Increase your Google Local Business reviews – Link to your reviews page

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Here’s an idea for discussion. Is linking to your Google Local Business listing asking for feedback OK? Are other sites already doing this? I’d like to hear your thoughts…

According to David Mihm’s excellent Local Search Ranking Factors, “The number of reviews is a critical factor for both ranking and conversion.” I realise there are many, many other factors but I’m in agreement here, genuine, positive reviews are critical. So what if you need some genuine (and hopefully positive) reviews of your site / business to get started? Quite often those reviews don’t “just happen”, so, is it OK to invite customers to give you a review from your own website?

Here’s my solution:

rate my posts

As a test, I’ve added a link in a “How do you rate this post” section at the bottom of each single.php post page on my site. If you’re interested, I’ve added on on-page ajax ratings system too, using Lester Chan’s excellent WP-PostRatings 1.31 plugin. (Check out his site for lots of amazing plugins). Hopefully that Google link at the base of this post doesn’t look too out of place.

So, the experiment begins. I’m really interested to hear opinions on this one. If it’s ok and it works, great. If it’s not, I’ll (ahem) remove the link and submit a reinclusion request… :-)

Increase your Google Local Business reviews - Link to your reviews page, 2.5 out of 5 based on 2 ratings

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  3. Michael

    Richard,

    Rather than have a link on my site, I gently ask clients and customers if they can spare a few secs and take the time to write a review on Google Local, particularly if I've gone that extra mile and they already have a Google account.

    I'm not too sure what ranking weight reviews have in Google Local, but besides this testimonials are great social proof and not surprisingly a number of new clients have mentioned testimonials on my own sites.

    I sell software and the conversion rate since I added testimonials into the main body of the page rather than the sidebar has gone up dramatically, not just for sales but also for customisation requests.