Online Reviews for Local Businesses: What Marketers Need to Know

Do you own or manage a local business?

Are you leveraging the full power of online reviews?

To discover how to leverage online review services, I interview Martin Shervington.
More About This Show
The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

In this episode I interview Martin Shervington, one of the world's leading experts on Google+ and Google for Business. As a trainer, speaker and consultant, he helps marketers understand how to best utilize Google's services.

Martin will explore online reviews for local businesses.

You'll discover how to get reviews for your business, as well as how to respond to negative reviews.

Share your feedback, read the show notes and get the links mentioned in this episode below.
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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Online Reviews for Local Businesses
Google for business

In June 2014 Google launched Google My Business, which simplifies how people set up pages. Part of this is for local businesses, so they can appear on a map, get reviews and so on.

Martin has been doing research on this and says businesses are not quite connecting the dots on Google+ marketing and using this powerful tool. He says as of last year, only 37% of businesses had claimed their Google listing, 63% have not.

Listen to the show to discover more about Google My Business.

The impact of reviews

Martin has spoken to hundreds of businesses (owners and staff) about reviews. People use reviews as a socialized way to judge the businesses around them, which get more customers as a result of reviews.

For example, Martin shares, Tasty Thai in San Mateo can attribute thousands of dollars of revenue to one single positive Yelp review from a guy who had been to Thailand and loves their Thai food.

At the moment Yelp has a lot of people's attention, and Martin hopes Google reviews will get to that level as well.

Reviews can bring tourists, new people and new business. The downside is there's the potential for negative reviews.

"[Businesses have to have] good service, good product and sometimes be willing to say when you haven't got it 100% right," Martin says.

Listen to the show to hear about an amazing experience I had while traveling, based on a Yelp review.

Google listings

Martin explains how Google sometimes auto-generates a business listing, and a lot of people's businesses are listed without them knowing about it.
To determine if your business has an auto-generated listing, Google your location to see if anything comes up. If it doesn't, go to Google.com/business to set one up. If it is already set up, click where it says "claim this listing," so you can control uploading photos, reply to posted reviews and more. When you set up a page on Google they verify it by phone or by mail.
There are two different types of local pages, Martin continues, a storefront and a service area. If you run your business from home, say you are a service area to hide your address.

Once you've claimed your property or set up your page from scratch, there are several things you can do: change the profile image (which is the icon people see when you make comments or reply to reviews), change your cover photo, manage your photos, add what you do to the description area, post on that Google page, reply to reviews, share reviews and more.

You can even embed the best reviews on your website. This is how you take the social proof you get from reviews and spread it onto your website.

The Google My Business dashboard provides a higher-level frame-of-reference around the things that are connected to your business, such as analytics, your YouTube channel, the page insights and the Google+ page itself.