Introduction
With more and more people depending on online reviews, it becomes more and more important for your company to have them to preserve your internet reputation. As with most information, many customers expect to see these reviews when they are looking up a company, but most do not willingly sit down and write them. So, how do you get a customer to write a review that normally doesn’t? The answer is quite simple – you ask them to. There is nothing ethically wrong with asking a client to write a review of your company. A lot of companies will print it directly on the receipt and even provide the customer with an incentive to do so by way of a discount in the future. You may think this is paying for reviews and in a way, you are right, but you are not paying for only positive reviews. That would be unethical, and we would never advocate for unethical business practices.
Don’t Use Bulk Requests
As the header states, you do not want to send bulk requests. Sure, you can assume that the majority of the people will not respond to the request, but what if they do. That means that a huge number of reviews will hit the review site around the same time. This will send up a red flag to the Google algorithms and you will be doing more harm than good. Google and reviews sites want to see steady growth just like you wanted to see when you first started your business. Not everyone came in the same day and shopped at your store, and you wouldn’t have known what to do if they did. The same is true of the review sites. They start to ask the question on how you got that many reviews so quickly. Of course, they always think the worst (review farms) and will punish your ratings accordingly. It will then be up to you to prove that you did nothing wrong, and that can be quite the challenge.
Peppered Reviews
In addition to not wanting to send bulk requests, you want to make certain that you are spreading the reviews around. What we mean by that is, if you do 500 reviews to one site, then send 500 other reviews to another site. This will spread the reviews around, and people can look at multiple sites for reviews. Consumers like to see that multiple sites have reviews on a business, not just one site. If you have only one site, they start to think that you run the site and that you can manipulate the ratings any way that you want. You want the ratings to appear organic, and for the most part, they really are. If it were truly organic, people would write the reviews without prompting.
Conclusion
And there you have it, a way to manage your internet reputation through the use of reviews. Remember, you want to ask your customer in order for more reviews to be written about you. The more reviews that are written, the more legitimate your business is. So, while you may fear asking for a review due to negative comments, even those negative comments have their worth. They prove that you are not paying for positive reviews and it also helps you to become a better business by using constructive criticism to your advantage.
