Here at Maximum Effort Agency, the majority of businesses we work with serve a local market. We have a list of foundational and growth strategies. This week will focus on the send foundational strategy: Reviews and Citations.
Last week we talked about setting up your GMB profile, and this week we’ll focus on how to take that to the next level.
What’s the hype though?
- 86% of customers read online reviews for businesses
- Customers read an average of 10 reviews before they feel like they can trust you
- 40% of consumers only take into consideration reviews within the past 2 weeks
- 89% of potential customers read businesses’ responses to reviews
- 91% of 18-34 year olds trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation
This was pulled from our page here: https://maximumeffort.agency/reputation-management/
Reviews
Reviews are testimonials, we all know what they are. But did you know it’s one of the core pieces that affect where you rank in the Google 3-Pack?
Attaining reviews can be tiresome and feel like you’re getting nowhere. Customers say they’ll do it and they never do. Why is that? Well, it’s simple: you aren’t making it easy enough.
People are lazy, if you don’t shoot them a text to the link, or a couple of emails, more than likely it will never get done.
Citations
Citations are another large ranking factor for the Google 3-Pack.
What are citations? GMB is a citation, as is Facebook and Yelp. They are the listings around the web that contain our business information like phone number, address, website, hours, etc.
The more citations that are out there for your business, the better. But it’s a tad more complicated than that.
The key is making sure every single citation is the exact same with information. That means the exact same phone number, URL, and hours. Google sees this and if it all matches, they know it has a higher likelihood of being correct and will rank you higher.
The biggest place business owners make mistakes in their citation building is using different addresses. Well, why the hell would they use different addresses? Glad you asked!
The reason is they don’t, but if they’re in 24 Sherywood Drive, and in some places, they spell out ‘Drive’ and other places they put ‘Dr.’ and others ‘Dr’, then Google picks this up as an inconsistency.
Consistency is key, quality is key, and quality of as many as possible is key.
Inside our agency, we focus on about 50 citations for all of our clients to start off.