaints before they become negative reviews online or to help create a really positive experience that encourages good reviews online. What you can do for In Store Strategies as well is also install signage and other material to invite consumer complaints to an in person team or help line. So those don't go online to google and leave a bad review. And you can also tell people if a customer service representative for example, gets a good vibe from somebody and feels like they had a really positive experience, encourage them when they're leaving the store. Hey, don't forget to go review us on google. So train staff to spot opportunities for customers willing to leave a positive review and remember to always ask them to do so. There are also local PR opportunities. This may apply more to enterprise businesses, but it's really relevant to all local businesses. Make sure your store or if your enterprise level that each store has a local footprint in the community, where local PR can help boost brand image as well as help you optimize your Google My Business listing. When your partnering with an event or sponsoring something, for example, try and get the business that you're sponsoring to link to your website or your Google My Business listing as this will help give authority to that listing. One thing you should do is empower each local store to build this local footprint and provide them with resources for sponsorships, hosting local workshops, hosting conferences or meet ups or more. Whatever maybe most relevant to your local business. Also don't neglect social media. You should ensure that your social media manager who's operating the social presence for either a single location or for enterprise customers multiple locations is aware of Google My Business and the value that it provides. Train your social media manager to resolve complaints or any negative discussions before they go online into negative reviews. Train them to address positive reviews and encourage people to leave a review on Google and help train them in telling the customer where to go to do so. You can activate social listening to get a good idea of the overall sentiment and help uncover positive or negative opportunities as they arrive. There are many social listening tools out there. I don't have one I particularly recommend, but these are really good, especially for local businesses. So in summary, we've discussed what a Google My Business listing is. Why Google My Business pages are important. The best way is to optimize your Google My Business listing. What elements are important for ranking well, such as reviews, business contact information, photos and more. And how you can better empower your staff of physical locations to help boost your online visibility.
