Google My Business: How to Generate Reviews

How to generate consistent reviews for your business. One way is to simply ask your customers. I know that sounds like very basic advice, but I can’t stress how important this is. Simply asking your customers to leave you a review, is one of the fastest and easiest ways to generate reviews for your business. This is especially true, if your business has a physical location, and you can literally drop this in casual conversation at the end of a transaction. You do, however want to make it as easy as possible for someone to leave your review. As in general, leaving a review isn’t the funnest thing to do. It gets even more tedious when there’s a long winded process behind it.

What we advise our clients with physical locations to do, is have a Bitly link generated, and add it on a card and simply hand it out. For those who don’t know, a Bitly link is basically a link shortener, I’ll show you how to set up one at the end of the video. Essentially, it’s very easy to do. Typically when you get people a link to leave a review for your business, it’s always a long winded URL. So with Bitly, you can basically plug in your long URL, and it’ll make it very short for you, but again, I’ll show you how to do that at the end of the video.

The beauty of Bitly, like I just said, that you can shorten URL, however, you can also customize URL. So instead of giving them that long Google review link, you can actually rename the link to say whatever you want it to be, which is very handy. Another option you can utilize is adding a review link in the email signature, in your footer. So in every email you send, there’ll be a review link in it, making it super easy for people to leave you reviews. You might only generate two reviews. However, that is still great, as that’s two reviews more than you originally had.

You could also put together a page on your website, with instructions, showing people how they can leave reviews, in a screenshot, step by step. The beauty of screenshots is that you are literally walking them through the whole process. Step by step, AKA, making it super easy for them, and thus increasing the chances of you securing that review. You can even go one step further, and create a screen-share video, like I’m doing right now in this course. This is probably a better option, as it’s more interactive and engaging. If you want to get super creative, how about leaving a link to your review page on invoices you send out.

Typically, if someone pays an invoice, it means they’re happy with your service. So what better time to ask them to leave a review, then after they’ve just confirmed the happiness, with the financial payment. These are all methods you can utilize to help build reviews for your business. The key, is making it super easy for them. And like I said, one way to make it super easy, is to convert your long review link into a nice short link. So I’ll show you how we do that now, as we head over to Bitly.

So typically if you wanted to send someone a direct link, which once they click, opens up a box to leave you a review, you would have to do it this way. So you have to find your GMB listing, scroll down, and then click write a review. Once a box is opened, you’d have to copy this URL and then send it across to them in an email, which I’ll just show you from this online notepad. This is how long the URL would be, so as you can imagine, it’s not that nice to chuck this in an email. It doesn’t look that appealing at all. So, what we want to do is convert this long review URL, into a nice short one.

So we can do that using a tool called Bitly. So that’s B I T dot L Y. Once you click that, it should redirect you to something that looks like this. You might have to sign up for it and create an account, however, it is free. So once you sign up, you want to log in and then go to create, and what you want to do is paste in your long URL. So if I paste that in, like so, you can see it’s now converted it into this really short URL, so I can actually copy this and now paste that. And you’ll see, that will actually redirect me to the same page I was just on.

So give it a couple of seconds. It should open the review box, just like so, however you can go one step a little bit further, and you can actually customize URL. So right here, we can get rid of all that weird stuff, and we can actually put in our business name. So level finish, and then click save. You can see that’s now updated. So I copied this link, go over to Google, and paste it into a bit.ly/levelfinish, and then click search. This will now bring up the GMB for level finish, and will give the person an option to leave a review. So, as you can imagine, it’s a lot easier to chop this in an email.

It looks much more nice on the eye as well. So if I was you, I would create a Bitly link. I would create a link for your business, save it in your notes, or maybe even favorite it, and then send that out when you want people to leave you reviews. So this is what I actually put in my emails on invoices, and so on, and so on. So this will help you a lot when it comes to getting reviews for your business.