Apart from investing in a Search Engine Optimization service, getting positive customer reviews on Google is one of the best and most effective ways to improve your local SEO including your exposure and visibility online.
Search engines like Google are smart enough to know that if customers are responding positively to your business then, logically, your website should appear more prominently in their search results.
However, getting a customer review isn’t as easy as it could be, often requiring visitors to make half a dozen mouse-clicks, navigate to a different page, fill in a form or (cringe) create a new account!
In this post, I’m going to introduce you to a couple of online tools that can help to make getting more Google reviews a breeze!
Google Review Link Generators
The first tool is the Google Review Link Generator, courtesy of grade.us.
To use, type in the name of your business and the business city or postal code. The Google Review Link Generator will then go out and find your business’s Google ID and subsequently return a series of URLs you can simply copy and paste into your website as a link.
When a customer clicks the link, they will be directed to a google review window that allows them to start typing a review almost immediately.
WhiteSpark’s Google Review Link Generator
Another option is to use a free tool from WhiteSpark. This tool is especially interesting for some of the extra traffic data it provides.
Head over to https://whitespark.ca/google-review-link-generator/ and enter your business location on the map. Grab the goo.gl link that’s generated and paste it into your website as before.
What’s a goo.gl link? It looks like this: http://goo.gl/1KEUsJ. It’s a URL that has been shortened.
What’s neat about this link, specifically, is that if you add .info onto the end of it, you’ll be shown some interesting link analytics. This includes statistics on the number of clicks the link has received, from what country the click came from, what browser and platform the user was using, and so on.
Check out link analytics for the example on this page by clicking here.
How to Implement this link into your Website
A link is a link is a link, after all, so ultimately, how and where you choose to implement this link is up to you.
Personally, however, I find it’s effective to link the Review Generator to an image.
So open up your favorite browser and google “Google Review”. Then navigate to the image tab:
Pick your favorite image and save it to your computer somewhere. Note that you should only select images that are royalty-free unless you plan to credit the author.
For this demonstration I’ve gone with this one:
Now, on the page where you want this link to appear, simply create an anchor or <a> tag that wraps around this image. For the destination or href of the link, use one of the links from the Google Link Review Generators above.
Here’s what the code will look like if I’m using the Link Generator from WhiteSpark and the image I selected above.
<a href="http://goo.gl/1KEUsJ" target="_blank">
<img src="{linkToYourImageHere}" alt="{altTagHere}" />
</a>Note: the href above is for my website. You will need to replace it with your own unique, generated URL. The target="_blank" makes the link open in a new browser tab.
Try out the Google Link Review Generator for yourself by clicking on this image (and if you’d like to leave a 5-star review, I’d be very thankful!)
And there you have it! We’ve just made it a heck of a lot easier for site visitors to leave a Google Review!
Conclusion
I hope this post has shown you how getting more Google reviews from your customers can be a lot easier! If you have a local business and you’re engaged in improving Local SEO, reviews can make a noticeable impact on your local SEO exposure. I definitely recommend considering ways to make gaining customer reviews a regular part of your business’s online strategy.
Thanks for reading and leave me any questions you have in the comments!
