As readers of our blog will know, we firmly believe that all businesses should focus on creating a powerful online presence. However, for multi-location businesses, it’s important to be granular and collect location-specific reviews. Here’s why!
Why are Local Reviews so Important?
Nearly half of all Google enquiries are searches for local information and, according to BrightLocal, 85% of customers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations with many reading, on average, seven reviews before trusting a company with their business.
Scoring well with online reviews can be a real game changer for multi-location brands, with 73% of local customers trusting local businesses more when they have positive reviews:
- 97% of customers use the internet to find local businesses
- 93% of customers read local reviews to decide if a business is good or not
- 85% of customers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations
Let’s not forget that it’s not just customers who place a lot of value on local reviews. Search engines use online reviews as a major factor in their local rankings too. For multi-location brands, the online review profile of individual locations plays a significant role in getting found when local customers search for nearby businesses. Reviews are an important ranking factor in both local map pack results and localised organic search results, so we very much want to encourage multi-location businesses to get granular with their reviews.
How Should you Collect Local Reviews?
So as a multi-location business, how should you proactively manage your reviews?
- Decide who is going to lead on reviews. Is it going to be someone from head office or an appointed (and trained) person from each local site? It’s imperative to decide this at the outset so everyone is clear on who is doing what!
- Put your review strategy at the heart of your online efforts. Central to this is ensuring that you ask all your customers for a review. When do you ask them? You can read all about that in our blog ‘When’s the Best Time for a Review?’
- Reply to all your reviews ensuring you respond within 24 hours of the review being left. Want to know why? Read our blog, ‘Why You Should Respond to Reviews Quickly’
- Repeat, track your progress and witness the results location by location!