Demystifing Google Reviews for Your Local Business

By Sarah Giometti | Google

May 09
Demystify Google Reviews for Your Local Business-01

Hey, everyone. I’m Sarah Giometti, the founder of Provaro Marketing. In this video, I want to talk about demystifying Google reviews for your local business, and then especially when Google might delete a review from your listing. So, the first thing Google looks at is if your business listing suddenly got a huge influx of new reviews, that’s a red flag that you are really asking for them, or you went back to customers, and get a whole bunch at the same time. That’s something you don’t want to do. In our local reputation management software program, we usually only ask for five, maybe 10, at a time because everybody’s not going to actually go give a review. And so, it looks like you’re getting one or two, or five at a time, spaced out so it’s not obvious that you’re getting a whole bunch all at once.

The next thing that Google looks at is if the actual reviewer has a brand new profile or it’s completely blank, there’s no information, no picture, no activity. That’s a red flag to Google also that it could be a fake review because there’s no history to back it up. You want to make sure when you ask people for reviews to mention that they really should have a profile, fill it out with their name, some pictures, maybe some Google searches and activity that’s associated with that profile before they review businesses, so it’s not flagged as a potential fake review.

The third thing that Google looks at are, if you hire an agency to just generate reviews, and they’ve all of a sudden generated all these random reviews from people that aren’t anywhere near your business, or they’re opening profiles and closing them. There are usually companies guaranteeing that they can create reviews for your business without actually asking your real customers for reviews, and they’re guaranteeing you can get a whole bunch of five star reviews. They’re doing something shady in order to generate that, and you don’t want to do that because Google will definitely penalize you for creating fake reviews in a large amount or at all, really.

What you really want to do is just ask your customers. If you collect their email addresses, which you always should, then just send them an email and say, “Hey, we hope you had a great experience with us. We’d really appreciate it if you click here and give us a review on Google.” Or you can also take a look at our local SEO and reputation management program, where our system does that for you as long as you collect the email address. And you do it all up on the up and up, and then there are no red flags for Google.

I hope the information in this video is useful to you in demystifying Google reviews for your local business, and why Google might delete one. If you liked the content in this or any of my other videos, I’d really appreciate subscribing to our channel.

About the Author