A key way to improve your ranking on virtually any ratings and review site or local search is to capture recent, frequent, and outstanding reviews. Business pages with the most positive and recent reviews rank better on the map pack, a significant referrer of customers to local businesses.
To capture reviews, you have to make it easy for your customers, though! You don’t want to just ask them to find you on a site and place the review. Looking for the review button can be nothing short of frustrating.
So, the easiest way to capture those reviews is to provide the links on your site, in your emails, or even via mobile message. Interestingly, most of the services don’t actually offer a means of providing you the direct link, though! So, we’re going to go through that trouble here:
Google Review Business Link
- Be sure to claim your business and keep it up to date at Google Business.
- Navigate the Google Place ID page and search for your business.
- Your business’ Place ID will be visible. Copy your Place ID.
- Then paste the Place ID in the following URL:
https://search.google.com/local/writereview?placeid={insert Place ID}Bing Review Business Link
- Be sure to claim your business and keep it up to date at Bing Places.
- Bing no longer collects ratings and reviews so no worries there!
Yahoo! Review Business Link
- Yahoo! turned over business listings to Yext.
- You can claim your listing here – be sure to just select the free option, there’s no need to purchase a Yext account.
- Yahoo! listings publish Yelp reviews.
Yelp Review Business Link
- Find your business on Yelp and you can just click Write a Review to find your review page.
https://www.yelp.com/writeareview/biz/{your business ID}Facebook Review Business Link
- Navigate to your Facebook page and simply add /reviews/ to the URL:
https://www.facebook.com/{your business page}/reviews/Better Business Bureau Review Business Link
- Search for your business at the BBB website.
- On the right sidebar, you’ll find a Submit a Review link:
https://www.bbb.org/{city}/business-reviews/{category}/{business}/reviews-and-complaints/?review=trueBe sure to bookmark this page, we’ll continue to add additional services as we identify their review links!
Good post as those links can be devilishly hard to find. An even better method than just sending your customers a review link, is to first ask them if they are happy or unhappy with your company, and then only send review links to the happy ones, and enquire what you can do to make things better with the unhappy ones. Win for your ratings and win for the unhappy customers who get personal attention and care.
Absolutely agree, Jon! And love that you’ve built one of those systems!
Great resource. Thanks. As an added thought—I’ve done this more on the commercial side for development of lit and web pages—when I get positive *verbal* comments back from our customers, I try to respond with, “Thanks! That’s kind of you to say. …Hey, now that I think about it, if I were to distill what you just said into a few sentences, could I send them to you for your approval to use in our marketing efforts?” This allows me to phrase their comments honestly in a way that they’ll support, but using verbiage and flow that best suits our marketing needs. We usually send it to them by email using a standard form and request their sign-off/approval. By extension, we could include this collection of links on that document and ask that they simply copy and paste the text into their preferred site if they’d be willing to leave a review. It’s one way to take the work off their plate and also have the review read well.”