When are consumers going to rumble reviews sites?

It cannot be long now. Here is Spark Energy on Trustpilot ('Great')...

...and here it is on Google...

Today the spark went out - Spark Energy went bust. Which reviews will you - and your potential customers - be trusting from now on?


Further reading...

• 'Deflection' is what happens when dissatisfied customers write to Google rather than the business's reviews site of choice - you can see it's happened here.
• 'Fear' - the reason so many businesses opt for a reviews site is a well-founded fear that should they invite their customers to post reviews direct to Google their image there will be dominated by the 'unhappy minority'. That's why review management - HelpHound - exists, to ensure that the absolute minimum of unfounded, unfair, inaccurate and misleading reviews are posted.

Reviews and your ranking in search - any correlation?

This is one of the $64,000 questions we are asked every day of our lives, and the answer is not straightforward - that is, unless you apply some simple logic.

To begin with, Google is hardly likely to publish its search algorithms any time soon - they are its most valuable asset, a bit like the secret formula is for Coca Cola. But if you diligently monitor the web, and read Google's blog assiduously, as we do, you begin to get a feel, along these lines...

• Google likes reviews - a lot. Over the past five years they have dedicated huge resources - and massive space in search - to reviews 
• Google really, really likes its own reviews - way above those of any other company - and it controls their relative prominence in search
• Google is aware that the US Congress is looking at their monopoly position in reviews - and it has come up with a clever solution: Google Partners

Here are just two pieces of hard evidence. This (from the Google My Business help centre)...

...and (this from a Google search)...

And what can we extrapolate from this?

• That businesses need to concentrate all their available energy on Google reviews
• That Google partners, from the point of view of most businesses, are a red herring, at least from a search visibility point-of-view
• That businesses should host independently verified reviews on their own websites

But, most convincing of all, let's look at some real-life examples of businesses that tick these boxes: they all have two things in common: they have great Google scores and numbers of reviews and they all have their own reviews on their own websites for Google to find (and in many cases pull through into search using the schema)...

Here's a business - with 112 Google reviews and another 137 on its own website - showing in a competitive local search...

...and another...

.

..given that the cost, in effort and in financial terms, is hardly prohibitive, don't you think it's time your business tried professional review management for itself?

Using a reviews site? Keep an eye on Yelp!

Not so much the stock market perhaps?

How so? Yelp - as Yelp Inc. - is the largest quoted reviews site on the planet, and we would argue that its share price is a pretty effective barometer of the value of all review sites. And by value, we mean value to paying businesses as well as to consumers.

Here's a chart...

...showing Yelp's share price from its peak in 2014 (March 7 2014, to be exact, at a price of $97.25). That's a fall of over two thirds of Yelp's market value. Why?

Let's examine what we at HelpHound, as interested observers, think about Yelp. First of all we think Yelp is a victim of very bad business luck. The same 'bad luck' that put paid to businesses like Nokia - a bigger competitor came along, in Yelp's case that competitor was their worst nightmare: Google. Yelp management may have hoped that they would be able to dominate the reviews space, at least for some years, but that was not to be, it's Google all the way now.

What's to learn for those businesses using other review sites?

You're with Trustpilot or Feefo? Neither of those businesses is quoted on any stock market, and, with the recent performance of Yelp frightening off investors, is unlikely to be any time soon. But that doesn't prevent customers of those businesses learning lessons from Yelp's share price performance. The lessons?

1. Focus on Google reviews
2. Do everything you - legally* - can to score as high as possible there (partly because one of our predictions is that Google will soon begin ranking businesses by their Google score in search - why wouldn't they?)

*Legally: far too many businesses have taken 'lesson 1' on board and focussed all their efforts on getting great Google reviews, but they have broken the law in doing so (and continue to do so). They have 'cherry-picked' happy customers to write reviews.

Please read the following...

• The regulations surrounding reviews in the UK - and why you cannot hand-pick customers to invite to write a Google review
• Moderation: every business's answer to the completely understandable concern that some reviewers will write inaccurate or misleading reviews

Reviews and the medical profession - did our predictions come true?

We first wrote about reviews and the medical profession way back in 2014. So were we right? First lets look at what we predicted:

1. That reviews of medical services, be they general practice or specialist, would become popular with patients
2. That Google would become the vehicle of choice, both for those posting the reviews and those reading them
3. That practitioners that did not find a way of actively engaging with reviews would ultimately suffer, for two reasons: first, medicine is, by its very nature, a complex subject to review accurately and second, the motivation for a dissatisfied patient to write a review is so much greater

And all these led us to the same conclusion: that the medical (and associated health and caring professions) would do well to adopt a proactive attitude to reviews.

What has happened?

1.  Reviews becoming popular

Tick one. Reviews of medical services, of whatever kind, have multiplied over five-fold since 2014. GP practices that had one or two reviews then commonly have ten, twenty or even thirty now, often many more...

Four years ago this GP surgery had no reviews. Now, as you can see, they have over thirty

2.  It's Google all the way now

Tick two. The alternatives have faded away - simply because Google reviews dominate in search. 

Looking for a GP? 

...whether the potential patient conducts a simple search (top) or a map search (bottom) they are shown local surgeries with their Google scores prominently displayed.

Looking for a specialist?

An example of one that has begun to harness the power of Google reviews...

3. Those that have not engaged will have suffered

Tick three - in a very high proportion of cases. If your practice does not engage one of two things will happen (often both, one following the other)...

• you will have no reviews:

...fine, but not especially helpful for potential patients looking for reassurance before choosing a GP. Much more important, it leaves the field wide open for dissatisfied patients to very quickly dominate the impression created in search. It is so easy to go from looking like the practice above, to this...

...a surgery that had no reviews until a year ago!

So what do you need to do?

In a word: engage.

We are fully alive to the fact that we are asking you to put your reputation on the line by proactively inviting reviews, but we are advising you to do exactly that.

Managing that risk

We all recognise that those who feel they have been insufficiently well treated - whether that be by the hotel or restaurant of their choice or their medical practitioner - will be much more motivated to write a review than those who are happy. So we - and you - need a mechanism to balance that equation. That mechanism is moderation.

Moderation

Moderation is the process whereby a review passes through a 'safety net' (operated by HelpHound in conjunction with both the practitioner and the patient/reviewer) before the review is published - that safety net operates in the best interests of both the reviewer and the practitioner to ensure that the review is factually correct and contains nothing that might mislead the person relying on that review to make an informed choice. For those that would like to mine don into the fine detail of moderation there is a separate article here.

Results

No matter what our clients' professions, our ultimate aim will always be to have them scoring in excess of 4.5 on both their own websites and on Google. A 'perfect 5' is attainable in some cases, but it would be unreasonable of us to lead anyone to expect that at outset.

It may well be that some processes within the individual practice need tweaking to improve the business's CRM (a one star review complaining that the phone 'is never answered' has exactly the same impact on a practitioner's Google score as a one star review of a complex medical procedure) but HelpHound will always advise on that before going ahead and implementing any review management processes.

The next steps

Implementation is always planned very thoroughly indeed. No stage is implemented - asking patients to write a Google review, for instance - until the previous stage (asking for a review to the practitioner's own website, in this case) has been thoroughly tested and proven.

At HelpHound we support all our clients every step of the way, from first review to their ultimate goal (as described above). We act in exactly the same way as all your other professional advisers - just focussing on reviews as opposed to legal or financial issues.

Last, but not least, we have no contracts with our clients (apart from our terms of engagement) so we are fully aware that we have to deliver month-in-month-out.

Is your business's marketing and review management joined up?

Let's see what we mean by joined up. Here are two advertisements run in the Times this weekend. One is a single page (rate card £27,000) and the other a double page spread (rate card £42,000)...

Now, suppose you were attracted by one of these advertisements, what do we suppose might be your next action*. Perhaps one of these...

• call the business? 
• email the business? 
• visit the business's website?

* as readers will know, there are two kinds of advertising: 'above the line' (often known as 'brand' advertising) designed to enhance the reader's 'feel' for the brand in question and 'below the line' designed specifically to generate a hard - quantifiable - response (leads). Both of the above advertisements might reasonably be considered to fulfil both functions, but as they both include 'calls to action' in the form of web-links we feel justified in judging them on a below-the-line basis.

So - in order to either call, email or visit the business's website their potential customers have two options...

1. follow the url in the advertisement
2. google the business

For the purpose of this article we will assume it's about half-and-half. So let's see what happens when we google these two businesses (on our phone, because that's what most people have to hand when they are reading a paper). First Irwin Mitchell...

...with 'Reviews' front-and-centre, one click away...

And now Invesco...

We are not going to comment at this stage. We will now simply show you a HelpHound client's brand advertising...

...and in print...

...and then show you what happens if a potential customer googles their local branch...

...and - as an added bonus - if the potential customer were to go direct to their website...

...or even search for them on desktop...

So: Our message...

Get your review management sorted and the response to all your other advertising and marketing must rise*, it's as simple as that.

Note re: Irwin Mitchell and reviews sites

The more eagle-eyed of you may notice that Irwin Mitchell have employed both Feefo and Trustpilot. Their experience with these sites is one of the most pronounced cases of deflection that we have ever seen ('deflection': the negative impact on a business's Google score of inviting customers to write reviews to reviews sites - more here).

*Must rise? 

Here are some numbers - from Google My Business - for a single location for one of our clients...

...for more read this.

A single negative review - just how much harm can it do?

We hear this kind of comment often - admittedly less often than we used to - but still often enough to get onto our soapbox and trumpet...

Negative reviews hurt business(es)

Just look at this...

...emailed by Google to the reviewer. The review is exactly three months old. In that time it has been seen by over 500 people. 

Do we think all five hundred have been put off the business in question? Probably not - but it's a nailed-on certainty that some have. So what has the business in question done? Nothing at all. 

What should they have done? Responded to the reviewer, that's what - addressing the issues raised, whatever they are, and however 'unfair' the business thinks the review may be.

What else can a business do?

Invite reviews from all its customers would be a good start. Next: how about responding to all customers who take the trouble to write a review - it takes minutes a week and is sure to impress potential customers, it can also gently correct factual inaccuracies or misconceptions, so readers don't automatically assume the reviewer is correct. The business above has responded to none of its reviewers, the majority of them saying 'use this business' - wouldn't at least a thank-you be in order?

What if the review is factually incorrect or misleading (or even malicious)?

You can appeal to Google to have the review removed. Here is an article that goes into detail about the procedure.

Better than that - if you are a member of HelpHound, you will have a very good chance that the customer will have written their review to you before going on to post it to Google. And all HelpHound reviews are moderated - not to 'weed out' negative reviews, but to ensure, for everyone's benefit, that reviews containing factual inaccuracies or potentially misleading comments are not published - either on the business's website or on Google (or anywhere else, for that matter).

Read all about our moderation process here. It's worth its weight in gold for everyone concerned - the writer of the review, the reader of the review and the business under review.

Quality is SO important where reviews are concerned

We have commented on the difference between 'feedback' and 'reviews' recently - here - but there is one aspect we neglected: quality.

If you are selling products a five star review is worth having, irrespective of the words attached to those five stars. people will buy a five star camera or a five star toaster on the basis of the star rating alone - but a high-value service? Not the same. They want to mine down into the content of the reviews themselves. 

Compare these...

With these...

Interestingly, for us at least, these reviews are the last three written for the first client we looked at. Check any HelpHound client's reviews and you will see the same. Why? Because of the way in which our clients ask their customers for their reviews - by email (not text). And the way in which they prepare their customers - the request to write a review does not come as a surprise, they have been preparing the way by 'warning' their customers that they will be asking for a review at every point in the transaction.

So: don't let the temptation to indulge in a headlong rush for numbers and ratings, quality of the reviews themselves is what drives business through the door for service businesses.