Stop! Before you buy Google advertising...

We are sometimes surprised that a service business - and here we are mainly talking about the professions: law, finance, medical and education - will spend valuable resources on a Google Ads campaign whilst ignoring the customer journey. Let's take just one example...

We had to use a 'real' business to illustrate this article. We didn't select this one - it was simply returned in a Google local search. It should also be noted that the business in question is representative of its sector: independent schools have increased spend on Google Ads considerably since the recent government action

The customer journey goes - in over 70 per cent of cases - as follows...

• research potential businesses - in this case independent schools - in person and online (even 'in person' research - personal recommendation - almost always results in a web search, even if only to find contact details or precise location)

• See Google score - and react (one of two ways: be impressed and continue that specific search or be dismayed and search elsewhere)

• Read Google reviews - why would they not? 

Let us be quite clear: the business above is paying Google to display it, plus a scrape of the information held on its Google Knowledge Panel ('Sponsored' above a Google listing means 'this business is paying to appear in this search')...

Now, we know, for certain, the following...

• Any Google score under 4.8 deflects enquiries, calls and click-throughs

• Negative reviews, such as this...

...especially if not responded to by the business (as is the case here) will deflect considerable numbers of enquiries

• For each 'thumbs up' (18 here) the review will have been read by +-100 people, maybe far more

What should this, and any other business in this position, do?

Put its review management on a professional footing. Take professional advice* and develop a simple strategy to...

1. Invite stakeholders to write reviews - to its own website and then to Google
2. Have those reviews moderated by an independent entity - HelpHound is one such - to ensure they are fair, factually correct and unlikely to mislead the reader (the potential customer/client/patient/parent)
3. Aim for a Google score of 4.8+
4. Aim, initially, for 100+ Google reviews, and then a thousand
5. Respond to its reviews

And finally: set as short as possible a time frame for achieving all of the above (months, not years).

Results

Reviews on a business's website enable a) potential customers to see moderated reviews written by genuine customers of the business and b) the business to comply with the CMA regulations (a.k.a the law)

This business began its relationship with HelpHound with two reviews on Google and none on its own website...

And it now leads in all relevant Google searches. Imagine the impact this has had on their business (for a start, it has helped them to expand and take over another agency)? No potential customer is going to be put off contacting a business, of whatever kind, that looks like this. Many will be positively encouraged to do just that, even if it was not originally on their short-list.

Further reading

• Moderation: the key safety mechanism that protects both businesses and their potential customers from inaccurate, misleading or plain unfair reviews

• *Taking professional advice: here are our fees - we hope you will be pleasantly surprised to see that they fall when your objectives have been achieved

Moderation - and why it is vital for great businesses

We generally publish about an article a year to update clients on anything we have learned about this subject. Here is the last one. So why another? Because we tend to pull our punches when we speak or write about moderation, simply because we don't want anyone getting the impression that it can - or should - be used to suppress genuinely held and factually accurate negative customer opinions. It cannot and should not.

But when we look at our existing client base and exactly how the best of them engage (they're all good businesses, by definition. Businesses that don't care about reviews won't employ us!) there are some refinements we should pass on.

Lessons we have learnt

Bear in mind that there are two distinct ways in which your business can collect reviews:

• actively: by emailing your customer and asking for a review of your business and then, automatically, to Google 

• passively: by allowing your customer - and any other stakeholders - to write a review of your business through your website. See the example above.

This has the following vital effect for those in the professions and other service-driven businesses: it allows the moderator, HelpHound in this case, to refer any factually inaccurate, potentially misleading or just plain 'unfair' reviews back to the reviewer, before they are published. This is moderation's essential function, unavailable to businesses that invite reviews directly to Google; besides enabling the reviewer to correct their review it ensures your business complies with the law - the CMA regulations. 

IMPORTANTLY: it means you don't have to send an email inviting a review to...

• the tenant that persists in believing, against all evidence and information provided at the beginning of their tenancy and subsequently, that the maintenance of their building is the estate agent's, not the landlord's, responsibility

• the medical practice's patient who thinks that they will only receive the correct diagnosis and treatment by bullying your reception staff

• the client that lost their legal case, having instructed you to proceed against all your advice to the contrary

...they are covered, from a compliance perspective, by the 'Write a review' button on your website (see screengrab above).

Businesses - and their review management - don't exist in isolation

You keep an eye on your competitors - what business doesn't? But do you look to see whether they are breaking the law when it comes to reviews? 

This impacts business on two different levels: the first is that it's never great business practice to visibly flout the law for all to see. Here are just two examples...

A professional service business using a review mechanism designed expressly for online retail. No wonder it looks so great - it controls precisely who is invited to write a review and when. Both the 'who' and 'when' are against the CMA core regulations.

Try as we did (and we promise we tried hard!), we could not find the source of these reviews. It certainly was not Google, or any of the other well-known review sites (both numbers and score are way out for the business concerned). Even if it were one of these sources the business would still be in breach by not allowing visitors to its website to a) view the source of the score and the underlying reviews or b) providing a link to enable them to write one of their own.

What would your competitors do if they knew your business was flouting the law where reviews were concerned? How about 'Would you trust [business] if you knew their reviews were cherry-picked*?

*Cherry-picking and gating

These are both against the CMA's core regulations. For reasons that will become obvious...

Cherry-picking

Means selecting those customers most likely to write a 5* review and then only asking those to do so.

Gating

Means using a mechanism such as a questionnaire to pre-establish the likelihood that a customer will write a 5* review and then asking only those to do so.

Reviews have a bad enough name amongst many consumers without such behaviour, but the fact that it so easily backfires on businesses that engage in it surprises us.  

It sometimes amazes us that so many people continue to trust and rely on reviews - but the numbers remain constantly at these kinds of levels: they do, especially where Google reviews are concerned

It is up to us as businesses to find a mechanism that protects them from inaccurate or misleading negative reviews that ensures they are in compliance with the CMA regulations. Welcome to HelpHound.

In summary

• If your business doesn't invite reviews - it will be compliant with the CMA regulations, but it will be missing out on a huge opportunity to generate enquiries through search whilst boosting its SEO

• If your business invites reviews through a Google widget on its website - it will be compliant but it will run the not-insignificant risk of attracting and displaying inaccurate and/or misleading reviews on both its own website and on Google

• If your business selects who to invite to post reviews - on Google or anywhere else (including on its own website) it will be in breach of the CMA's core regulations and, in the case of gating, Google's own Terms of Service

• If your business in any way selects which reviews to display on its website - it will be in breach of the CMA's core regulations (the only compliant way to show such reviews is by 'date posted' and including a direct link to the source of the reviews)

• If your business employs an intermediary such as HelpHound to moderate your reviews - you can relax in the knowledge that inaccurate or misleading reviews are unlikely to see the light of day, you are ticking a major SEO box when it comes to Google search and that you have a direct line into people, in the case of HelpHound, with well over a decade's professional knowledge and understanding of everything related to reviews