How to legally generate reviews on Google

Transcript:

Hi guys, Nick here from HVAC Business Growth. Thank you very much for watching the show. In today’s video, what we’re going to talk about is reviews and how you can generate more reviews in a legal way for your HVAC business. There’s lots of information out there on the internet. However, what you’ll find is a lot of this information is actually contradictory and it’s against Google’s terms of service. So in this video we’re going to talk about some quick and easy ways that you can get more reviews for your HVAC business. Let’s get stuck into the show.

All right, so how do you legally generate reviews on Google? It’s a frequently asked question. First of all, what we need to understand is it’s against terms of service, Google’s terms of service to pay for reviews. I’ve heard of quite a few business owners will give away movie tickets and those sorts of things, and essentially it is bribe people to get a five star reviews. So just understand that you can’t do that, but what we’re going to talk about now is how you can legally generate some reviews on Google. So, first of all, probably the simplest and low friction way to do it is to just leave a link on invoices and post-sales material. So if you go into your Google My Business dashboard and you … basically through the share function, you’ll be able to create a link that you can then send out to people that you do business with.

So I would include this link on the bottom of all the invoices and all sort of post-sales material and followup that you do with your business. You can also use a followup email and SMS campaign. There’s lots of different softwares up there or out there, I should say. So Grade.us and Trustpilot are two that come to mind that essentially, after you do the job, you finish the job, you get the customer’s contact details, you put them into this particular system. Then from there, it has an automatic campaign where it sends out email and SMS combinations to them and basically walks them through a review process. The great thing about these tools is that they essentially garner the review before they get it posted onto Google. Let me explain. So they basically will have a review funnel, if you want to call it that, where basically they’ll start the review process and if it’s a four or five star review, then they’ll be directed to place that review on Google or any other review platform that you want.

If they’re going through this funnel and it looks like it’s going to turn out to be a one or a two star review, then the person doesn’t actually get funnelled to Google or another platform, or Yelp or something like that. They’ll actually get funnelled to an email form or it’ll activate a phone call to you. You don’t want these one and two star reviews actually going up. You want as many four and five star reviews going up, and you want to be able to nurture and problem solve those one and two star reviews. So these followup systems like Grade.us and Trustpilot and many, many others will take care of this for you.

The other thing that you need to do, and it’s the simplest thing to do, but it’s also probably the hardest thing, is you need to get the techs to ask for a review. It’s pretty simple. So if your business is doing good work, then at the end of the appointment, after maybe some money’s exchange hands, if you’re collecting upfront payments, if the customer’s happy with the work, then get the tech to ask for a review on Google. It should be a very simple one or two sentences, and you can almost play it a little bit with it as well. You can say, “Mr. Or Mrs. Smith, as you can understand, we’re a small business and referrals and word of mouth and reviews mean a lot to us. Would it be okay if you review our business on Google?” Highly likely they’re going to say yes, and then you can hand them a little card if you want to that will step them through the process. It need not be complicated, but obviously asking for something is going to be the hardest thing to do.

So that’s one of my biggest recommendations, just get the techs to ask. You don’t need any special technology or any systems or anything like that. Just get the technologies to ask. The problem is that the techs are good at the technical stuff, right? They’re not good at the business, but if you’ve got some really good guys and girls out there that are really talkative and they’re excellent at building rapport with the customer, they are the best person to ask, not the administration person on the phones in the office.

So here’s some resources for you that I’ve mentioned. Grade.us and Trustpilot are two good resources that you can use to help get some reviews for your business. Also, on the monthly packages, my business, HVAC Business Growth, users’ reviews on all the different monthly packages we got. We’ve got three tiers, and the review systems are available on the smallest package level as well, as well as some other high quality SEO tactics to get your business to the top of Google. So it’s pretty clear. Let’s create some systems to get some reviews to your business. That’s the action item on this particular video. So thank you very much for watching as always, and we’ll see you in the next video.