Strategy for Building Your Stock of Online Reviews
You can’t stop people from
saying things about your practice online, and if you ignore that feedback and
the existence of review sites, you leave an open door for naysayers to destroy
your reputation. It’s true that people tend to only send feedback and write
reviews after a negative experience.
The following steps for
managing and controlling online reviews will work — if you follow the steps
religiously.
Step 1: Assess Which Reviews Matter Most to Your Firm
Naturally you want to know
what reviews are out there, and which directories already include your firm.
More important to your strategy, however, is pinpointing which directories are
most influential in your geographic area and practice area.
Step 2: Claim Those Directory Profiles
In “Take Control of
Your Firm’s Local Directory Strategy,” I discussed the importance of
claiming your profiles. It’s especially important for online reviews, because
once you claim all the profiles that allow for reviews and “own” them,
some sites (like Google) will allow you to respond to positive and negative
feedback.
Step 3: Monitor the Online Reviews
You can’t improve something
you aren’t tracking. Here are sites that can help automate this process:
- GetListed.org.
- ReviewPush.
ReviewPush is great for a multi-location
practice. It sends email alerts and tracks trends. (Paid.)
- GetFiveStars.
This is a brand-new service that has major
promise for law practices, especially those with multiple locations.
It’s designed to help you with the process of getting reviews and monitoring
them.
Step 4: Make Reviews Part of Your Daily Routine and Client Process
It’s always easier to
achieve a goal if you incorporate small steps into your daily routine. But there’s another reason why you
shouldn’t save your online review activities for one big push: It can set off
alarm bells on the Internet.
Step 5: Rinse and Repeat
If you get just one review per month on Google with this method, in five months
you will have enough reviews for stars to show up next to your business listing
— and those stars will help attract more clicks on your listing.
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