Get more Google reviews by linking directly to the review form

Picture of Jon Haslett

Jon Haslett

Managing Director at Dash
Picture of Jon Haslett

Jon Haslett

Managing Director at Dash

This screencast and article were published as an update to my original tutorial on how to directly link customers to the review form your Google My Business listing. The instructions in this article are current as of June 2016.

Reviews on social media are valuable to your business. Reviews act as a signal to search engines that your website is useful to customers. They also help customers to identify reputable and established businesses.

If you’ve got a Google My Business listing. You know, those sidebar boxes that appear on Google searches sometimes when you search for a specific business, then it’s a good idea to actively try and get positive reviews from your best clients or customers.

Here’s few reasons why this is something you should be doing:

  1. People will see reviews and a star rating when your business details card appears in search results.
  2. Pro-actively building a collection of positive reviews means that one day when you get that unfortunate negative review it will not matter as much because it’s already being drowned out in a sea of positive reviews.
  3. Getting reviews allows you to pull further ahead of your competitors. When you’re actively building a collection of five star reviews and your competitors aren’t, over time it becomes harder and harder for them to catch up to you.

What we don’t want to do is casually tell our customers
“hey, you should totally leave a review for me on Google”. The problem here is that there’s too many things for the customer to figure out on their own.

  • First they have to figure out how to get your Google My Business listing to appear in a search result.
  • Then they have to find the “write a review” button.
  • Then they might need to sign in to a Google account.
  • Then finally, if they haven’t given up yet they might actually pick a star rating and type some nice words about your business

Instead, let’s send your customers a clickable link that takes them directly to your review entry dialogue box where if signed in they can immediately leave a review for your business.

How to find your Google Review link

I previously published a guide to getting this done on the Dash Blog but Google has gone and changed the process so today we’ll be looking at the method that’s current as of June 2016.

Step 1: Go to google.com and perform a search that brings up your Google My Business details card. For example I can bring up the Dash card by searching for “Dash Darwin”.

Step 2: In your Google My Business details card, click the “Write a review” button. You’ll see a box popup that either asks you to write a review or to sign in if you aren’t already signed in to a Google account.

Step 3: With the blue and white overlay open, select and copy the entire web address at the top of your web browser including any punctuation or funny stuff.

Step 4: Open a new browser window and paste the funky web address that you just copied. Hopefully that special address will take you to your Google search results and automatically open the “write a review” box.

Save this link for later. You could keep it in a document, email it to yourself, anything you like. This is the magic link that you should use when asking customers to leave a review for you on Google. If a customer clicks this link they’ll have a much easier time leaving you a review.

You could even draft an email template that you send to your best customers after you’ve done work for them asking them to leave a review and giving them this direct link.

Not everyone will leave a review but if you always send this direct link you’ll get more reviews than if you don’t.

Do you have any tips or strategies for getting more reviews for your business? Let us know on
YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter.

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