When you bring up online reviews I’m sure most of you quickly think of restaurants, hotels and other tourist type businesses. But reviews are everywhere now and they’re available for every type of business. With the rise of sites showcasing user reviews like Yelp, Angie’s List, Facebook, Home Advisor and especially Google, your potential customers can get a good idea of your business easily and quickly. And as most of you know, you can’t please everyone and those few instances when a customer isn’t satisfied inevitably seems to be the ones that are the fastest to go online and review your company!

Now we can go on and on about the importance of online reviews for how potential customers may view and make inferences about your company before doing business with you, but we’ve done that before and I think we all know the down and dirty basics of it: Positive reviews – good, negative reviews – bad. What you may not know is how online reviews are now impacting your search engine optimization.

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Google is still top dog when it comes to search engines and it shows no signs of slowing down and giving up that reign anytime soon. So when concentrating on Google and using Google you may have noticed the search engine is pushing their marketing efforts to raise awareness more on their “Google My Business”. Google My Business is a one-stop shop for small business owners to increase their visibility within Google search, Google Maps, and Google+. These listings are also, not surprisingly, near the very top of your search results. While not every local search is like this, the trend is clearly shifting in that direction. So, with a look ahead to where search listings are going, both on mobile and desktop, it’s not difficult to see the importance of your Google Reviews. Not only will positive reviews help encourage people to trust and call your business, but it will now improve your ranking online.

Great, so how do I encourage more positive reviews for my business? Well we can now help build your online reputation with our Google review software. We all know getting positive reviews are more difficult simply because people don’t think to go online and share their positive experience. However, our reputation request tool makes it easy to encourage a review while the job you just performed is at the top of their mind. This software allows you to enter your clients email and/or mobile number and it sends them text and/or email prompting them to share their experience. If a customer leaves a 4 or 5 star review it prompts them to go right to your Google My Business account to post that review automatically. Any 3 star reviews and below will go directly to you so as a business owner you can be aware of any problems and can help correct the issue.

Online reviews aren’t going anywhere, and if anything they are becoming more and more popular everywhere you turn. For most businesses outside of restaurants and other service driven industries their importance was minor. But now that Google has made them an integral part of their online search rankings, it’s time for every business owner to take notice.