Your reputation is your business.  

We’ve heard this a million times, we live to provide excellent service so that our reputation remains unscathed and our business can grow as a result.

It’s not easy to run a business, local and small businesses need all the help they can get, it’s hard enough to manage employees, focus on customer service and happy customers, managing finances, it can be quite daunting.

This all helps our small businesses survive, but what we really want for them is to thrive.  When we talk to local businesses about reviews and their importance we tend to explain it to them as being an integral part of their marketing plan, why?- Because:

• Reviews Help Make you Credible
• Reviews Increase Search Results
• Reviews Are important to consumers who research
• Reviews are content that never go away and that can help sustain leads

We also tend to follow a pretty fluid review capturing timeline:

• Request Your Review within a few weeks of service
• Request via email and remind them
• Make leaving reviews simple and direct

We offer our clients a comprehensive system by which their recent customers are sent a thoughtful message requesting their feedback, they are reminded if necessary, and then are sent to a review platform in a simple and direct way.  Because of this our success rate in capturing quality real reviews is high.  There are companies out there that promise overnight results, they are no doubt using black hat marketing and purchasing, or soliciting reviews.

What is Black Hat Marketing?

Simply put: Black hat marketing refers to any marketing tactic that is unethical or illegal, it is a blanket term that really covers many different types of marketing,  In the past there have been work arounds that agencies exploited and used to make their clients websites seem more authoritative on certain subjects and propelled them in search results.  Thankfully, Google has made strides to assure us that this doesn’t happen anymore, by creating more and more complex algorithms.

There are still ways to abuse search engines like link farming, cloaking, and gateway pages, but the one that appeals most to small businesses are paying for reviews.  The reality is that reviews are beneficial and add a lot of value, they help you rank higher and give potential customers a good perception of your business.

So Why Not Pay For Reviews

Fake reviews  might help you reach a higher ranking on Google, but that is just temporary, once Google realizes that you tricked its algorithm in to thinking you should be on the first page of search, and then your website doesn’t perform like it needs to to remain there, they’ll do a lot more than just take your business off the first page.

Because fake reviews are unethical, they violate Google’s terms of use and they would be well in their right to blacklist a company.  Blacklisting means you can kiss your SEO goodbye, your business will never be allowed in search results again, and let’s be real, if Google says your business doesn’t exist, it pretty much doesn’t, so we never risk it.

Reviews Made Easy

Because we have created such an easy to use and effective tool to request, capture, and track reviews we don’t have to resort to black hat marketing tactics to help our clients get the reviews they need to thrive. We also manage that reputation and ensure that it is continually growing and evolving with the business and with the ever changing world of SEO.  We encourage our customers to focus on their products and services and making every consumer happy, we’ll focus on maintaining a steady stream of high quality real reviews.  With the right team on your side any business can get the 5 star rating they deserve, the right way.