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Did you know that a 5-star rating on Google My Business is not actually the best star rating for your business? It’s something we’ve been saying for a long time, but this time we’ve got a report to prove it! A study conducted by Uberall determined that businesses who had 5-star ratings on Google My Business suffered from less conversions than businesses with less than a 5-star average. For this study, Uberall compared data from 64,000 third-party managed business listings for the first half of 2018 with the first half of 2019. The Sweet Spot While we can understand why…

One of the biggest sticking points when it comes to small business is reviews. While we have guides on what to do with bad reviews, and guides on how to ask for reviews, we need to also talk about the importance of reviews, especially when it comes to running a small business. Why are reviews so important? Reviews can make or break a small business. Online reviews are now “word-of-mouth” advertising on the internet. When you Google a business, often times you will see an aggregate of Yelp, Facebook, and Google reviews, showing off blurbs from reviewers as well as…

One thing small businesses struggle most with is brand reputation. Specifically, bad reviews. One bad review can really do a number on your reputation across the internet, depending on what it says and how it was received. While we do have guidelines on what to do with bad reviews and how to best handle them, we always advise our clients to let us respond rather than have the client respond themselves. Recently we had a couple of clients who did come down with bad response/bad review syndrome. The first case was a bad review that our client wanted to respond…

The more I work with clients online the more I realize that not a single business is immune from bad reviews online. Getting a bad review can certainly feel like the end of the world, especially if you’re a reputable business trying to keep up a good reputation online and you don’t have a whole lot of reviews to begin with. The good news is it’s not the end of the world — and often times not the end of your business, either — and handling a bad review in the right way can be super important. Step 1: Don’t…