A customer leaves a bad or negative review about your local business. You reach out to them, try to make amends, and offer them a discount or free goods to make them happy. As a result, they modify or remove the negative review.

Seems like an excellent idea, right?

Not anymore, unfortunately.

Google has updated its Google Maps review guidelines. According to this late update, incentivizing customers to modify or remove negative reviews is now prohibited by Google.

The guidelines say, “Content that has been incentivized by a business in exchange for discounts, free goods and/or services.”

Now, Google has added the following line of text to the guideline, which makes it prohibitive for local businesses to use incentives for modifying negative reviews:

“This includes merchant requests for revision or removal of a negative review through offered discounts, free goods or services, or other incentives.”

Fake Engagement |Deceptive Content

In “Fake engagement”, under the “Deceptive content” section, Google has the following guidelines.

• Paying, incentivising, or encouraging the posting of content that does not represent a genuine experience.
• Content that is not based on real experiences and does not accurately represent the location or product in question.
• Content that has been incentivized by a business in exchange for discounts, free goods, and/or services. This includes merchant requests for revision or removal of a negative review through offered discounts, free goods or services, or other incentives.
• Content that has been posted by a competitor to undermine a business or product’s reputation.
• Content that has been posted from multiple accounts to manipulate a place’s rating.

The idea of these guidelines is to ensure that Google Maps reflect a genuine experience of a business or place.

You can read the full set of guidelines regarding prohibited and restricted content here.

The takeaway for local businesses

If you have a local business listed on Google Maps, it may be tempting to incentivize people who left negative reviews and ask them to modify their bad reviews.

Don’t.

It is now explicitly prohibited by Google and goes against the user-generated content policy that Google has for Google Maps.

In addition to this, remember that incentivizing or encouraging content that does not represent a genuine experience is also against Google’s policies. Similarly, encouraging or incentivizing people through free goods/services or discounts in exchange for positive reviews is also prohibited.

Learn more about how to ask and get more positive customer reviews.

The post Google prohibits bribing customers to remove negative reviews appeared first on Improve My Search Ranking.

In this blog post, we will share a few tips and strategies on how you can ask and get more positive reviews and testimonials from your customers.

The importance of customer reviews

Before we jump into the tips and tricks you can use to increase the number of positive reviews for your business, let’s take a quick look at why customer reviews are important.

Here are some stats:

• According to a study by BrightLocal, 85 percent of online consumers trust online reviews as much as they trust personal recommendations.
• The same study also showed that positive customer reviews make 73 percent of customers trust a business more.
• In addition, a HubSpot study found that 60 percent of online consumers believed online customer reviews to be trustworthy.

Furthermore, customer ratings and reviews can also improve your SEO efforts. In fact, customer reviews are strong search ranking signals for local businesses.

6 ways to ask and get more positive customer reviews

Now that we know why customer reviews are important, let’s see how local businesses like yours can get more positive reviews.

1. Ask for reviews

It really can be as simple as that. You will be surprised to see how many businesses do not even ask their customers for reviews.

According to a survey, 68 percent of customers were willing to leave reviews when businesses asked.

Do not be intimidated by the idea of asking your customers for reviews. If you provide good products or services and add value to their life, they will be more than happy to leave reviews. More often than not, those reviews will be positive.

2. Ask for reviews at the right moment

Sometimes, however, merely asking for reviews isn’t enough. You also need to ask at the right time. It’s important to identify where a customer is in their buyer’s journey and pick the right moment.

Asking for a review when they might be struggling with figuring out your product is not a good idea. Asking for a review when they have successfully demonstrated success is perfectly timed.

A few other moments when you should ask for reviews may be:

• After they successfully use your product or service.
• When they place a recurring order.
• When they re-purchase your product or service.
• After they buy your product/service and tag/mention your brand on social media.
• If they revisit your website and browse other products.
• If they refer more customers to your business.

3. Be more strategic

Depending on your niche and the demographics of your customers, it may not be a good idea to ask for reviews directly. Instead, starting with an open-ended question can sometimes lead to a more meaningful conversation and more honest feedback.

For instance, instead of directly asking, “can you please leave a review on our website?”, initiate the conversation with an open-ended question such as “how do you like our product so far?”

This can lead to a conversation that can help you gauge their level of satisfaction and whether or not it’s the right time to ask for a review.

4. Make it easy

Remember that a business needs customer reviews. Customers don’t usually get anything for leaving reviews.

So, as a business, you should do everything to make leaving reviews as easy as possible. For example:

• Offer multiple platform options for your customers to leave reviews so they can pick whatever suits them best.
• Send them a direct link to leave a review. Don’t just send them to your site’s homepage and leave it to them to navigate from there.
• Share examples with them and remove any potential barriers.
• Give them cues on what they can write by asking specific questions.
• Follow up with them if they forget to leave a review.
• Let them know the exact time it takes for the average customer to leave the review. For example, “It’ll only take 30 seconds.”

5. Respond to every review

It’s important that you respond to every review — positive or negative. This simple practice not only helps your business look more credible but also encourages more people to leave reviews.

6. Share positive reviews

Share the positive reviews you receive with others to encourage more positive reviews from customers.

You can highlight select positive reviews on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or even your website.

Conclusion

Positive reviews can be a crucial factor for local businesses as they can help increase engagement, conversions, and revenue. Moreover, customer reviews can also help improve your local business website’s SEO.

Use the 6 tips mentioned in this article to ask and get more positive customer reviews for your business.

For more SEO tips, news, and strategies, stay tuned.

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Need help with your Local Business SEO?

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UK SEO Agency

Essex SEO Agency | Kent SEO Agency | Sussex SEO Agency | Surrey SEO Agency

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SEO also helps build brand awareness for your business as search engine users are more likely to trust a site that are on first page of search engine results pages (SERPs) than brands who are not.

If you’re a small business owner, you should utilise SEO to build a strong web presence and bypass your competitions to gain new customers for your business and take it to the next level.

Here are top 5 KEY benefits of SEO for small businesses:

Related article: Local SEO Factors for Small Businesses

1. User-Friendly Websites

SEO will help small business owners create a faster, smoother, and user-friendlier website. Although most people still hang on to the old definition of SEO, thinking that it is only about optimising for the search engines, however, today SEO is also about improving user experience too.

Well-structured, clean, and uncluttered websites compels a casual visitor to stay longer, thereby decreasing bounce rate and increasing page views. Similarly, highly relevant content (sales pages and blog articles) keeps you readers happy as they are more likely to solves answer their questions, solve their pressing issues and helps them find exactly what they’re looking for on your site.

On-page SEO, if done properly, makes your users happy, which makes search engines happy too as they love to serve high quality information to their users.

2. Bring in MORE Customers

Let’s face it, one of the main reasons for having a website is to stand out from your competition and increase your customer base. Otherwise, why invest 1,000s of pounds (£) on marketing, right? Businesses that have a SEO optimised website bring MORE customers and grow as twice as fast than businesses who do not have one.

SEO is probably the most efficient and affordable marketing strategy that exists today. Moreover, it will only bring in customers who are actively seeking to find your product or service!

If you’re willing to spend few hours of time, energy, and small amount of money, SEO will help brings “targeted” traffic to your website, and eventually more customers to your business than any other marketing tactics you’ll ever use.

3. Better Conversion Rates

SEO-optimised websites loads faster, are easy to read and surf, and will display properly in almost all types of devices, including mobile and tablets. Websites that are easy to read and navigate are more likely to grab and hold attention from your readers or visitors – i.e. they’re more likely to become your loyal customers, subscribers, and returning visitors.

4. Build Brand Awareness

One of the benefits of getting higher rankings on the SERPs is building brand awareness. When your sites appear on the first page of major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing, your potential customers are more likely to trust your brand when they search for a particular term rather than other brands that don’t have a strong web presence.

That is why small businesses that want to build better brand awareness (either locally or expanding nationally) must invest in SEO and start gaining top rankings for the KEY terms related with their business. We’re not in the 90s anymore; search engines now play a significant role in making or breaking your brand.

5. Bypass Competition

Let’s take an example of two businesses that are in the same industry, selling similar products, at similar prices. One of them has an optimised website while the other has a non-optimised website. Considering everything is else is equal, which company do you think will attract more customers to their website from local searches? Which company will likely grow faster and become more successful?

Search engines and SEO are very powerful. If your competitors are doing SEO marketing, simply you must ask yourself why you haven’t invested in such a strategy yet too.

Want an agency to solve your SEO problems? Contact London’s best SEO agency today.

Bonus: Benefits of SEO for Small Businesses Infographic

Over to you. Why do you think SEO is important for small business? Please share your ideas in the comment box below.

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• Why Local SEO is Important

Need help with your Local Business SEO?

SEO Company for Small Businesses

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London SEO Agency

UK SEO Agency

Essex SEO Agency | Kent SEO Agency | Sussex SEO Agency | Surrey SEO Agency

The post 5 KEY Benefits of SEO for Small Businesses appeared first on Improve My Search Ranking.

Moreover, approximately 2.5 million websites are integrated with Facebook. This signifies the importance of Facebook, not only as a social media platform but also as an important portal for lead-nurturing and lead-generation.

There are so many things that you can achieve via Facebook, but that all starts with a very simple question …

How many users are interacting and engaging with your Facebook posts?

You may have thousands of “likes”, but that does not matter much if your Facebook fans are not regularly interacting with your content. Your aim should be to attract them with your posts, encourage them to participate – like, comment and share your posts – and ultimately, increase your list of paying customers.

In this post, we’ll discuss a few amazing ways to increase engagement and interaction with your Facebook fans.

Posting Frequency … Less is More!

One of the simplest ways to increase Facebook engagement is to formulate a posting frequency.

With Facebook, less is more.

Statistics reveal that businesses that publish 1 post per day get 19% higher interaction than businesses that publish 3 Facebook posts per day. Ideally, you should be posting every other day.

Apart from that, more frequent posts may lead to repetitiveness. Stay away from that. A recent social media study revealed that approximately 52% Facebook users stopped following businesses that had become too repetitive.

Use Images to Boost Interaction

Text-based posts are good for encouraging conversations, but you also need to keep it interesting.

According to a research, image-based posts increase user-interaction by 39%. Furthermore, these posts are more likely to be shared by your Facebook fans. So, it is recommended to share image-based posts every now and then.

Ask Questions

It’s good to share information with your Facebook fans, but it’s often better to ask questions. As you can guess, questions directly increase interaction, engagement and comments.

A recent social media study concluded that questions – when compared to other type of text-based posts – can generate 100% more comments.

Using Quotes

Too many questions can’t be good, right?

Don’t worry. You can always post quotes to significantly increase interaction from your Facebook fans. On average, quotes get 26% more likes and 19% more shares than other text-based posts.

The idea, however, is to not overdo it and keep the quotes infrequent, rare and in context with your business.

Post Like a Tweet!

Unlike Twitter, Facebook doesn’t limit you with 160 characters per post. However, our advice is to keep those posts under 80 characters.

It might be a bit difficult to be this concise and comprehensive, but posts with 80 characters or less get 23% more interaction on Facebook. That’s a huge bonus!

Add Powerful Calls-to-Action

Even a simple call-to-action will do. Seriously.

Just make sure your Facebook post has at least one simple, direct and easy-to-understand call-to-action.

For instance, if you specifically ask your fans to “share” a particular post, it is 70% more likely to be shared.

Conclusion

According to a 2012 survey, B2B companies have successfully acquired 77% new customers from Facebook. On the other hand, B2C businesses have successfully acquired 43% new customers.

This shows that Facebook have immense potential for lead-generation. However, it all depends on how much interaction, engagement and buzz you’re generating. By using the above-mentioned techniques, you can instantly see a distinct improvement.

Anyway, which techniques do you use for increasing interaction and engagement with your Facebook fans?

By Josh Hamit @hamit

The post How to Increase Engagement with Your Facebook Fans appeared first on Improve My Search Ranking.

It takes time to continuously publish quality blog posts to keep your blog up and running. However, it is much more important that your content brings more traffic, sparks interaction and increases conversions.

Every day, around 175,000 new blogs are created. Isn’t it important that you stand out from the rest of the crowd?

In this post, our new blogger Jamie shares some really useful tips on how to fine-tune your blog posts for more traffic, conversions and engagement.

Write Powerful Headlines for More Traffic

The headline of your blog post is arguably its most important part.

It creates interest, sparks curiosity, encourages clicks and social media shares, and drives more traffic to your blog.

There are many different techniques to write powerful headlines. Ideally, it should at least contain the following qualities:

• It should have a promise for the readers.
• It must be focused around a benefit for your readers.
• It should be able to raise curiosity – just enough to make the readers click on your post.
• The headline should be actionable and pragmatic.
• It should be well-directed to your specific target audience and business prospects.

Always Use At Least One Image In Your Post

In today’s blogging world, images are absolutely crucial.

According to a research, blog posts that have images get 94% more views. Moreover, images are not only profound and meaningful, but they also break up paragraphs of texts to make the post more readable and easy-to-understand.

Mobile-Friendly Design and Layout

Do you know that now, on average, 25% of total blog posts are read on mobile devices?

In other words, if you don’t fine-tune your blog posts for mobile devices – smartphones and tablets – you lose out on approximately 1/4^th of your total traffic.

So not only your must your blog have a responsive design, but the layout of your blog post should also be mobile friendly.

Simplify Your Writing

In terms of writing blog posts, this may be the most important point.

You see, people like “simple” things. They read your blog because they want to understand and learn something. Moreover, they also want to be connected with a real personality. It is, therefore, your responsibility to simplify your writing as much as possible, while making it look like a conversation.

A few good ideas for achieving that are:

• Use simpler and shorter words wherever possible.
• Use active sentences whenever you can. Avoid passive sentences.
• Create shorter paragraphs to keep your readers interested.
• Let your own personality, flair and unique voice shine in your writing.
• It is also a good idea to directly address your reader.
• Write blog posts as if you are talking to the reader. It should feel like a conversation.
• Ask questions to keep them interested and to encourage two-way conversations.

Don’t Forget the Calls-to-Action

Every blog post has a purpose.

It always has a goal, even if you don’t realise it. Calls-to-action help you achieve that goal.

Ideally, every blog post should have a very specific call-to-action. It can be anything, e.g. asking your readers to subscribe to your e-mail list, sharing your post on different social media websites, buying a product, requesting more information about your business, or encouraging the readers to comment on your post.

The purpose does not matter.

The important thing is that you do include a call-to-action – even if it seems understood or obvious. You have to specifically mention what you want your readers to do.

For instance, do you know when you specifically ask your Facebook fans to “share” a post, it increases the sharing ratio by 70%? This is the power of a specific call-to-action that you must utilise by explicitly mentioning it.

Conclusion

So these are the 5 tips that you can use to fine-tune your blog posts.

Most of the time, it does not matter how many blog posts you publish. The quality of your content and the effectiveness of your content marketing strategy are more important.

Always remember that your goal should not be to achieve a certain number of published blog posts. Instead, the number of targeted visitors, business prospects, social media engagement and increased conversions you achieve from each blog post should be your main focus.

To learn how to optimise your blog posts for SEO – click here

Related Posts:

• On-Page SEO Guide
• Write Better Headlines
• Landing Page That Converts
• How to Optimise Landing Page for SEO
• How to Engage Readers

The post How to Increase Blog Traffic appeared first on Improve My Search Ranking.