Google makes changes every day - some small, some large, some large that may at first glance appear small. This is one such.
Google Local Guides are now badged in reviews:
And they are prompted - like this:
And incentivised - like this:
So what is a Google Local Guide?
A Google Guide is a regular reviewer - that's all. But they are a reviewer who has proactively volunteered their services as a Guide. Once a Guide reaches level 4 (it's a points system) they begin to have more influence than a 'normal' everyday Google reviewer. How so? Well, first they get a badge to identify them (as well as the words 'Local Guide' next to every review they write - even if that business is a thousand miles from their physical home); next: we have begun to notice a pattern of Guide's reviews appearing when the search - automatically - defaults to 'Helpful', we have also noticed that Guides are being 'thanked' (the blue thumbs-up) more often than the average reviewer.
We reckon these Local Guides are helping the Scarsdale Tavern, put it this way: they cannot be hurting it!
But try and think of it from a consumer's point-of-view: don't Guides strike you - more than most - as 'real' people. From our own experience Guides tend to take more care over their reviews - more words, more photographs, less expletives, less ratings (scores with no written review attached). It's early days, but their reviews may even end up being preferred for the influential rich snippets that Google show in every business's Knowledge Panel.
The opposite of the reviews for the Scarsdale above, unhelpful for the business, even without the 'Local Guide' status. With it? We will let you decide.
And what does that mean for your business? We think it means, all other things being equal, that a review from a Google Local Guide is more influential - in both directions.
Recommended action
We are not suggesting you rush out a marketing campaign to attract Local Guides just yet, but just be aware that they exist; if you have a customer you know to be a Guide you might want to go that extra mile to encourage them to post a review. And if you have any experience of dealing with a Guide - positive or negative - we'd love to hear from you. We will doubtless be updating this article in the not-too-distant future.
We introduced you to Google Local Guides here. It's a great system - especially for consumers, especially because they know for sure that they are reading a review by a 'real' person, but there are some downsides.
How so?
People, being people, have differing character traits, some are motivated by greed, some by altruism, and Google Local Guides are no exception. Google rewards guides for writing more reviews, correcting maps and much more...
...and, for the overwhelming majority, that's just what they do. But a minority can get carried away. Just like the boy collecting stamps, they can be in a hurry to 'fill that page'. In Google terms: 'in a hurry to reach the next level' (or even to get an invitation to the holy grail of Local Guides - the annual summit in San Francisco). That, of itself, is not a problem - what could go wrong? Well, as Yelp - who invented the concept with their 'Yelp Elite' - know only too well, some people get carried away. We have just seen evidence of this, where a client of ours was reviewed by a Local Guide. The review - a 1* negative - was posted last week.
...as were thirty-eight further reviews; all one-liners (nothing wrong with that, no contravention of Google T&Cs)...
...taking the reviewer to level 5 from level 2...
Where do we take issue?
Google reviews are powerful - people do take notice of them, whether consciously or unconsciously, of that there is not a smidgin of lingering doubt. They create an instant first impression - through both the score and the content of the reviews. We are suggesting that Google modify their T&Cs, which currently look like this:
There are two important issues here: the first is contained in the grey highlighted box: 'the review breaks the law'; in a nutshell this means it is libelous (accusing the business or a staff member of acting illegally) and the second is the four categories under 'Violation type' - which, significantly, excludes 'This post is untrue'.
The reason for that exclusion is that Google do not want to get involved in arbitrating between two parties in a commercial disagreement, and that is fair enough, as far as it goes. But we would contend that Google reviews carry so much power and influence that there should be some burden on the reviewer to verify their comments if the business flags the review as 'untrue' (as it is in this case), especially in the case of high value businesses - it is time to stop treating pizza parlours and the professions the same way with reviews.
Google would respond by saying that the business has the right-of-reply (and our client has replied to the review above) but there is no right-of-reply to the damage the 1* score has done to the business's overall score (they are recent clients and are just starting out on their journey with reviews). Solutions? We would strongly suggest that aggregate scores should be irrelevant for certain types of service business - it's OK to choose a pizza because the parlour scores 4.4 out of 5, but a lawyer or a wealth manager? People should be reading the content of the reviews.
Two very similar businesses in the same location - very different profiles on Google. If they both received a 1* review tomorrow the one on the right's score would remain at 4.9 and the one on the left's would fall to 3.0 - failing the Google filter. Another? (it's not beyond the realms of possibility - their first review was written by a Local Guide, and we've already established how some of them behave): the score for our cleint remains the same, the other business falls to 2.3.
But before that particular pig flies (it is a conundrum that Google - and other reviews solutions - will have to address eventually, but we don't advise holding your breath) - our advice to our clients is to build critical mass with their reviews. Your Google score is a pure mathematical average, so the impact of a single 1* review is far less if you have lots of four and five star reviews, but don't forget that those considering high-value businesses will read the actual content of your reviews - always the negatives first, so meanwhile do everything you can to minimise the chances of someone being given cause to write such a review.
Last night a representative of a London City law firm appeared on Channel 4 news. One of our staff googled the firm. What did they see? This...
31 reviews. Those, in theory, should give any potential client a pretty rounded picture of the business and its services. Do they? You be the judge...
Our opinion? A resounding 'NO!'
Why? Because not a single one of these is written by someone that has first-hand experience of the services delivered by the business.
Local guides
A great idea - Google Local Guides - that has backfired on Google (and its users, both businesses and consumers). Google incentivises local guides - they earn points for every review or rating, as you can see from this:
Just how helpful is this review for someone looking for an international corporate lawyer?
Or this one?
Ratings
A lazy way to generate content at best. Maybe they work for pizza parlours, but they are worse than unhelpful for service businesses and their potential customers. One star - why? Five stars - why again?
Helpful?
What should Google do?
Eliminate ratings
Insist on a minimum character count for reviews - say 50
Suspend local guides that 'review' businesses they have not used
What should the business do?
Contact Google and ask for all these so-called reviews and ratings to be deleted
Adopt a proactive review management programme, so they begin to look like this in search:
Helpful for potential clients? Generating more business for the business? We will leave you to answer the first question. Our answer to the second? You will see in your first Google My Business monthly report after joining. Here is one:
This innocuous little badge - showing someone wearing a Google Local T-shirt and carrying a smartphone and a camera, is 'awarded' to Google Local Guides.
So what is a Google Local Guide? (If you are a Local Guide, or you are familiar with the concept, you can skip to the next paragraph.) They are simply a more committed Google reviewer; the sort of person that actively reviews just about every business they come into contact with. They have absolutely no qualifications - anyone can volunteer to be one. There's more on them here.
Why mention them at all?
For two reasons...
They are far more likely to write a review - whether asked to do so or on their own initiative
Their reviews carry a disproportionate influence with consumers - for no rational reason
Look at these two reviews...
Which do you think is the most credible? Their content is similar and their score for the business is identical. The only thing that separates the two reviewers is that one is a Local Guide and the other is not. With what you know now you may justifiably be cynical about the Local Guide's review, but we can assure you that Joe Public gives their reviews more credence.
So: if someone mentions that they are a Google Local Guide you can be pretty sure they will review your business. That's all. We don't recommend you quiz your customers to establish if they are a Local Guide or not, but just be aware that such people - millions of them - do exist.
Google has expanded its outreach to your customers a step further. Now, when someone visits your website, they will get an invitation from Google like this:
The implications for businesses:
Those that are currently ignoring Google reviews: you will begin to get them (Google Local Guides are incentivised to write reviews - see the 'level' and 'points' above and this article), and, given human nature, unhappy customers are about fifteen times as likely to post as happy ones.
Those currently using another reviews system: your dissatisfied customers will begin to post to Google, especially if they happen to be Local Guides. This is a syndrome we call 'deflection' and there is more about that here.
Our advice:
Adopt a proactive review management strategy. How ever much you and your colleagues are still saying 'who posts these reviews?' and 'what king of people pay attention to these reviews' you know the answer to the second question is certainly not 'no-one': apart from studies from the likes of Harvard Business School there is the amount of real estate Google now dedicates to reviews in search and the hard evidence from those that have adopted such a strategy (20% more calls and 30% more visits to your website anyone? See this case history).
If your review management strategy currently involves a reviews site (other than Google): change to a Google-focussed strategy (see the results of doing this in the link above - the client in this case study moved from a reviews site to adopt professional review management).
If you are currently breaking the law (and many businesses, wittingly or unwittingly are): conduct a thorough compliance audit to ensure you are not either cherry-picking (inviting selected customers to post reviews) or gating (using a more formal mechanism to identify happy customers - e.g. a survey, or even another reviews site - before then only inviting proven satisfied customers to post a review).
What? HelpHound agrees? 'Tell me more', we hear you say. Alright, but first, for those of you who don't have a subscription to the Times (link for those who do in the opening line, above) we will precis Janice's article... She starts with a fairly common-or-garden complaint about the number of invitations to review everything from her Uber driver to sheets from John Lewis and the local McDonalds. She then answers her own unspoken question (why do businesses ask for reviews?) by quoting the Competition and Markets Authority's statistic: that £23 billion of spending is influenced by reviews. She goes further, by saying how useful her husband's research into holiday restaurants is. Then follows the story of Oobah Butler's fake restaurant that made it to number one on TripAdvisor - now we're cooking (forgive the awful pun).
"Amazon and TripAdvisor say they can detect frauds." NO they CANNOT! Anyone can set up an account with TripAdvisor - as Oobah Butler did - and write fake reviews, even multiple accounts and multiple fake reviews. We have met businesses who openly admit to commissioning staff or outside agencies to do so (did you know you can even bulk buy 'temporary' email addresses so your fake reviews cannot be tracked?). It is the same with every reviews site on the planet. We have highlighted many examples on these pages over the years. There are sites that are nearly fake-review-proof - but they have other downsides (more on that later - see * below).
If reviews - genuine reviews - were not so massively helpful, to both businesses and consumers, we would give up. But they are, so we won't.
Advice to Consumers
This Google review of tea at the Ritz is almost certainly genuine: written by a Google Local Guide (identifiable by the star) who has written dozens of reviews of other businesses
Wherever possible, read Google reviews. These days they are almost all attached to a real person. Look for reviewers who have posted multiple reviews, or even better, trust Google Local Guides.
A plea to Google: your reviews would have even more credibility if...
you insisted they were all attached to a bona-fide Google Plus identity
you deleted all the old reviews listed anonymously under 'A Google user'
you suspended the rating function (effectively a review without text) it helps no-one and is frustrating for consumer and business alike
Advice to Businesses
Focus on Google reviews. They are so much more visible than any reviews from an independent site and are massively more trusted by consumers (with good reason - see above; and a recent survey by the property portal Rightmove found that consumers trusted Google reviews up to ten times more than those on independent reviews sites).
The reward for looking great on Google - more business - is worth the effort. If you are concerned that your customers may harm your business by writing factually incorrect or potentially misleading reviews, and need a mechanism for minimising the chances of that happening, then HelpHound is here for you. * Booking.com and Feefo are two interesting examples: a review can only be written on Booking.com if the reviewer has booked their hotel room through the site - and that works fine, as long as the actual person making the booking agrees with any other guests (partner/tour party) on the gist of their review, because the other parties will not be able to write a review, at least not on Booking.com. Feefo is a variation on this theme, with one major difference: they rely on the business to provide the email addresses - we reckon this works brilliantly for online retail but has significant flaws for more complex transactions and service-related businesses: how many estate agents resist the temptation to leave that stroppy tenant's email address off the list? In the real world this kind of 'cherry-picking' has the effect of making the business look great on the - nigh invisible - reviews site and considerably less great on Google, where everyone sees the negative reviews posted by those who were never invited to write a review on the independent site (for more see here).
You may have noticed it with your own business, and you will almost certainly have noticed it when searching online for other businesses. We estimate that Google reviews are accelerating at a factor of between 1.5 and 3 a year.
A glimpse into the future? Not for this business! More and more people are writing reviews now, especially Google reviews
As many of you know, we carry out audits on every business we meet - simply to understand their current exposure to - and engagement with - reviews. Just this week we have encountered two businesses, one in recruitment and one in estate agency, where the number of Google reviews has gone - in the last 12 months - from 91 to 263 and 29 to 86 respectively.
What is driving this growth?
A number of factors, many of which we alluded to in this article almost exactly a year ago. Let's list them and highlight some that are new...
more people can physically write a review - Google just has millions more people signed up to one of more of their services (G+, Gmail, Youtube and so on)
more people have 'broken their duck' - once they've written one review they are far more likely to go on and write more
peer approval - writing reviews is becoming the norm. A common response to the complaint 'I've experienced bad service' these days is: 'Then write a review'
review site fatigue - it's the name we've given to a syndrome that we reckon is becoming more common by the day: people cannot be bothered to register with multiple review sites, one for a hotel, another for a plumber, yet another for their estate agent - now they just go to Google
credibility - ever since Google began insisting that a review is attached to a Google account (you will still see old 'A Google user' reviews, but they can no longer be written) credibility has made a quantum leap. Google understands that consumers want credible reviews from real consumers and is determined to deliver them
Take a minute to read this review - it would be harmful if it were one amongst dozens, but it was the first review written about this business, and remained the only review of the business until a potential client mentioned that they had seen it. Now this business has many reviews from happy customers, but wouldn't life have been a whole lot less stressful for them if they had formulated a review management strategy before this review had been posted? At the very least conduct a search on your business once a week to see your business as those searching on Google see it.
businesses are driven to proactivity by a negative review - there's nothing like receiving a really well-crafted negative review to bounce a business into action - most often the wrong type of action (the major errors we see are invariably infractions of the CMA code)
NEW! The Google Filter - enabling consumers to filter businesses that score less than 4.0 out of searches - has undoubtedly prompted some businesses to act to increase the flow of reviews
NEW! Google Guides: Google prompts its Local Guides to write reviews - it knows where they have been...
your business is featuring in multiple lists like this
Add to this the propensity for consumers to write negative reviews - the motivation is just so much greater...
Here's a typical example: this person has only ever written four reviews - estimates vary, but the general consensus is that people are nearly fifteen times more likely to write a negative review
Then we begin to see that businesses need to find a proactive strategy with regard to reviews.
Where next?
Today a business with twenty reviews looks good (as long as the reviews and resulting score are positive, of course). But soon a business with numbers like these will become the norm:
Review management cannot guarantee your business scores 4.9 - like this
client of ours - but it will minimise the chances of harmful inaccurate or
misleading reviews being posted
And then there will be some real heart-searching in marketing departments across the world. Why? Because Google scores (and therefore the Google Filter) operate on a purely mathematical average. The impact of this is to make it increasingly an uphill struggle to 'correct' a bad score. Look at the numbers... A business currently has a score of 3.0 from 10 reviews. How many five star reviews to get that score up to 4.0 (and therefore pass the filter)? Answer: 10 (and no 4, 3, 2 or 1 stars meanwhile!). But a score of 3.0 from 100 reviews? The business will need a hundred five star reviews. And so on upwards. And that's only to get to 4.0; to really impress consumers your business should look to be scoring at least 4.5. You do the maths.
Our recommendation
One day your business is going to have this many reviews - and only proactive review management is going to ensure that your score is a fair and accurate representation of the service you provide.
Engage - and engage before your business finds that it is failing the Filter or, worse still - and we have seen this on more than one occasion - the phone stops ringing.
If you are interested, the relevant words can be found at minute 14.
Some readers will be old enough to remember John F Kennedy's inauguration speech, back in January 1961, in which he implored his 'fellow-Americans' to look into their hearts and 'ask not what your country can do for you, but ask what you can do for your country.' In our headline we paraphrased the first part of this famous quotation. In this article we want to go on to emphasise just how important reviews are for consumers - the 'ask what your reviews can do for your potential customers' part. First: Understand how reviews are consumed This is the first - and essential - step. Online reviews break down into two distinct categories:
product reviews: reviews of toasters and T-shirts, cameras and and cordless drills. We are not concerned with these, simply because they add so little value. People buy shirts because they like the look of them - a review that says 'this shirt only lasted three years' will be ignored by 99% of prospective purchasers (and the purchaser can always send it back if they doesn't like the colour or fit). If there is a 'thirst' for such reviews it is easily satisfied by the online reviews sites, publications such as Which? and plenty of online expert reviews.
service reviews: these we are concerned with. For two reasons: firstly because the overwhelming majority of consumers now trust their fellows when it comes to such reviews, secondly because such decisions (as to exactly which service to choose) have much more far reaching - and often irreversible - implications if we get them wrong. Let us examine some of the categories under this heading:
health: medical and all areas of wellbeing, from physiotherapy to care homes
finance: from mortgages and loans to wealth management and insurance
education: from schools to further education, from tutors to adult courses
legal: from conveyancing to divorce, will writing to commercial law
property: estate agency and surveying, building and allied trades
We would suggest you choose just one of the five above and ask yourself, bearing in mind recent experience, how much you would have valued reviews of such a business as an aid, assuming you had urgent need and none of your friends or colleagues were able to recommend a solution, like this home-seller:
Second: understand the value of reliable reviews
Imagine just how valuable such reviews would be. We include an example for each of the above categories here, doing so somehow makes the concept so much more 'real':
health - gynaecology
finance - mortgages
education - independent school
legal - leasehold dispute
property - flat sale
Taking that last example, this review by Lucie Noble is of Winkworth in Kennington. We are sure that all but the most hardened cynics will agree that it is pretty powerful on its own. But accompanied by 119 more?
On the most visible platform there is? Showing in local search like this?
As opposed to two categories of business that have not engaged? The first being those with no reviews at all...
And a common sub-category: those that have not engaged but have ended up with these less than helpful 'ratings':
The above is the result of a combination of factors: unhelpful Google 'local guides' rating the business (of which they almost certainly have no direct experience) in order to gain points and boost their individual scores combined with 'helpful' staff, giving their employer a boost. It is also a sign of a business that has not engaged with reviews. How do we know that? Because we know what a business that has engaged with reviews looks like. It looks like Winkworth (see above) and here:
And here (in map and mobile search):
These reviews are genuine, thoughtful and - on the whole - written with an eye to helping the reviewers' fellow consumers make an informed decision. But they did not happen by accident. This is what the business in question did...
It researched the whole market, including the independent reviews sites and the option of 'doing it itself'.
The reviews sites were discounted for two main reasons: first because it had become obvious that Google had become consumers' 'go to' resource for reviews, and second because they lacked any form of moderation pre-publication (it may be fine for someone to publish a glaring error about a pair of shoes costing £100 and for the business to then correct that error in their response, but where transactions that have the potential to be life-changing are the subject of the review it is essential for all parties concerned, not least the reviewer, that these errors are corrected pre-publication).
Do-it-yourself was, likewise, discounted for two reasons: it was considered that an independent moderator would carry far more credibility (moderation is the function of reading reviews to ensure, as far as is possible, the review contains no errors of fact or statements likely to mislead a reader - read more about this vital function here) and because Google values businesses that publish their own reviews on their websites for SEO purposes (look at Winkworth's position in both the Google 3-pack and organic search above - the stars and score in organic search are drawn from their own reviews).
It chose HelpHound to work along side all its stakeholders (tech, web designers, management and franchisees, not to mention staff in-branch) to deliver on all their objectives.
By delivering on 'ask what your reviews can do for your potential customers' - providing a credible and effective reviews system for all their customers - existing and potential - to use, whenever they choose...
Just one click here - to read as many of the 179 reviews as you want or write one yourself
...and wherever they are looking (on Google or on the business's own website - above).
So by asking the question - 'what your reviews can do for your potential customers' - you will be helping not only those potential customers but your own business; because businesses that adopt proper professional review management do so much better by comparison with their competitors - see this case history for a great example - it's a complete win/win: your potential customers win and the business wins.
Further reading...
There are nearly 1,000 articles here, all of which cover a subject that is relevant to the world of reviews and review management. You can interrogate the blog (there's a box on the right) but here is an index of the handful of articles that will put you in the picture before you contact us to see what we - and you - can do for your business and your customers.
