Review Marketing and Google Local Go Hand-in-Hand

As Internet marketing becomes more complex, competitive and expensive, practices sometimes overlook their most fundamental and critical online marketing areas: Your Google My Business (GMB) profile and Customer Reviews. Instead, they spend all their time and money obsessed with their SEO, blogging, backlinks, pay-per-click advertising and social media.

What is equally important to note is that they both work hand-in-hand with one another to generate more online visibility and helping prospects find you, as well as leveraging the credibility of Google and your satisfied patients/clients. Keep in mind, your GMB is a piece of Google-owned real estate where, in most cases (ex. a new business), it created your GMB without you doing anything. You simply had to find and claim it. And since Google really likes its own assets, it already comes with a tremendous amount of credibility and power behind it. 

You probably remember the old Google social media platform, G+, which was shut down on April 2, 2019. Although Google has given up on its social media investment, it still sees huge value in businesses building strong rapport and engagement with its customers. 

Thus, in mid 2018, Google announced on Twitter that it would start rolling out sending email notifications to inform reviewers when you respond to their post. By 2019 it had been fully completed. Reviews, in many ways, has become Google’s solution to building engagement (and credibility) between businesses and consumers.

Since then, there has been increasing amounts of “chatter” about reviews and their impact on Google Local SEO results (map-pack results). Although Google takes into a lot of factors when determining which GMB profile listings get viewed in its map-pack results, reviews and responding to reviews does have an impact.

Check out this article by Chatmeter: Google Confirms Responding to Reviews Improves your Local SEO.

Many practices say that they have no control over their organic SEO results and rely solely on their web marketing agency to improve results. However, by collaborating and working with your online marketing team, and generating more reviews and responding to them, your efforts can have a substantial impact on your organic local SEO listings.

It is also extra important to respond to those customers who go out of their way to post a highly positive review, especially Google-identified "Local Guides". By doing so, it is an easy way to 1) help your own Google visibility, 2) stimulate referrals from your most vocal supporters, and 3) build your online credibility and trust signals. See my previous article on Review Marketing Tips.

Look for an upcoming article on Tips to Optimize Your Google My Business Profile.

Feel free to reach out if you have questions, or would like an assessment of your GMB, or Review Marketing.

Cheers!