Get Google reviews easily

Reviews on Google could have a small (and positive) impact on your search engine rankings, but more importantly they allow potential customers to see what a great service you offer, which will help drive traffic to your website and aid conversions.

We all trust what other people say about businesses (we tend to ask for personal recommendations ourselves), so the reviews act to reinforce the positive messages that you put out to the market. In addition, businesses can strengthen their relationship with their market by engaging with them directly through their reviews on Google.

Leaving a review is quick and easy to do, and can be left on a desktop, smartphone or tablet and you’ll start to see those wonderful review stars in your listings as reviews get left for you, they make your business really standout from the crowd.

Remember, people can leave a review for you on Google whether you like it or not, so you are best engaging with the reviews to ensure that you get the most from it.

Here is my simple three step process for getting more positive reviews on Google and use it to create more business for yourself.

Step 1: The most important thing is to ensure that your business information is verified on Google as only verified businesses can respond to reviews.

Here is more information on how to verify your business on Google (https://support.google.com/business/answer/2911778)

Step 2: Encourage customers to write a Google review for you.

Simply remind your customers once they have had a positive dealing with you to write a review for you on Google, reviewers do need a Google account, so it can sometime mean that not everyone can write a review for you (I know, it seems crazy that some people out there don’t own a Google account!).

If they search for your business name on Google, they should see a full panel in the results with your businesses details on them, they just need to click the “Write a review” button.

You could always email them a link to your page to make the whole process easier for them!

Step 3: Be active and engage with reviewers

It helps people to decide to leave a review if they see that you engage and thank reviewers, others will see that you value the input of customers and will want to leave you their reviews too.

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How to rank for RankBrain

Launched in early 2015, RankBrain is Google’s machine learning technology, it uses artificial intelligence to help Google understand exactly what you want to find with your search and delivers you highly relevant search results.

So how do you rank for RankBrain?

Actually the answer is rather simple and something that I’ve been advocating for years now, we know that RankBrain is effective for the 15-20% of the queries that Google has never seen before; this clearly indicates that these are natural language queries, typically long typed out queries or more likely voice queries asked on smart devices (smartphones, tablets etc.).

So optimising for these is easy, just write in natural language, write for humans, write for your target audience. If in doubt read your content out load to see if it makes sense (again, something I’ve been advocating for years), if it doesn’t make sense then your content isn’t correctly optimised and it need rewriting.

As a content writer, you tend to find that the highest quality content is written in a very natural way that is conversational.

So that’s it, check your content, check that it reads well and you will improve your Google rankings.

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Data or Creativity?

Had an interesting chat with an old colleague of mine the other day who came through the old school marketing ranks (to be fair, so did I), he spent a lot of time in a senior data role in a telecoms company we both worked for; and he has kept the strong ethos that marketing should be strongly data-led first and foremost, it should be the driving force behind the strategy and tactics of the business.

I disagree to some extent, there are obviously times when data is incredibly important (predominately if you are doing some qualitative research on what your target market(s) think about you or you are analysing analytics from campaigns or web site etc), but this should only inform you and not be the single driving force behind any major business decisions or campaigns.

Data (just like technology) enables opportunities for marketers, but the creativity is where the real value is created.

I think we see this problem occurring everyday, big brands push their flashing advertising on us, but very little of it sticks in the minds of the consumers – they lack the creativity needed to be memorable (and therefore successful), I’m sure the data says the execution was perfect, but if it doesn’t hold consumers interest or create that desire, you’ve lost the war.

So yes, data is important, let it drive discussion and debate in the boardrooms (I’m all for that), but never let it drive business decisions; creativity is what’s needed to drive the creation of the value, and it’s this value which will ultimately decide whether your strategies and tactics are successful.

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From Just One Pound

Going off at a slight tangent this post, but at a recent networking event I became interested in the scalability of businesses and in particular how businesses can start from nothing and grow into huge financial concerns.

I was talking to a group of small business owners, one of which was the very proud owner of small retail business that literally started with one pound and had grown it from there into a very sizeable business indeed and is now turning over many thousands of pounds in about 18 months.

Unfortunately, she had some to a sticking point in which she was struggling to get the business to grow further; it all seemed to stem from the fact that she had started the business with no real vision of what she wanted the business to be or do and so she didn’t really have any idea on how she wanted it to grow in the future.

We talked for a while and I realised that as well needing some assistance with asking the difficult strategic questions (who is the customer?, what do they value?, how is she value better than her competitors? etc), she needed something very visual to grab hold of in order to help her move forward.

As she started the business with just £1, I started to look at business milestones from the point of view of how that simple one pound coin, had grown. How quickly did she double that pound? With that £2 how didn’t did she double that to £4 etc, I started to draw it out for her and she liked the concept.

I’ve replicated it below, the simple idea is that from a single £1, doubling your money each step, it’s just 21 steps to you making your first £1m.

She’s pinned this on her office wall and she marking out these 21 milestone steps, dating each step as see goes, she has found visualisation of her business incredibly powerful, she is also undertaking a proper strategic review to ensure that she is making her money doing the very best activities.

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