The Ultimate Guide to Dominating Google Business Profile by Dennis Yu - HTML preview

Reviews

There’s no surprise that getting reviews is vital. But responding to them is just as important, and unfortunately, most people don’t.

So make sure to respond to all the reviews.

And have your staff or delivery people ask questions whenever they're talking to customers:

“How is your food?”

“Oh, it was great.”

“I’m glad to hear that. It would be awesome if you could leave a review for us.“

And if you want to be bold, when customers are there ask them to leave them a review because it helps your place.

Most people will say yes, it’s something that makes them feel appreciated - you show them that their opinion is important to you.

When they agree, tell them:

“If you give me your phone, I'll show you how to do it right now.”

99% of the time they just hand over the phone, and then all you do is Google search for your business.

Click on “leave a review” and then hand it back to them. They fill out the review and post a photo.

You want to include a photo and a few sentences — not just a line of text.

Text alone is not that powerful.

So the review ranking would go like this:

1st place: 4-5 sentences + a photo 2nd place: 1 sentence + a photo 3rd place: photo without text

4th place: 4-5 sentences without photo

5th place: 1 sentence without photo 6th place: no text and no photos

And then you want to make sure you have a post - you can even take photos with your customers and say thank you for their visit and kind words.

New vs Old Reviews

86% of consumers are looking at the reviews left in the past two weeks. They want to know how you’re performing now, they don’t care about last year.

But don’t totally ignore your older ones. There’s another important group of consumers who filter for your best and worst reviews.

They’re looking for how you respond. 95% of users are reading your responses, particularly to the bad reviews.

Older reviews are also feeding keywords into the database.

Being mindful of how you respond and encourage happy clients to leave reviews will shape the words that appear.

Be careful! You can’t explicitly ask for specific reviews. That’s directing, and that goes against Google’s guidelines.

Google wants the real experience, and if they catch you directing people, you’ll get suspended.

The way you can help your client is by telling them why reviews are important and trying to do it on the spot while they are face-to-face with you at your local business.

Should You Reuse Reviews?

The short answer is no, Google doesn’t like that. They’re looking for original content. But in practice, people do copy their Yelp or Zillow reviews over to their Google Business Profile.

If you have absolutely zero reviews on Google, you can give this a try, but please be mindful of the potential consequences - especially if you have competitors that might want to take you down.

What if my client asks me to draft their review for them?

You want to avoid that because no matter how much you try to sound unique, it will end up looking and sounding like you’re writing your reviews, or that you’re using a bot or buying your reviews.

If you keep doing it, Google will spot the pattern and take action. Google will catch that, and you will get shut down. It happens quite often, and when it does, Google might delete all your reviews, not just the “fake” ones.

Plus, there’s no going back from this. You can’t fight against it, because you were caught red-handed so it’s reasonable for Google to see your other reviews as suspicious or spammy.

Review gating

Review gating means stopping bad reviews from being published. This can be done in multiple ways: adding code to your website, redirecting users to a form, etc.

It makes sense to do this from a business perspective, but Google doesn’t like it. Google says if you’re review gating, you're basically manipulating your review score.

It doesn’t matter if your intentions are pure or if you want to resolve bad customer experiences.

Buying reviews

Just don’t.

If you get caught, there’s a strong chance that ALL of your reviews will be deleted. Google is also very good at catching fake reviews.

The people writing them aren't trying very hard to cover their tracks. They’ll either use a VPN in the same location, write a ton all at once, or use names like Obama, making it very obvious.

If your competitor asks Google to take a look at your obviously fake reviews, they will.

And they’ll go one step further and look at all of your reviews for spam. There’s a good chance even your legitimate reviews will trigger the spam filter and be removed.

You may even lose your entire listing. It’s just not worth the risk.

Google Business Profile Risk

One-star Attacks

If your competitor is leaving you fake one-star reviews, you can get help. Go to the Google Business Profile Community. One of the partners will be able to escalate to Google for you.

The threat of being attacked is more real than you’d probably imagine. A single one-star review could cause your business to fall from the local three-pack to #50 or worse.

If Google finds that you’ve had malicious spam, they’ll lock your profile. Spam lockdown is designed to protect you from getting more fake bad reviews, but it will unfortunately leave your profile locked for anywhere from three to six months.

Depending on how much your business relies on GBP, you could lose significant revenue for no clear reason.

So be aware of anything like this.

Is someone attacking your GBP?

If your profile keeps being shut down, reviews disappear, or key info keeps being changed, you may have a competitor attacking you.

The good news is that you can fight back.

First, find a small business lawyer. Have them help you open a lawsuit against John or Jane Doe because you don’t know who’s attacking you.

File a subpoena against Google. The email address is legal@google.com. You’re trying to subpoena the identity of someone who left suggested edits or fake reviews on certain dates on your business profile.

When doing this, be very specific about it. Show screenshots and other proof.

Google is going to have 30 days to reply to you. In those 30 days, they look at the identity of whoever the offender is.

They send out a communication to them saying, 'You are being named in this lawsuit. Did you do this? We have this evidence.'

Most people don't answer because they're afraid of being sued by Google.

At this point, Google goes ahead and releases whatever IP or personally identifiable information they have to the person who has done the subpoena.

That's the process.

This is not legal advice. It’s just a potential way of finding who’s trying to hurt your business.

Make sure to speak with your lawyer before you engage in anything.