Dive Deep into Reviews

People are obsessed with reviews. Today’s consumer wants and expects you to have reviews, and they expect you to have lots of them. I know that personally, I almost always look at the online reviews of a business before making a purchase. But getting people to leave you a review can be hard and frustrating. This is definitely one of the most challenging yet one of the most crucial aspects of marketing and growing a law firm.

If you are not consistently getting reviews, your competitors are and leaving you in the dust. It is imperative in today’s marketplace to be focused on amassing reviews. Here are some things to keep in mind when it comes to review generation:

• You need to ask for them. Always be sure to ask anyone who has had any interaction with your office to leave a review. The vast majority of people will only leave you a review with you first asking them to leave you one. Even after you ask for one, it is rare that someone leaves a review the first time they are asked. In fact, it usually takes multiple requests before someone will leave a review. The key is persistence. But the way you ask for the review is really important and can result in a higher success rate. You need to give them a reason to leave the review. At my firm, when we ask for a review, we tell the person we need reviews because reviews help people who need our personal injury legal service to find us online. This is a very effective approach. Also, we have found that texting the review request to be so much more effective for collecting reviews than requesting the review via email.
• Always be sure to respond to each and every review. By responding to all reviews, you would like to let Google know that you are engaged in your Google My Business profile and show potential clients that you take the time to respond to all your reviews. That I have found really impresses people. Whether it be a glowing 5-star review or the dreaded 1-star review, make sure each and every single review is responded to. Of course, be very careful what you say in your response if someone bashes your firm in the review. The last thing you want is to say something unprofessional in your response that could give rise to an ethics complaint. If you get a bad review (we all get it), then be sure to be very professional and try to make the situation right. At the end of the day, that is all you can do. We can’t make all clients happy all the time. But, if you receive a review that is truly disparaging, harassing, or constitutes bullying, you can simply flag it and ask Google to remove it. Our firm has over 600 Google reviews, and we only needed to ask Google to remove two reviews. They removed both immediately after we asked them to, much to my delight and surprise.
• The more, the better. To me, there is no such thing as too many reviews. When a potential client searches for a lawyer and sees a law firm has 30 reviews while another has 300 reviews, there is a good chance that person will be attracted to the firm with more reviews (social proof is real and compelling for consumers). Set goals for collecting reviews. My firm's goal is to get to 725 Google reviews before the end of this year. That tells me exactly how many reviews we need to collect each day, week, and month in order to reach this goal. This measurement and tracking helps us to stay on track while we aim to reach 725 reviews.
• Leverage your staff. Ensure your staff knows they are expected to ask for and generate reviews for your office. Weave this into your office culture. Recently, we had competitions at my office to see who could get the most reviews. This past year, we had ‘February Frenzy’ and ‘March Madness,’ which brought fun and some healthy intra-office competition to see who would get the most reviews.
• Never stop. Google is going to be around for a while, so collecting reviews on their platform is crucial.If you have other ideas on this important topic, I would love to hear from you, so please email me at [email protected].