Emerge from this crisis in pole position

There's no doubting the fact that commercial activity has slowed down for almost everyone. So what to fill the time with, especially if staff are working from home? There's always admin to be caught up with but no-one reading this article will be surprised to see us suggesting 'reviews'.

What follows gives you some benchmarks to aim for and some advice as to how to achieve the position every business wants: a dominant position in local search.

The statistic referred to above comes from this BrightLocal survey...

So, in an ideal world, your business will have...

• Recent reviews

• A Google score of at least 4.5 (preferably as close to 5.0 as possible)

• At least 100 Google reviews 

• At least 200 reviews on your own website, partly to feed Google, partly for potential customers that bypass your Google reviews...

showing in all your Google searches...

including the all-important local search...

• responses to all reviews on Google

Here are some more key survey findings, usefully aggregated by Gatherup...

All of which reinforces what we have been saying for many years now:

• your potential customers want to see reviews and will trust them
• they want to see them on your own website and on Google
• they actively welcome being invited to write a review
• the independent sites (e.g. TrustPilot/Feefo) - aside from Yelp, which no longer operates in the UK - are no longer relevant

Contacting customers for reviews

We strongly recommend you continue with your current procedure...

1. Send the email requesting the review to your own site - this has a direct link to your HelpHound module
2. Follow up with a phone call - preferably within ten minutes. Response rates to the email alone are generally less than 2 percent, response rates with a follow-up call have been known to exceed 50 percent
3. Our system will then automatically invite those that write an email to your own site to copy it to Google - you will receive a copy of that email. We recommend that you leave a twenty-four-hour gap between that email and your second follow-up call

There are two advantages of doing this under the current circumstances: you will find many more of your customers with time on their hands, whether at their place of work of working from home, and they will - mostly - be entirely sympathetic to your request as they will almost certainly be in a similar situation.

If you would like any help or have any questions at all we are, as ever, here to support you.

Important note for any business not a client of HelpHound

Please bear in mind that simply inviting selected customers to write a review to Google is illegal under UK law. For an explanation of how the law applies to your business and its engagement with reviews please read this.