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Board Game Marketing Posts

Kickstarter / Gamefound Board Game Asset Requirements

From our experience, there are several kinds of assets that perform very well as Facebook board game ads.

Please see our following requirements:

Images

  • 1080×1080 [Required]
  • Any large image that we can crop [no max resolution]
  • .jpg
  • Without Kickstarter / Gamefound insignias or logos
  • Without overlaid text on the image itself (apart from game logos)

Videos

  • 1920×1080 [Horizontal video – for desktop users]
  • 1080×1920 [Vertical video – for Facebook stories]
  • 1080×1080 [Square video – for mobile users]
  • Length: 10-30s
  • Loopable preferred (can reply seamlessly) 
  • Animated subtitles preferred (if your video has voice over / talking head)
  • Format H.264 (.mp4 / .mov)
  • Bitrate: Target 12Mbps, Variable Bit Rate (VBR) 1 pass
  • Framerate: 30fps
  • Audio: Stereo AAC @44,100Hz

Quantity Is Greater Than Quality 

We start your Facebook advertising using Dynamic Ads, which allows Facebook to test variations of assets against variations of copy at a rapid rate.

This allows us to quickly figure out which image/text combination is working the best.

As a result, it is always better to send us too much than too little as we curate the best performers using this system.

Often the counter initiative assets perform the best.

High Performing Image Examples

Box & Game Components

Either a 3D rendering or a photograph of your game box with some unique components around the base usually performs well.

Box Art

The box art can make a great ad or an art image that captures the theme or energy of your game.

The Less Polished iPhone Snapshot 

These “less polished” images tend to perform well because they don’t look like ads.

This could include any images of playtesting. Reactions work best.

The Purpose of Your Facebook Ads / Landing Page

Your ads and landing page are not designed to educate the customer about your product but rather to build intrigue.

  • The Facebook ad as one objective – Get relevant people to your landing page
  • Your landing page has one objective – capture an email 

Once this is done, it is through email marketing/social media engagement that you will dispense information about your product/answer questions. 

Leveraging Social Media With A/B Testing

A good place to start would be looking at the engagement of your existing social media posts. For example, an image on Instagram with a lot of heart reactions could make a good ad.


You can also ask your community or other communities which images they like best before sending us assets. This is a good way to know which image is likely to perform better without spending any money on ads!

 Example Facebook Group Post:

“I’m about to run some Facebook ads for my new board game! In your opinion, which image is better and why? Thanks!”

More Resources

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Board Game Marketing Posts

2 Essential Concepts That You Need In Facebook Ads

TLDR – Redundancy & Inception

When it comes to the subject of the actual text we use in Facebook Ads, I frequently battle against my own clients’ preconceived notions about what needs to be there and what can be cut.

After all, as a board game publisher, one of their primary roles is to cut excess fluff so the fun shines through, free of any element that detracts from the core experience.

While you want to eliminate distraction from your end user in a board game, the primary goal of an ad is distraction of the end user.

I need to distract you from your browsing of Facebook or wherever else with my ad. I want you to stop what you’re doing and read my ad, then click on my ad, then sign up for the email list, and on it goes as you fall deeper into my evil clutches when you spend $90 on my client’s latest Kickstarter project!

The image/video’s purpose is what I call the SHINY ROCK philosophy — also known as something that grabs your attention — but it is the ad text that combines with the creative image to generate interest in your mind as to what more lay behind that link.

(If you need some examples of Facebook ads that converted well, I recently wrote an article showcasing some of my clients’ top performing Facebook ads[Link Here]) Let’s get into these two elements, and why they are so important to your success!

Redundancy

Redundancy is when you repeat yourself, and it is important to repeat yourself.

Let me illustrate with an example of a recent client’s ad (on the left).

In case you don’t see the redundancies, here are the things that are repeated multiple times: The “Call to Action” 4x– 3 different calls, repeated 4 times total (Crush your opponent, Check Out Thrones, Learn More x2)

The Game’s Name 3x

Thrones is repeated 3 times (the advertiser name at the top, the primary text above the image, and the headline below the image)

Kickstarter 2x

– Kickstarter is repeated 2x (the vanity URL and the headline)

Why is redundancy important?

Redundancy is when you repeat yourself, and it is important to repeat yourself.

If you fail to repeat yourself, I might miss your call to action, your game’s name, or other important details that are important for part 2…

When a user reads the text that surrounds this glorious image, it provides important context to the image and creates interest in what lay beyond the click of the mouse.

It might be interesting, but sometimes I don’t have time to indulge that interest right now. Other times, I see an interesting ad, but I miss the very bold “Learn More” button (because I’m very busy spying on my Facebook friends and lurking in my Facebook groups).

The only chance you have of me remembering you without paying more for me to see your ad again is through a clever use of redundancy. The difference between an ad that uses redundancies can be as much as a 50% lower cost per click (from $0.30 to $0.20 for example). That number is a massive boost to your effective budget in your ad. That number means you create 50% more money out of thin air that you get to spend on ads. Don’t neglect redundancy. Don’t neglect redundancy.

Inception

Inception is when you tell your audience what they should think about a particular topic.

This term is a reference to that epic movie starring Leonardo Dicaprio, where he enters the subconscious mind to plant an idea that his “victim” will later agree with or act upon in a favorable manner.

Let me illustrate with a slightly altered example of that same ad from before (on the left).

There is only one subtle use of “inception” in this ad. Can you find it?

If you thought it was the on-the-nose “Game of Thrones” reference, you missed it!

The only use of this concept is the term “beautiful.”

Why is Inception important?

Beauty, as they say, is in the eye of the beholder. My reader is beholding my ad, so… (I know what you’re probably thinking — “I disagree!” Hold that objection for now, and let me address that later)

The phenomenon of “groupthink” is so powerful. We will agree with something if an influencer or group of peers agrees, as long as that thing isn’t against our fundamental beliefs. Often times, we are actively forming opinions about new things.

You need to help your audience form the right opinion! But be careful, because you can utterly botch this — it’s time to address the reader’s objection of… “I disagree.”

You might be disagreeing with my ad, because I went to great lengths to point out my attempt at inception to you. After all, I wrote an entire blog post on this and you’re reading it.

(…this is a great blog post that you want to share, by the way…)

If you’re still with me, pay attention to this: People like to disagree.

If you say something that can be argued with, you’re going to get argued with.

Most of the time, the objection may never come out in a comment. The objection will happen in the mind of the reader, and they will stop reading your ad.

Therefore, it is important to make statements that people should agree with, stopping just short of things that you *want* them to agree with…

…regardless of if the statement in question is true or not.

Several game-specific examples of things I disagree with all the time (whether or not they’re true):

“…a revolutionary/incredible/amazing/epic game…”

“…new mechanics…”

“…infinite replayability…”

90% of this can be summed up in the following statement: Be careful of the adjectives you use, but a creative use of descriptive words will improve your ad performance!

Conclusion

I hope you enjoyed this article! Please leave a comment with your #1 takeaway, and feel free to ask a follow-up question! Chances are that if you would benefit from the answer, others would as well.


If you’re looking for a marketing guy for your next Kickstarter project, view our Kickstarter Marketing page for details.

Categories
Board Game Marketing Posts

5 Pre-Kickstarter Board Game Facebook Ads With Great Conversion Rates

While the fundamentals of marketing don’t often change, the medium for effectively delivering a marketing message does. Facebook Ads are a mystery to many, but one thing is certain: They must work, because tons of people are using them.

I am one of those people that makes a living doing this — I have run Facebook Ads for dozens of industries, and specialize in Facebook Ads for board game Kickstarter projects.

One of my favorite things about the board game industry is that creators are very altruistic — people help each other, because that is the right thing to do!

This article is the first in a series of board game marketing articles, and probably the tip of the iceberg that I will no doubt produce over the years I work as a marketer in this industry and design board games on the side.

In the famous words of Earl Nightingale, “You become what you think about.”

Things You Need To Know First

Before you review the ads, know that there are actually 3 parts to this equation (to get an email signup): The ad, the audience, and the landing page.

The core of a great marketing campaign before a Kickstarter launch is your landing page. Without a great landing page to capture someone’s email address, you’re not going to get results.

The problem with landing pages is that they disappear once the campaign is live, so there aren’t many great examples that stay live (fortunately, I design them often, and will share examples of landing pages with great conversion rates in a future post).

The audience needs to be interested in the sort of product you’re selling. If you’re sending the right message to the wrong audience, your ad will seem like a dud.

My source for conversions is when a website visitor gives me an e-mail address. I never use Facebook Lead Ads, because I am not just looking for an email… I want to feed information to an interested person to get them excited about the project. I’ll also cover what system helps us do this, which I call the “virtuous cycle,” in a future blog post, but you can listen to me discuss this on a podcast here.

Furthermore, things that matter change a bit after a campaign goes live (mainly because the landing page changes to Kickstarter, campaign goals change from email signup to backing your project on Kickstarter, and the ability to track stats change due to Kickstarter not allowing Facebook to track data on their platform. That is a whole other can of worms we’ll address in small parts later, but what I can say is that the information you’re about to read translates very well to what works post-Kickstarter launch!

Lastly, there are benchmark figures you should be looking for that mean an ad does well or poorly. I will definitely cover this in a future post as well, but you can listen to me discuss some of these numbers on a podcast here!

So without further ado, here are 5 ads that I have developed that are very effective for their respective campaigns along with why I think they were effective:

Example 1: Die! In The Dungeon

The audience:

Board gamers that are also interested in RPGs.

Result summary:

This ad raised 491 email subscribers for $1.55 per lead average. The campaign funded over $73,000 CAD.

What the ad did well:

RPG players absolutely love beholders. I cannot think of a more iconic character in all of D&D to use in an ad, so my angle was to relate the monster that everyone knows to how the game is played. We also made a clever use of puns that were complemented with highly relevant emojis in the ad text. I almost always use emojis!

Key takeaway:

Relate your ad to something that people already know and love.

Example 2: Backwoods

The audience:

Board gamers interested in Outdoor Activities.

Result summary:

This ad raised 286 email subscribers for $1.70 per lead average over 5 days.

What the ad did well:

Of all the ads I have designed, this one probably pulls people into the theme better than any of them. In order to really get into a theme, a player needs to know who they are, and why they are doing this” (aka what is motivating their characters in the game). In addition, the ad makes clear who would like this — co-op players that enjoy survival games.

Key takeaway:

Highly thematic text that explains the “hook” of the game combined with a simple explanation of game mechanics is a powerful combo!

Example 3: Ascension Tactics

The audience:

Board gamers that are also interested in minis, collectible card games, and other related interests.

Result summary:

This ad raised 411 e-mail subscribers for $0.61 per lead average.

What the ad did well:

We kept the message simple, and relied on introducing a new twist on a well-known franchise to an existing fanbase. We used many variations of images and text, but this was our top performer by far. People knew that logo, and when we kept the message all about the brand, we performed better than when we made it about the components, the art, or the mechanics.

Key takeaway:

Don’t be afraid to let the audience fill in the gaps of how the game actually works. Lead with a teaser, and let the reader’s imagination do the rest of the work!

Example 4: Deliverance

The audience:

Board gamers that are also Christians of any denomination.

Result summary:

This ad raised 537 e-mail subscribers for $0.94 per lead average.

What the ad did well:

The focus on one of the primary characters kept the ad simple to understand and focused on showing theme. Other tests showed equivalent value when using other characters as long as they were zoomed in. This also used “introduction” language like Example #3 above, but is unfamiliar as it is a new product. The appeal of the ad was all about the theme, which is quite unique among board games.

Key takeaway:

Don’t be afraid to target very specific niches with your ad text. When doing this, make sure your audience lines up with your message!

Example 5: Protectors of the Rainbow

The audience:

Board gamers with families that are interested in Unicorns.

Result summary:

This ad raised 393 e-mail subscribers for $1.89 per lead average.

What the ad did well:

While we had other ads that performed even better, I wanted to focus on what this ad did very well that you should take not about — we actually lead with creative emojis. The text took advantage of a very popular culture phenomenon, which is Unicorns, and was rewarded well for it.

Key takeaway:


You should always try an ad creative that is dominated by emojis. Browse emojipedia.com for ideas!

BONUS: Deliverance (Revisited)

The audience:

Secular board gamers (as opposed to “Christians” in the first Deliverance example).

Result summary:

This ad raised 457 email subscribers for $1.03 per lead average.

What the ad did well:

This ad also focused on a primary character in the game, but the different image performed especially well when tested with secular audiences. The appeal of the ad was all about the theme, which is quite unique among board games.

Key takeaway:

Make sure to test ads using different images with different customer groups, because each ad creative will often appeal to one group more than another!

Conclusion

I hope you enjoyed this article! Please leave a comment with your #1 takeaway, and feel free to ask a follow-up question! Chances are if you would benefit from the answer, others would as well. 


If you’re looking for a Facebook ad guy for your next Kickstarter project, view our Kickstarter Marketing page for details.

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LEAD GENERATION: TIPS & TECHNIQUES FOR NON-SALES PAGES

LEAD GENERATION: TIPS & TECHNIQUES FOR NON-SALES PAGES

NEXT LEVEL WEB STAFF

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SHARES0 Lead generation describes the process of stimulating and developing an interest in products and services to grow your sales pipeline. In other words, it’s the process of getting people fired up about your product.

For example, car dealerships attract customers through the wacky, wavy, incredible, flailing tube man.

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Silly? For sure. Obnoxious? Absolutely. But they are everywhere.

It’s because it effectively captures the attention of potential customers. Moreover, it accomplishes the goal of engaging potential customers, creating an interactive experience, and ultimately, guiding them through the sales process until final checkout.

Website lead generation should reflect the same goals, but using different methods.

When companies design their website to maximize lead generation, however, they often overlook fundamental lead generation opportunities, or simply lack execution. Every page is an opportunity to accomplish our goals above. Marketers must, therefore, understand the fundamental lead generation opportunities in front of them to build a healthy sales pipeline.

LEAD GENERATION STRATEGIES: THE FUNDAMENTALS

Before you get to the fun stuff, you need to roll up your sleeves and dig into website analytics to properly understand where leads are coming from. These typically materialize in the form of email capturing, tracking phone leads, blog followers and social media.

Email Capture

Email capture consistently yields the highest ROI for eCommerce, and with the new generation of millennial consumers, that isn’t likely to change. Accordingly, email capture is a valuable exercise, and often, a website’s greatest asset for lead generation. However, every technique affects user experience in some way, and sometimes this ends badly causing users to leave.

How can we avoid this common pitfall?

One way to direct visitors’ attention towards an email capture is by providing an incentive to do so. Incentives can be anything from coupon codes to newsletters, industry insights, upcoming promotions and premium memberships.

The Tower Paddle Boards provides an excellent example of this in action. Any time a new user visits their site, they are greeted by this message:

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(Image Source)

Immediately it’s apparent that just an email address is required. Most people will happily enter their email address for the chance to win the prize. It’s important to make visitors feel comfortable sharing personal information. The more information required from them, the higher the return should be.

What’s more, the email capture is strategically placed in the middle of the visually stimulating display, and the overall design immediately demands the visitor’s attention — without being obnoxious. This is a perfect way to build an email list for potential sales leads.

Email capture is a tried-and-true method for maximizing lead generation, but only if the technique is well-planned and targeted.

Phone Leads

Almost everyone on the globe owns a cell phone, but how many people actually use it to make a phone call? There are many alternative forms of communication, and the art of a phone call as we know it is dying.

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This makes the value of leads who pick up the phone and call for more information immensely valuable. Of course, the value of each lead depends on his/her ability to find our contact information.

Enter the “Contact Us” page.

Without a marketer’s touch, the “Contact Us” page is static and disrupts the customer acquisition path. Examples of these commercial websites display some uninviting combination of a generic contact form, a list of phone numbers and an address. Generic action prompts yield generic replies, which doesn’t move the needle.

Instead, a good contact page has personality. If we strip away the cold, technical aspects of contact pages, we can replace it with something relatable.

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By effectively presenting the page to our audience, and making it readily accessible, we maximize our efforts to generate phone leads.

If you need any additional help to keep track of your prospects, there are a couple of different tools you can utilize.

Blog Content

People love content and constantly crave it, which makes blog pages the perfect tool to satiate their appetite.

To generate leads through this page, we must create interesting content geared towards the correct audience. Based on this research, we can decide relevant topics to add to our editorial calendar. These topics should check two boxes. First, they must be valuable for the reader, but they should equally align with your business objectives.

Take hiking and adventure gear company Uncharted Supply Co., for example:

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(Image Source)

Every topic is tailored for potential consumers of adventure/survival gear. Creating “how-to” posts is a great way to educate the audience while also inserting products that solve the problems of potential customers. Also, notice how the blog topics are broken down into categories. This qualifies the company as an industry expert. Some sites, however, prefer to offer “supplemental content,” or “content upgrades.”

A content upgrade is the bonus customers receive for providing their email address, which is another effective way to build a subscriber list. If we produce solid content, to begin with, customers will certainly pony-up their email for “premium access.”

Remember, each tactic should guide users through the buying process. The blog page is no different.

Social Media

The content produced on a blog can be easily shared on social media to reach a wider audience. If we share our gated content reserved for premium members as well, we expand our subscriber list. The prize contests we explored earlier can also be promoted on social media.

Moreover, social media platforms allow us to interact with these leads in a more personal manner. Users, however, cannot interact with you unless your social channels are readily available.

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(Image Source)

Promoting these social media interactions encourages more participation, as the charitable, faith-based retail company FACT Goods does here:

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(Image Source)

Notice how clearly the brand is presented in all of the photos? Although promoting various interactions is important, the brand should stand out the most. This encourages people to buy your brand so they can interact with your company too.

People’ don’t like missing out, so give them the opportunity to participate. Social media engagement and acquiring leads through social networks can be a great way to increase your sales and brand exposure, make sure to utilize it.

Bonus Lead Generation Tip: Don’t Forget About 404 Pages

404 pages are arguably the most overlooked opportunity for lead generation. Often, 404 pages leave visitors without direction and the lead is lost. By including an email capture on this page, it prevents that from happening, like Coinlookup does here:

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Wrapping Up

Maximizing the potential for lead generation requires being present without being pushy. The fundamental lead generation tactics we explored can be measured and tested regularly. Based on the results, we can tweak these tactics and make strategic.

Just because something is working, it doesn’t mean it cannot be improved!

AUTHOR BIO:

John Ball is a marketing specialist with Inseev Interactive. Hailing from Chicago, he has recently made San Diego home. He loves supporting marketing efforts and is currently working on a few fun projects in different industries like Source Capital Funding, and a new website crawler called Rapid Rex.

Guest Blog Disclaimer

From time-to-time we have guest bloggers post on our site.

The views, opinions and positions expressed within these guest posts are those of the author alone and do not represent those of Next Level Web. The accuracy, completeness and validity of any statements made within this article are not guaranteed. We accept no liability for any errors, omissions or representations. The copyright of this content belongs to the author and any liability with regards to infringement of intellectual property rights remains with them.

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    *Note: We are working remote, so email is preferred!

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    HOW TO TURN A WORDPRESS ELEPHANT INTO A CHEETAH: 5 EASY WAYS TO INCREASE YOUR WEBSITE SPEED NOW

    HOW TO TURN A WORDPRESS ELEPHANT INTO A CHEETAH: 5 EASY WAYS TO INCREASE YOUR WEBSITE SPEED NOW

    NEXT LEVEL WEB STAFF

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    How fast your WordPress website loads will have a significant impact on your search engine rankings, user experience, traffic, and ultimately, the success of your online business. Very few site visitors will wait around for a slow loading site. This is especially true for mobile devices which are commanding an increasing share of the marketplace.

    WordPress is designed and built to load fast, be simple to navigate and looks exceptional by default on most if not all devices. However, like any content management system, it can fall prey to bloated plugins, poor customization, and pages that are heavy-laden with unnecessary rich media and functionality.

    Thankfully, WordPress also comes with an abundance of tools and strategies to overcome slow loading sites. If you have not done an audit on your site in a while, here are some practical suggestions to help you turn your WordPress slug into a website rocket.

    CHOOSE THE RIGHT HOSTING PACKAGE

    If you are a new website owner, you might be tempted to choose the least expensive hosting option. However, the cheapest choice is not always the best one.

    You should weigh your website needs against the pros and cons of the different hosting options to ensure that you select the one that best suits your business needs.

    The three main types of hosting are shared, VPS, and dedicated server:

    • Shared hosting: the least expensive type where you share the same server with many other sites
    • Virtual Private Server (VPS): A higher level of shared hosting where you have dedicated parts of the resources on the server
    • Dedicated server: The most expensive option but gives you the most control

    Many WordPress site owners decide to start with a shared plan. When they notice that their traffic is being affected by response time, they choose to upgrade to a VPS or dedicated server.

    Experiencing too much downtime can hurt your site. This can be caused by getting more traffic than expected to your website or by others on the same shared server overloading it.

    The result is a sluggish user experience and the possibility of lower rankings in Google. Conversely, a fast website will not only improve your organic ranking in Google, but it will also tend toward higher conversion and higher customer or client retention rates for your business.

    Overloaded servers, especially on shared servers are a common problem and can slow down an entire site. Do your research before choosing a hosting company. Make sure they are not known for overloading their servers.

    USE A CACHING PLUGIN

    The term caching means the process by which static versions of content are created and served to website visitors. When pages or posts in WordPress are rendered for visitors, queries are sent back and forth to and from the database. The caching function creates static copies of the requested content. This reduces the need to go back and forth from the database and reduces the load on your server.

    One of the many benefits of using WordPress is the multitude of free and premium plugins to do just about anything you need or want on your site.This includes the need to optimize your site’s speed by caching files locally on your website visitor’s computer. There are many caching plugins to choose from such as W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache, and WP Fastest Cache.

    PAY ATTENTION TO IMAGE SIZES

    A widespread mistake many website owners make is also one of the easiest to fix. Uploading very large images to your website can significantly slow down the speed at which your page loads.

    Images are valuable for websites, especially for e-commerce sites where pictures of products play a significant role in a potential buyer’s decision-making process. One survey showed that 66% of consumers wanted to see at least three images of a product before making a purchase.

    How can you increase your conversion rates using images without slowing down your page loading time?

    You should be sure to compress your images.

    There are many free sites online you can use, or you can decide to use a WordPress plugin to accomplish the same goal.

    USE THE LATEST VERSION OF PHP

    Depending upon your hosting package and the hosting company you choose, PHP versions might or might not always be up-to-date.

    However, using the latest version of PHP can increase your site’s loading time by 25-30%. It is well worth the time and effort to do what you can to use the most recent version.

    KEEP YOUR SITE UPDATED

    For those of you who are already running a WordPress site, you are well aware that not only does the platform update frequently, but so do the themes and plugins.

    Not keeping up with updates can not only slow down your loading speed, but it can also leave your site vulnerable to security threats. Updates are done to fix bugs, security issues, and add new features to improve the functionality of the platform, theme, or plugin.

    As a WordPress website owner, you want to be sure to stay abreast of all the updates available to you to keep your site running optimally.

    Every second counts when it comes to the speed at which your website loads. If it takes too long, visitors will leave your site, you will drop in the search engine rankings, and will lose business. Take the time to do what you can to make sure your site loads as fast as possible. The quicker your pages load, the better the overall performance of your website.

    Guest Blog Disclaimer:

    From time-to-time we have guest bloggers post on our site.

    The views, opinions and positions expressed within these guest posts are those of the author alone and do not represent those of Next Level Web. The accuracy, completeness and validity of any statements made within this article are not guaranteed. We accept no liability for any errors, omissions or representations. The copyright of this content belongs to the author and any liability with regards to infringement of intellectual property rights remains with them.

    TESTIMONIALS

    READ WHAT OUR CLIENTS HAVE TO SAY

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    GET A QUOTE

      GET IN TOUCH AND TAKE YOUR BUSINESS TO THE NEXT LEVEL!

      221 Main Street, Suite 206 Vista, CA 92084

      info@nextlevelweb.com

      (760) 691-3400

      *Note: We are working remote, so email is preferred!

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      HOW TO BEAT YELP’S FILTER & GET MORE POSITIVE REVIEWS: 111+ INDUSTRY EXPERTS WEIGH IN

      HOW TO BEAT YELP’S FILTER & GET MORE POSITIVE REVIEWS: 111+ INDUSTRY EXPERTS WEIGH IN

      ANDREW LOWEN

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      Local retail and service-based businesses have always relied on word of mouth to gain new clients. In this online world, the premise for more word-of-mouth business is simple. You need online reviews!

      But if you’re reading this article, you’ve probably experienced the difficulties of getting your best clients to follow through and write you a review. Getting those reviews to remain unfiltered by Yelp often proves difficult on its own, and serves as one of the most common complains we hear from our SEO Marketing clients.

      So we’re going to tell you exactly how to beat yelp’s review filter!

      But instead of just sharing our typical advice in this post, we wanted to do something more. So we gathered one hundred and eleven (Seriously, 111) online marketing industry experts and asked them to give their best advice.

      We received some amazing answers from our experts. Still, we are aware that this is a huge post and you will need some time to read it completely. That’s why we made a summary with our top 10 tips on how to get great reviews that won’t get filtered by Yelp or Google:

      1

      Follow the guidelines of each platform. Yelp doesn’t allow to ask people for reviews. You can ask for reviews on Google, but in both cases don’t “bribe” people with discounts (this is a black hat trick that may get all reviews flagged).

      2

      Over-deliver, offer great customer support and make your clients happy. They will feel the need to make a nice gesture for you. It’s enough to tell them how important and useful is for your business to get reviews on sites like Yelp and Google.

      3

      Offer your customers the possibility to choose any platform they use: Facebook, Yelp or Google. Don’t ask them to sign up to a new site just to leave a review for you. Reviews from new users will almost always be filtered out.

      4

      Display Yelp and Google icons in prominent locations to notify and/or remind customers of your listings.

      5

      Recommend people to use a mobile device when they leave a review.

      6

      Advise your clients to include photos and share details about your products or services using a normal language. Too many praises or details that are too specific will seem suspicious and get you flagged.

      7

      Connect Facebook to your Yelp profile, and tell clients to do the same. A user’s reviews will have a much higher chance of being approved if that person has filled all the info required: profile photo, age, email address, phone number, friends added etc. Mention that to your clients.

      8

      Don’t ask all your clients to add a review from a laptop or computer in your office. Reviews that come from the same IP address for the same firm, will be considered fake, even if they are from different accounts (See #5!).

      9

      Sign up for Google’s Verified reviews (if you have an online store)!

      10

      Understand that there is no easy way to game the system and violating any guidelines can have very negative long-term consequences for your business.

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      Businesses may have more complicated advertising strategies than 20 years ago, but the principles are the same. Recommendations from happy customers will increase your sales and your brand exposure. That is why Google and Yelp reviews should play a significant role in a small business marketing strategy.

      Things aren’t as simple as they seem, though. It’s difficult to get your clients to review your business and even if they do it, often times, their reviews will be filtered out. You need to understand how these sites work to overcome the dreaded “review filter.”

      To help you attract more meaningful reviews, we reached out to one hundred and eleven (Seriously, 111) internet marketing experts and successful business owners for an answer to this question:

      WHAT IS YOUR #1 TIP TO GET A REVIEW TO PASS YELP & GOOGLE’S REVIEW FILTERS?

      Lukasz Zelezny Zelzny

      Google and Yelp are only looking for objective third party reviews, and believe it or not, they will be able to tell if you have ‘fake’ or ‘paid’ reviews listed.

      The #1 thing that I always tell people is that it’s cool to ask other people to leave a review, but you shouldn’t offer them an incentive to do this.

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      This includes paying them, offering them a discount off a future order, or entering reviewers into a prize draw. Likewise, you also shouldn’t review your own business.

      There are a number of ways that Google and Yelp look out for paid reviews, with one of the key being someone creating an account, leaving one business review, and then never logging in again. If you have a lot of reviews like these, you’ll struggle to get many accepted.

      Yelp and Google reviews are very important for a local business such as a dentist, restaurant or even a funeral home.

      After you have delivered your product or service just tell your clients that you would love to hear their feedback. Allow them to choose the platform they are familiar with.

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      Ask them if they would be willing to share the experience of working with you on sites like Google, Yelp or Facebook.  It won’t do you any good if they sign up to Yelp just to leave you a positive review. Reviews from first-time users are filtered most of the time.

      If they reply saying that they have used Yelp before then advise them to complete their profile and include links to their social profiles and a photo. Also, mention it’s better to post the review from their mobile phone and include an image of the product they bought from you. Before and after images are extremely valuable for hair stylists, fitness coaches, or plastic surgeons. Ask your clients if they could include such images in their review. Also, always ask them for permission before using their photos on your site or anywhere else.

      Don’t be disappointed if your customer chooses to write a few words about you on your Facebook page. Although Facebook reviews don’t help you rank better, they will help attract new clients. More often, lately, I see people asking for recommendations on Facebook before buying or choosing a service.

      Randy Mitchelson iPartnerMedia

      Managing Yelp vs Google reviews requires two different strategies.

      Yelp’s proprietary algorithm has been challenged in the courts by disgruntled companies frustrated by the Yelp’s filters. Yelp won. So business owners need not like the game but they can certainly take action to make the most of the platform.

      Yelp gives preference to reviews written by people who have an established track record of posting credible reviews. 

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      Yelp’s secret algorithm also seems to err on the side of the consumer.

      So if a first-time Yelper posts a bad review it might be published. If someone uses Yelp for the first time and reviews a business with a five star review, there’s no guarantee it will be published right away. However, Yelp clearly states in their policies that these sequestered reviews can be activated in the future as that Yelper continues using the platform to post other credible reviews.

      So what’s a business owner to do? First, a business owner needs to claim their Yelp page so that they can respond to reviews, post proper pictures and logo from their business along with other important facts like hours of operation. Yelp publishes a blog dedicated to business owners. Read it! Learn from it.

      One option to get reviews is to research Yelp for local Yelpers who have an established history of posting reviews and have earned some credibility (e.g., compliments, bookmarks and review votes are some of the measurements Yelp tracks for each reviewer). Invite Yelpers to your establishment to try your service and write an honest review. Do not incentivize them in any way (no freebies!) as this will compromise the integrity of the system. And for what it’s worth, Yelp is smarter than you so don’t bother trying to game their system.

      Google reviews are a little easier to manage but there are some important behaviors that business owners must follow. First, do not have a computer set-up in your place of business where customers are invited to write reviews. Google tracks the IP address of every device that delivers a review.

      If they see multiple reviews submitted from the same IP address, expect those reviews to be suppressed. Second, Google does not allow reviews that contain self-promotional information. If your customer brags about their own business (or even mentions its name) in the review about your business, the risk of the review being blocked by Google is greatly increased.

      Marcus Miller Bowler Hat

      There is one clear strategy for reviews that is suitable for every business and every platform – honesty. You want honest reviews from real customers. If this is the case then there is no reason why reviews would be filtered. That said, in ideal world businesses want to generate reviews from happy customers. To do this a simple strategy is to use reviews as a follow up to your customer service process.

      As an example:

      Once you have completed the work (or delivered the product or service) contact your customer to see whether they were happy with the service. When you receive positive feedback reply and ask for a review.

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      When you receive negative feedback use that to improve your product or services (invaluable input).

      This is high level but this real input from customers is not only invaluable for improving your business processes but you can then ask customers who have talked about you in positive terms for a review. If you want to get more advanced you can seed reviews to Google, Yelp or any other relevant platforms to ensure you have a far-reaching set of positive reviews. There can be a few more moving parts here but we cover this in far more detail over and talk about a review strategy to improve SEO and lead generation on the Bowler Hat blog.

      My number 1 tip to try and get past review filters is to simply let your customers be honest when reviewing you.

      Trying to get automated reviews, or to bypass any flagging systems is just completely worthless, as not only are you wasting time, but put simply, your customers should be leaving these reviews, and if they are honest and accurate there is no reason why they would get flagged or filtered.

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      Tell your customers how to leave you a review and ask them to reflect the experience, without being to exaggerative or emotional, but, just let them review your company, product or service as they would as if they were speaking to someone.

      Reviews only get filtered out if they are fake, contain certain keywords or are obviously company led, so let your customers do the talking, just show them where to go to do it.

      Albert Mora Seolution

      We all know that Yelp &Google are very strict on what reviews they consider legitimate. Take into account the following: these engines filter reviews which are likely to be fake. For example:

      • Are from someone who has only written few reviews.
      • The reviews are very short, with generic comments and lacking details
      • From someone with poor profile info.

      Or even better than that, let’s see how for example Yelp itself explain the review filter:

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      Here are 5 important things to understand about the review filter:

      1. Reviews that reflect perfectly legitimate experiences are sometimes filtered out by the review filter’s algorithmic processes.
      2. Reviews are never “deleted” by the review filter; they are always shown on users’ profile pages. The review filter simply syndicates established users’ reviews from their user pages onto business pages.
      3. The best word of mouth is organic and unsolicited.
      4. We’re purposely not elaborate about all the variables that go into defining an “established” user.
      5. Both positive and negative reviews can be affected.

      Taking all this into account, my best advice would be:

      My number 1 tip to try and get past review filters is to simply let your customers be honest when reviewing you.

      For example:

      • Place a Yelp badge on your website
      • Add a link to your business listing in your email signature
      • Add a link to your business listing in your social media profiles
      • Share reviews on your social media
      • Ask your customers…

      Nate Shivar Shivar Web

      Pay attention when you have truly “wow-ed” a customer – and ask for a review on Yelp / Google.

      People love to tell people about their favorite stuff, and they will happily leave honest, glowing reviews that pass Yelp / Google filters. Your job as a business owner is to find the right moment to channel that eagerness into an online review instead of word of mouth or some other natural channel.

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      It sounds vague, but it really does depend on every business. It might be when leaving the final bill on the restaurant table. It might be on the third treatment visit. It might be when presenting a restored car. The key is to test & find your wow-ed customers when they are most excited and get them to leave that filter-proof review. Do it right and you’ll have an unassailable moat.

      Matthew Capala Search Decoder

      Create clear guidelines and incentives for your current customers.

      As moderated review websites, Yelp and Google behave as an editor of a news site would. People trust the news. This is why public relations campaigns are effective and expensive when something is mentioned in the news, it has credibility. Credibility is established on Yelp and Google because so many people, who are unpaid, are contributing.

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      Credible high rankings will help generate new business and revenue. In order to generate non-bias reviews, reach out to your database and offer incentives and a brief guideline to posting. Guideline posts should include the following, links to Yelp and Google submission pages, a few survey questions that can get them to write a sentence or two about you, and a personalized thank you and discount/incentive.

      Your administrative staff, sales staff, and up to the CEO should request reviews as routinely as they ask for other referrals. Yelp and Google Plus business is similar to referrals and a very valuable free way to generate new business and should be utilized as much as possible

      Sean Si SEO Hacker

      Rather than proactively asking every single person to leave us a review, I’d prefer asking them what they really think and give them access to links where they can actually make a review. If your reviews don’t come naturally or come too fast, the filters will spoil even the good ones. The only thing worse with using bots or fake accounts when making a review is having to blindly ask people to make one.

      If you have a way to directly ask people who experienced your product/service, believe me, go for it. These are the people who really matter and can make solid honest reviews for your business.

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      Besides, there’s no need to ask people for positive feedback if you give them a good experience, right?

      Bottom-line: focus on your product, make it great, then the good words will follow.

      David Krauter Websites That Sell

      No.1 Tip To Pass Yelp & Google review Filters:

      The idea behind my tip is exactly the same however execution will differ based on business model.

      The concept behind passing reviews 100% Every Time is to have your clients do it themselves. No IP problems, fake account problems or too many reviews in one go.

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      Now the execution will differ based on the business model so here are the 2 scenarios to handle the different situations:

      The business owner servicing clients face to face: This one is easy, ask for the review right there and then and then help the client step by step to fill out the review on their phone while you’re there.

      Do not use your own phone otherwise, all reviews will come from the same IP address, use the actual customer’s phone, laptop or tablet and their internet connection – however, show them step by step how to fill out the review and submit it for your listing.

      It’s simple and will pass EVERY filter Google & Yelp have in place to fight fake reviews.

      The business owner servicing clients remotely: When servicing clients remotely obviously you can’t hand-hold them through the process face to face but you can get to it as close as possible.

      Create a step by step training video to help clients complete a review on their own computer and Internet connection.

      We use software such as Camtasia walking the client through the actual review process, we then on top give them a link to our Places or Yelp page where they can leave the review.

      So it’s like you’re there by their side helping them fill out the review.

      – – –

      The first option will always be better as you’re getting the review there and then, however, the second option where you have no other choice but to get creative is the closest we have gotten to get maximum reviews and stick rate on Google Local & Yelp.

      Successful reviews are honest reviews. Both when it comes to getting the review approved and when it is read by a user, an honest tone is getting the best results. A review praising a company to the clouds is far less believable than a mostly positive “pros and cons”-list.

      Real, organic reviews come in a steady stream. If you get your reviews in huge chunks, it seems suspicious. Large, short-term campaigns to get reviews, therefore, are not the best way to go – an ongoing effort to make customers review your company yields higher credibility and better results in visibility.

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      Put an enticement on your packaging, slips or menu cards to review your company and help you get better at what you do.

      A short, easy to type link (and even QR-code) that leads to a page on your website, with links to your preferred review sites makes it easy for your customers to review (and for you to get the review on the right channel).

      Howard Barker Status Marketing Group

      The single biggest thing that a small business owner can do to get their reviews past the filters is to get them from a mobile device.

      The review filters that both Google and Yelp have set up favor mobile devices posting them. One way to make this easy is to print a postcard with a review link and have them in office. Encourage customers to post a review on the site.

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      For service businesses, send an email when the job is complete or have a service person encourage on the spot again, to post a review while providing a link to do so. Also, remember that it’s ok to occasionally not get a 5-star review. 5-star reviews undergo more scrutiny than 4-star reviews. Allow some 4 and 4.5-star reviews to get posted on your profiles and chances are they will be accepted.

      Also, reply to them and take advantage of the opportunity to carry your brand messaging further. With almost all of our clients, we set up a basic review acquisition system to encourage capturing more reviews from new and existing customers. Just asking goes a long way to getting positive responses.

      Andrew Scherer Marketers Center

      If the review is from a legitimate customer it shouldn’t have any trouble getting posted.

      The IP address plays a big role in my opinion and a local review will have a local IP.

      One thing we do to build more reviews is through a funnel.

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      After the sale is made and the information is collected, we point traffic to a review page URL that asks them how their experience was and redirects to the Yelp or Google listing to leave a review. You can do this easily via SMS and/or e-mail and we’re even experimenting with what I call “review cards” which are printed cards with the review page URL.

      Gareth Ellis Yorkshire Designs

      I would say be genuine, deliver a great service and make sure acquiring reviews is built into the everyday business as part of the process.

      Also having a simple guide or easy link on a business card, to help the customer leave a review avoids confusion and makes it easy for them. An example was a kitchen fitter, who delivered marble and granite worktops to customers.

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      I convinced him to make them delighted, by using offcuts, to provide a matching cutting board and coaster with the same material, along with flowers and chocolate. Of course with this was a thank you card asking for that review. Of course, customers left reviews. And this might sound a bit much, but an additional £50 on top of a £20k order is small in the scope of things and made the customer absolutely delighted. I think how I can employ a similar model for all my customers.

      Zac Johnson ZacJohnson.com

      One of the best ways to get a review from real customers and audiences that will actually get approved is to simply ask. However, in most cases, you can’t actually ‘ask for a positive’ review, as this is against the rules of sites like Yelp and Google.What you can do, is follow up through emails, give a reminder after purchase and also provide a paper, postcard or flyer to ask for a review as well.

      Reminding your audience how important reviews are to your business is one of the best ways to get them to take action, without actually rewarding them (which also usually isn’t allowed).

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      During this whole process, keep in mind that it’s much easier for someone with a bad experience to leave a negative review than a positive one. So try and make sure your site, brand or business is always the best as possible and makes it easy for your customers to get what they need.

      Lilach Bullock LilachBullock.com

      One of the best ways to get your customers to leave a review after using your business is to simply ask them to do it. In fact, unless they had an amazing experience that really blew them away or a horrible one that they feel like they need to share with the world, you’re most likely not going to get many reviews. That’s why you need to ask.

      Once someone uses your business, shoot them an email asking them to leave a review; ask for their honest opinion and most importantly, make things as easy as possible for them, so that they actually take the time to write the review.

      Give your clients instructions for how to leave reviews, easily, try to link to the exact page they need to go to leave a review, and so on.

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      Encourage them to speak freely and give away their honest opinion; this way, all reviews will ring true and, plus, it will show you are interested in hearing their real opinions, and not just trying to get reviews.

      I also wouldn’t recommend leaving a review for your own business, especially if you’re going to log into your business page account. The service will know the review is not real and will most likely not show it.

      Alicia Hughes One Stop Web Services

      Businesses that have Yelp and Google reviews are more likely to rank in the local search results and are also more likely to attract new customers due to the inherent trust factor. While nobody truly knows every metric that goes into the search engines’ algorithm, Google has recently announced that by 2020, the SERPs will be determined predominantly by user behavior. Thus, it logically follows suit that customer reviews will become exponentially relevant for organic ranking and growth.

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      Customer participation rates in the review process vary tremendously by niche. While most customers would be naturally inclined to rave about the fantastic dinner they just had at a local restaurant, they’re far less likely to think about reviewing the mechanic who changed their oil, or the landscape company that mowed their lawn. Most businesses are getting disproportionately few reviews, primarily because the customers just don’t think about leaving one, or they don’t know that the business has a Google or Yelp listing.

      By making the review process as intuitive and simplified as possible, your business can expect to see a much greater participation rate from your customers.

      Displaying Yelp and Google icons in prominent locations will notify and/or remind customers of your listings.

      By implementing these few simple tips, your business should start to see an increase in the quantity of reviews. However, the quality of reviews is equally important so as to avoid penalties.

      Yelp and Google are user-centric platforms. Any information that their filters perceive to be fake or contrived will be penalized and/or removed in order to preserve the trust and integrity of the information served to its users. To this end, it is imperative to avoid any “Black-Hat” practices when pursuing customer reviews.

      Dave Schneider Ninja Outreach

      (Update – Dave no longer runs this website, but can be found at lesschurn.io and daveschneider.me)

      Users just need to establish a footprint with the review services—that is, they need to have posted more than one review, have ongoing engagement such as friends, ratings, and such. Some red flags to watch out for are users who post reviews from locations irrelevant to the business (ex. Someone from India posts a review for a strictly UK-based business), ghost accounts, and obviously slanted reviews.

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      As a business owner, some common things you can do to help filtered reviews pass through include:

      Asking your reviewers to complete their profile using a legitimate account (better if they connect to their Gmail address or Facebook account)

      Add your reviewers as friends. It would also help if you have other team members with their own accounts who can add them. You guys can also add each other and post your own reviews so your own accounts aren’t empty.

      Send your reviewers some messages, respond to their reviews, give ratings, and encourage them to post reviews for other stuff as well.

      The filters are not permanent anyway, so once the reviewers have more of that required engagement level, their reviews will eventually show up.

      It sounds like a lot of work, but long term, I believe it’s worth it to just not game the system. The system eventually finds out some way to catch you one time or other, and once that happens, you’re back to square one.

      Anthony Kirlew Infinion Marketing

      My #1 tip for getting reviews through filters is to ask your customers to review you on sites where they are already active.

      If someone signs up on a site and creates a profile just to write a review for you, not only is it their only review, but a lot of people miss the part of creating a complete profile, so they do not appear to be a true member of that community providing feedback for the community.

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      I find that these reviews (from users with incomplete profiles) get filtered at a higher rate.

      Miriam Ellis Moz

      Let your consumers pick their own favorite platform on which to review your business.

      Yelp’s policy forbids owners from asking for Yelp reviews. So, go ahead and ask a happy customer for a review, but don’t specify Yelp in your request.

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      If the customer is already an active Yelp user, hopefully, they will already have left enough reviews on that platform to avoid being filtered out as a newcomer, and their review of your business will stick because of this.

      Google is far less stringent in their policy, but one-off reviews from brand new Google users can look somewhat suspicious. Google isn’t great at policing their corpus of reviews, but your Google reviews may be subject to less scrutiny if they come from users who are already active, having reviewed at least a few other businesses before they review yours.

      Yelp and Google are quite different animals when it comes to review filters and policies, but earning reviews from active users on either platform is a smart move. That’s why it’s often best to let the buyer (your customer) do the choosing.

      Heather Miracle Target Rocket

      The best time to plant a tree was 30 years ago, the second best time is today, and the best time to get ahead of bad reviews is right now. When it comes to online reviews – getting the good ones to squeak past algorithms and quality filters and getting the bad ones buried – I tell my clients that you’ve got to have a plan in place to consistently generate positive reviews week after week, month after month.

      This means automated follow-up through applications like MailChimp or Podium or manual follow-up through email outreach and customer satisfaction surveys.

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      Make sure it’s setup to maintain a healthy influx of consistent, quality reviews across the “big four” service business review websites – Yelp, Google+, Angie’s List, and Facebook.

      PS – think you’ve been hit with an illegitimate, negative review? If the reviewer’s profile is new and doesn’t feature many other reviews, get friends and family to flag the review as a conflict of interest. It may take some time, but it typically works in pushing fake reviews off review profiles.

      Victoria Pavlova Star Light MG

      If you are looking for more reviews for your business on Yelp and Google, it’s always a good idea to ask your friends, family, and clients to help you get started. Unfortunately, reviews often don’t pass strict filters that were imposed to keep those platforms safe from fake reviews. So if you are planning to ask your friends to write a positive review about your business, you need to follow these basic rules.

      First of all, make sure your friends and clients write diverse and lengthy reviews. Reviews should include some historical context like a story, names, dates and even time.

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      Short reviews are more likely get filtered. If your potential reviewers never used Yelp or Google business before, their first reviews may get filtered as well. It doesn’t mean that they have to start posting hundreds of reviews every day. They simply need to use the platforms prior writing a review. Google and Yelp track your IP address and they know whether you are a frequent user or not, whether you searched for the business in this area or not. And if you didn’t, your review will be definitely filtered.

      So if you want your customer reviews to be visible, ask them to search for a similar business to yours in that area first, open several listings (incl. the one they want to review), and post reviews after a few days. This is one of the most important rules when it comes to passing Yelp and Google’s filters.

      And if you want to ask your colleagues to write a review about your business (or perhaps write it yourself), then you should avoid using same IP address for logging in as business and as a user. If Yelp sees you were logged in as a business, and then you switched to your user account for posting reviews about yourself, there is an almost 100% guarantee that your review will be filtered.

      Trevor Cherewka Smashing Pixels

      If customer reviews/testimonials are considered to be one of the highest effective content marketing tactics then it stands to reason that you need to have a customer review strategy.

      Here is the strategy we use to get reviews and it works like a charm.

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      1 – Provide exceptional service. Customer will tell 2.5 times more people about a negative experience than a positive so your positive experience delivery needs to be at 250% before clients will consider providing a testimony.

      2 – Ask for the review at the right time. Like Goldilocks, not too hot, not too cold, just right. You need to strike when the iron is hot. You need to ask at the right time, which is when the client is the happiest. Generally, right after the transaction happens.

      3 – Make it easy. Don’t make your clients have to work to give you a review. Not everyone is on Yelp, or Google, or Facebook and surprise – they don’t want to sign up just to give you a review.

      Provide multiple options for reviews and make sure you include links that open on the review page.

      Tip – test the links before you send the emails. Now go out and get those reviews.

      Justin L. Morgan The Dental Marketing Guy

      I use a reverse testimonial I learned from Sean D’Souza (consumer psychology expert).

      A testimonial which starts with the relate-able objection is more effective to pass through a Yelp or Google review because it’s not one-sided.

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      Here are the 6 questions you ask in order to get a reverse testimonial which passes Yelp and Google filters:

      1. What was the one (hold-up/thing/obstacle/objection) in your mind that would have prevented you from choosing (us/product/service)?
      2. What did you find as a result (of choosing us/buying this product/service)?
      3. What specific thing did you like most about (this product)?
      4. What would be two/three/four other benefits about (this product)?
      5. Would you recommend (this product)? If so, why?
      6. Is there anything else you’d like to add?

      These 6 questions will not only help you get through Google and Yelp filters but also get through the filters of the readership. They’ll relate to your reviewer’s position because it’s a story that starts with the challenge.

      Tali K. Gadish Miss Gadish

      If there is a key to getting ratings and reviews on apps, I am still trying to find it. Even with the most amazing app experience, there is really no way to guarantee a person will take the time to write a rating or review. It’s hard enough getting people to download your app and try it for the first time – let alone getting them to take the time to rate it.

      Having said that, like with everything else, the first few are always the hardest, and therefore it’s important you come out of your shell.

      Ask the people around you, friends and acquaintances who have downloaded the app, to rate and review your app.

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      Tell them to use a code name if they don’t want to give you feedback to your face. It’s important that it be authentic as well.

      Apple and Google have become smarter and are getting smarter-by-the-minute about seeding out the “fake ratings”. A person who just rates one app or just continues to rate every app “5-stars” does not hold the same amount of weight in the stores as someone who has rated a few apps and given them varied reviews and ratings.

      And for us at The Library of Miss Gadish, every review is important and taken into account. It’s always wonderful to hear the great compliments and stories, but when there are bugs and issues that need to be improved, we need to hear and know these things as well in order to fix them!

      Christopher Schwarz WebDesign499

      These days, it is becoming harder and harder to get a legitimate review through to YELP or GOOGLE.

      The absolute greatest tip we could give to bypass this issue is to “interact with the reviewer’s account in any way possible before they post the review.”

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      That means, add that reviewer as a friend, send that reviewer a quick message. In other words, set the precedent that the review is actually legitimate before they attempt to post it. Once the review is posted, make sure you respond to the review in due time.

      Another great icing on the cake is to vote the review as “useful” or “funny” or both! If you follow this advice, you WILL get more legitimate reviews on the platforms.

      Tom Clark  Convert Digital

      My #1 tip for business owners who are wanting their clients’ to pass review filters is to tell them to be engaged with these two platforms before leaving reviews. 

      Connect your Facebook and Twitter to your Yelp account and add a profile picture – this makes you more ‘human’.

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      Then you need to get friends on Yelp and leaving some initial positive reviews for companies you actually had a good experience at. Next, go and search a popular restaurant in your area and then click the ‘sort by’ option at the top and pick ‘Elites’. Add these people as friends and you will come across as even more likely to be a legitimate user.

      Make sure your reviews are in-depth and don’t have typos. You will now be well n your way to passing the filter!

      Neil Sheth  Your Brand Found

      Google can see a fake review from a mile away. Think about it for a second – if the Google search algorithm can detect what a quality blog post looks like, don’t you think it can do the same with a review. As we have done with content, we’ve lowered the volume and increased the quality, we need to think of reviews in the same way. I recommend going out of your way to over deliver for your customers so they feel like they owe you a LONG detailed and meaningful review.

      I recommend going out of your way to over deliver for your customers so they feel like they owe you a LONG detailed and meaningful review.

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      You really need to impress your customers if you’re going to get the review that you want though. Like, a few weeks ago I left my first review on Trip Advisor for a local cake company, as they had made a delicious cake and actually gave it to me for free as a goodwill gesture. When they asked me whether I would leave a review, it wasn’t even a question.

      I recently received a great review from a customer. I was training them in online marketing and they sent me a gift all the way from California to the UK and left a Google review that was over 200 words long. I had clearly exceeded their expectations, and this was the nicest thank you I’ve received.

      There are two ways of looking at reviews. Firstly, getting as many reviews as you can to grow your online presence. Or secondly, a tool to encourage you to exceed your client’s expectations and help them solve what they want and more. I prefer looking at reviews as the latter, because not only should you feel proud for serving your customers, the review they leave is like the icing on the cake!

      Gary Evans Your web

      One of the biggest challenges with reviews is getting them approved. We have customers that leave us reviews on both Yelp and Google but they never see the light of day. This is not uncommon and there are a few things that you can do to help the approval process along.

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      Yelp Reviews

      With Yelp if somebody leaves you a review and they have never used the system before that is a fairly high chance the review will not get approved, whereas if they are frequent users of the platform their reviews will stick and show on your profile.

      How can you help with the approval rate in this instance? Start by interacting with the user and the review:

      Reply and comment on their review

      Mark the review as useful

      Send a message to the reviewer

      These things alone help prove the legitimacy of the actual reviewer and thus help in the approval process.

      Google Reviews

      I have seen plenty of great reviews never get approved for absolutely no reason whatsoever and yet I see some reviews approved which definitely should have been flagged as spam.

      Some of the things you can do to help this review process are as follows:

      – If you are just starting to collect reviews then don’t ask all your customers at once as this will definitely be flagged. Spread the request out over time.

      Ask the customer, to be honest, and open about their experience. Even if negative, the feedback will help your company grow.

      Don’t send the ‘canned’ content to the reviewer to post on your behalf.

      Don’t send them a direct link to your review section. Tell them where to find it themselves (this one poses a challenge in itself because some customers won’t bother to leave feedback unless you show them exactly how to do it – regardless of how good your work was)

      I have one particular customer in the travel/tour guide industry and they hand out cards towards the end of the tours. Their hit rate on these is superb as most people fill them out on the bus back to the airport. They interact with each client post tour and follow the processes listed above when the reviews come in and their approval rate is high.

      Melissa Lopez Identity Media PR

      The first piece of advice we share with our clients is to create a space that is buzz worthy with excellent service and a welcoming atmosphere.

      These three things, when executed properly, result in the community’s support when it comes to Yelp and Google Reviews.

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      The best way to ensure a 5 Star rating on these platforms is for reviews to occur organically. This means not asking your clients for reviews! Instead, encourage check-ins on social media such as Yelp and Facebook. Reviewers with genuine comments, a big following, and active engagement are more likely to help new and small business to achieve the coveted 5 Star Rating.

      The best way to get reviews to “stick” on Yelp and Google is simple: ask all of your satisfied customers to post a review.

      The key is to A) figure out who your satisfied customers are, B) give them a choice of sites to post reviews on, and C) do this consistently (not just once every six months).

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      By giving your satisfied customers a choice of which sites to review you on as opposed to just asking everyone to post a review on Yelp, your customers will choose the site they’re most comfortable with. So if they’re a Yelper then they’ll choose Yelp. If they already have a Gmail account (and currently around 1 billion people do) then they’ll choose Google. If they’re on Facebook all day then they’ll choose Facebook (and Facebook is one of the most important sites to get reviews on in addition to Yelp and Google).

      If you push all of your customers to one review site, you’re going to be missing out on a ton of quality reviews that would otherwise be posted to other important review sites that will drive business your way. So don’t cut off your Google to spite your Yelp.

      Another important factor is the consistency of getting reviews. It’s better to get a handful of new reviews every month than it is to get 100 reviews every January 17th. Review site algorithms take into consideration how your reviews flow in and how fresh they are… and so do the potential customers who read them. No one likes stale reviews.

      And lastly, we recommend having reviews come from your customers home or work, anywhere but in your actual business. Emailing them a day after their visit is a great way to help get reviews from happy customers from their home or work, which also then helps you rank better in the areas they leave a review from.

      Hannah Brown YDOP

      You can’t control how a customer reviews your local business, except of course by trying to provide the best possible service. But you can influence the types of reviews you receive, and on which platforms, if you’re using a reputation management system.

      Our agency has used GetFiveStars for years and it has brought hundreds of positive reviews for clients with nearby customers.

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      The system sends out a feedback request to your customer and asks them to rate their experience with the local business on a scale of 1-10. If they rate their experience positively, they’re asked to write an online review (and we choose what sites we send them to). If they rate their experience negatively, they’re asked to explain what could have made their experience even better. This is sent privately to the business, allowing the customer to vent and feel heard, but not providing them an option to write an online review.

      If you have a service team (such as landscapers, HVAC technicians, etc) that’s physically at a customer’s house or business, asking for reviews in person can bring more success than asking over an email. Review hand out cards or magnets can be a great way to politely ask for a review without feeling like you’re being a bother. And if you make it personal, such as asking the customer to personally review the employee, we see they are more likely to go and do it.

      James McCarthy Placement Labs

      Part of our client work revolves around online review management. As you are probably already aware, Yelp has never provided any official information regarding their review filters, so I cannot say for certain if any one tip is truly full proof, but I have found certain tactics to be more useful than others.

      My #1 tip to get a review to pass Yelp’s internal filters is to make sure the account leaving the review is active in the Yelp community.

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      If the small business owner has clients who want to leave that business a positive review, he should find out whether the individuals leaving the reviews use their account regularly.

      Users who have only left 1 or 2 reviews, and who have made no connections with other users on the site are much more likely to have a submitted review be filtered than a user who has dozens of reviews, comments, and connections with other users.

      Paul Jansen Luvly

      I’ll focus on the Yelp review filter as it tends to be stricter than Google’s review filter. What can be frustrating is that Yelp filters out legitimate reviews as well. I suspect that enough other bloggers in this piece will give recommendations on how to make sure reviews are seen as legitimate.

      My number 1 tip is to engage with people who leave a bad review.

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      Stats show that 33% of bad reviews turn into a good one, so it’s definitely worth your time to turn that unsatisfied customer into a happy customer.

      How to do this? In my experience, it has a lot to do with swallowing your pride. For some, this might be really hard, but it’s just the best way to go when dealing with customers. I even see it as fun to have a customer who’s really unreasonable and mad and kill him or her with kindness. This throws most people off guard and sometimes they even feel ashamed that they were so mad.

      So, swallow your pride and kill them with kindness!

      Alexa Kurtz WebTek

      The best way to get your customers talking is to have a product/service worthy of the time it takes for them to leave a review online. A specific method we encourage our clients to use to generate positive reviews is as simple as a follow-up email!

      We create custom online review templates for clients to email customers that are hyperlinked with Yelp, Google, and even Facebook buttons.

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      Users are then taken to locations on the site of their choosing to leave a review, making the process as easy as possible for them. To prevent any negative reviews going public, in the email, we ask unhappy customers to respond directly to the email so that the issue can be handled correctly.

      The first step is understanding the difference in the reviewing process for both companies. Yelp manipulates the results and puts a heavier weight on active users. So let’s say you do what I suggest below and you get a great review from a customer that isn’t a yelp “user (meaning they actively review)” – that will look great in the beginning but after about 30 days it gets buried.

      Google, on the other hand, has almost no filter. I have helped businesses where the first reviews that were done were employees and owners of the company. In practice, we don’t recommend you abuse this.

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      The tip to get the review to pass the filter makes it a real review.

      Ideally, if you’re going to do it right it needs to be someone with a different IP address that can be somewhat verified. This is mostly for YELP (and some more stringent review sites). There’s report of Chinese reviewers for google stuff so there really isn’t much of a filter there.

      Julie Schumacher sasse agency

      My best practice tip is to give your customers three options for leaving you a review.

      The best way to prevent a review site from filtering or rejecting a review is for the reviewer to have an existing profile with the review site itself.

      There are several good methods for requesting reviews:

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      1. Send an email to specific customers thanking them for their patronage and ask them directly.
      2. Develop a thank you page for your email forms that invite the user to leave a review on the top three review sites.
      3. Dedicate one of your email newsletters to thanking your customers and inviting them to leave a review.
      4. Include customer review invites directly into the sales process.
      5. Create little review postcards with short links to the review sites that you can give out to customers in waiting rooms or after meetings or after service delivery.
      6. Create an autoresponder for new subscribers to email newsletters that include links directly to review sites!

      Another best practice which is imperative is to be authentic and strategic.

      One of the main areas that I have been focusing on this last year or so is reviews for Google and other business directories.

      To be honest, Yelp has a much stronger review filter compared to Google. But most of the common reasons for a review to get filtered on Yelp are completely out of your control. They tend to be related to the usage and previous activity of the reviewer. If they have not used their profile much or this is the first review that they are leaving, it stands a strong chance that it will be filtered.

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      My #1 Tip to get a review to pass the Yelp & Google filters is to request the customer to talk a little about their service and experience.

      A common feature of filtered reviews is them being too short or vague, so by asking the customer to talk a little about the service they received, it is more likely to get be accepted.

      Hernan Santiesteban Great Lakes Development Group

      My #1 tip for getting a review to pass the Google and Yelp review filters is really my top 3 tips:

      1. Preferably, the review should be written on a mobile device.

      Writing a review from a mobile device seems to have a lower rejection rate.

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      2. If you are soliciting reviews and know that the user has never left one before, you may want to pass. New users or a sudden spike in review activity with no friends is considered a red flag. Conversely, a user with a long history of reviews and activity is much less likely to have a review rejected.

      3. Make sure to ask for an honest review.

      So, first things first, you have to determine if a client is a good candidate for leaving you a review. For example, if they don’t already have a Yelp account, they’re right out. Or another issue is if they do have a Yelp profile, but they have no friends or reviews, and they haven’t added anything to their profile. Either way, there’s a 9 out of 10 chance that their review will be filtered, and thus not worth the effort.

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      I will say, there are elements of Yelp’s algorithm that defy expectations. Three of the reviews for my business–all five stars–that have been filtered out had a large number of friends and/or have written many reviews. But looking at the other four reviews, they had: 0 friends and 5 reviews, 0 friends and 2 reviews, 0 friends, and 2 reviews, 5 friends and 1 review.

      So, Yelp does seem to lean towards filtering out reviews from more inexperienced members. I would still say that you should encourage everyone to leave you a review, but make sure to single the ones out that are movers and shakers in your local Yelp community for special attention.

      Another tip that has worked for us as a web design agency is that we ask clients to leave a link to their website in their review. It’s free advertising for them, and it appears to add some validity to the review, from the perspective of Yelp’s algorithm.

      My last tip would be to have clients submit a photo of your business or products if its applicable to your business.

      Typically, a fake review wouldn’t spend the time curating photos for a review, so this also seems to add validity to reviews.

      Aaron Lin Ignitive

      From our experience, Yelp reviews are bounced for just 3 simple reasons:

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      1) The review comes from a non-active user

      There isn’t really an exact way to combat this; you can’t control how active your customers are on Yelp. What you can do, however, is identify active users on Yelp to visit your place of business. Perhaps you could entice them with a discount or a freebie in exchange for an honest review.

      2) The review comes from a user who didn’t purchase directly from Yelp

      Yelp’s filters work in such a way that it discredits reviews from profiles that cannot be proved to have visited your outlet. 

      What this means is that if Yelp is able to recognize that the owner of the profile did indeed visit your business, then they wouldn’t have a reason to remove that review. Relying on Yelp Deals works perfectly for this reason as Yelp is able to verify that a deal was indeed purchased by that particular user, making reviews from such accounts genuine.

      3) The review comes from a profile that is incomplete

      Fake reviews are incredibly easy to identify. They’re effortless, and they come from anonymous or faceless profiles. It’s important to target individuals who have complete Yelp accounts, which includes connected social media accounts, a legitimate profile picture, actual friends, an installed mobile app, and a lengthy review. These are all the fundamentals that will make your Yelp reviews stick.

      Algorithms have gotten pretty complex and incredibly accurate these days, making artificial reviews a thing of the past. The rule of thumb to follow is that if you’re being real with Yelp, Yelp will be real with you. So as long as you’re playing it honest, you will definitely be rewarded.

      Reilly Forbes Vendasta

      Both Yelp and Google openly admit that, at times, totally legitimate reviews get filtered out by their software. So with that as a baseline, instead of asking how to pass the filter, the better question is how can I minimize the impact of the filter?

      The answer is volume, a business simply needs to prioritize fostering a culture of online reviews from their customers.

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      Here are 4 ways to immediately increase your online reviews

      1. Make sure your listings are accurate – Critical first step in removing as much friction as possible between your customer attempting to give you a review.

      2. Set-up official profiles with all major review sites – The difference between a default looking profile and a fully developed one can have a huge impact on customer perception

      3. Make customers aware – Put up visible signage in the business as reminders. Make them light and fun and most customers will play ball.

      4. Ask – Sometimes the easiest things are actually hardest. A surprising amount of businesses don’t do this basic step.

      Christina Nicholson Media Maven And More

      Business owners need to do two things. The first one is very easy – offer great customer service. When you give a customer or client great customer service, they will want to tell other. So, the second thing you need to do is ask them to tell others. In this case, you can ask them to hop on Yelp or Google and give a review.

      Some businesses will hold raffles and the way to enter is to leave a review. Others will reward a review with a coupon.

      At the end of the day, you need to deliver great service and ask for the review.

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      It’s really that simple!

      Russell Lobo Taurus Knight

      As a social media agency, we cater to a lot of local businesses including restaurants, photographers, etc. Since many of them have reviews on their website and from customers by email, they ask us to add the review directly to Google and Yelp as they don’t want to bother their customers to add the review again. However, if you add too many reviews from one IP address, Google and Yelp both ban you and a lot of your hard work will go down the drain.

      To prevent this, we educate the client (the restaurant or the photographer) on the pitfalls of adding reviews (even though they are genuine), on their own. They then integrate their reviews into the “Thank you” email that they send their customers which encourage the customers to review them on Google and Yelp.

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      A genuine review will always pass the filters. Just make sure to ask your clients to ask their customers to write their honest opinions.

      We have successfully integrated an email campaign for all our clients and now emails are automatically sent to the customers thanking them for choosing our clients and requesting a review on Google/Yelp.

      We have perfected the pitch that we send to the customer of the restaurant/photographer and I am happy to say that 8 out of 10 review requests replied are replied to by them and we get an amazing number of reviews which improve the ranking of our clients on Google and Yelp. If you would like a free, customized “review pitch” which you can send to your client and will get you a lot of reviews, do contact us on the website above

      Sam Warren RankPay

      The most effective (and obvious) way to get reviews accepted on Google and Yelp, is to earn/solicit legitimate reviews from legitimate customers.

      Don’t buy or build fake reviews. It’s not worth the added effort, and Google and Yelp are particularly good at sniffing them out.

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      Instead, ask real customers for their honest feedback and ask targeted questions. “Would you mind sharing your thoughts on your experience with us so far on Yelp? Specifically, we could use customer feedback on our signup process.” Or… “We rely on customer feedback deliver amazing experiences, would you be open to letting us know what you thought about our customer service so far on Google +?”

      This is a non-pushy way to “steer” customer testimonial requests without being disingenuous or telling clients what to say.

      Kendra Ross Oak & Rumble

      Reviews have played a crucial role in growing our business, and we often give our clients advice on how they can leverage social proof in their marketing strategy. Here are a few thoughts:

      Ask that your customers leave a review honestly and authentically. That means: tell the truth in your own voice. Algorithms like Google’s are getting very good at flagging content that isn’t authentic. Dissonance and a lack of added value get your content penalized, whether it’s a blog post stuffed with keywords or a review that’s a little too effusive yet formal.

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      If a review is given the way it would be spoken in person as a testimonial, it has a great chance of being published.

      John Caiozzo SEO Inc

      The quality of a review is probably the most important factor in Yelp’s review filter.

      You can have a customer with a brand-new Yelp account with very little user activity (no friends, no previous reviews) write a review that will still be shown as a recommended review because they took the time to write a thoughtful review.

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      If you think a customer had a great experience, simply ask them to write a two to three paragraph review explaining what their problem was, why they came to you, and what they honestly thought of the experience and the service provided.

      It’s a simple formula that requires only a few minutes from them and increases your chances of success regardless of whether or not they have an established Yelp account.

      Julie Howell Postalli

      Here are some of my tips for successful review solicitation.

      #1. Carefully read and abide by the guidelines for all review sites. Google and Yelp, for example, have very different guidelines on how small business owners should seek to get reviews. For Google, asking for a review is okay, but giving any incentive (i.e. a gift card) violates their policies. Yelp has different guidelines and discourages active solicitation of reviews, as they feel it creates bias.

      #2. If what you’re doing feels wrong, it probably is. A great small business that focuses on customer satisfaction should have no problem getting positive reviews.

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      Understand that there is no easy way to game the system and violating any guidelines can have very negative long-term consequences for your business.

      #3. Give your customers directions on how to leave reviews. There are tools you can use to generate shortened URLs that customers can easily access to write a review on their desktop or mobile devices. Bit.ly and Whitespark are great options for this. You can also use in-store handouts, link to your Google My Business page in your email signature and add a link to your company’s website. If you’re going to ask for a review, make it as easy as possible for customers to give them.

      #4. Stress the importance of honest, helpful reviews. The point of a review is to help potential customers make decisions about what companies they want to do business with. A 5-star review that says “Great job!” does very little in the way of this. Great reviews give detail about the business and the customer’s experience. An honest, detailed business review is better than 5 very vague ones.

      #5. Respond to reviews, positive and negative. If you receive a negative review, rather than getting angry, try to understand the context and respond appropriately. It could help you identify areas to improve your business. Responsiveness to user-generated content like reviews is also usually much appreciated by customers.

      Matthew Davison Tack and Tuck

      Getting reviews is one of the best ways to get customers to trust your business and get them to your door. Sometimes getting reviews is more important than any other marketing activity.

      This is important for local business and is has become not only a decision-making point for customers but a ranking factor for Google. What’s really important is to try and get real reviews, some people fake it and I’ve known cases where all the reviews (including the real ones) were removed. This is never good news and I’m pretty sure Google won’t look at you the same.

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      Something that I recommend is using this tool which allows you to send a short link to your customers. It gives you 2 options:

      Option1: Will show the review box where customers can add their review.

      Option2: Will enable you to show a list of current reviews.

      This makes it super easy for them and you can even track these link clicks.

      I like to send a request for review only when I know the customer has had a good experience and is likely to leave a good review.

      Tony Wang Local Word

      The most important factor in getting a Yelp review to stick is if the reviewer is an active Yelper, meaning they write reviews at least once in a while. If they create an account just to review your business and then don’t write anymore, there’s a good chance it’ll get filtered. If the reviewer has written at least 10 or so reviews, there’s a much better chance it’ll stick.

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      Furthermore, don’t include a link to your Yelp page in an email; it’s easy and convenient but Yelp can see that and will filter the review.

      Just tell your clients to search for your business on Yelp and write the review, if they’re active on Yelp, they’ll know what to do.

      Basically, since Yelp reviews are so hard to get, you need to give people options.

      Google is a great first choice or Yelp alternative to offer as a review site. Anyone with a Gmail or Android account can write a review. Google filters are MUCH less strict than Yelp, so no worries. Have them Google your business name and city, that should pull up your Google info on the right side (desktop) or at the top (mobile). Just look around for the link to “write a review”

      For both Google and Yelp, don’t set up an iPad or computer in your lobby to make it easy, they will know all the reviews are coming from the same ip address and filter them.

      I like to also offer Facebook as a third/last alternative for reviews. They are not quite as important just yet, but that can change anytime as FB is A huge player, don’t count them out. FB reviews are the easiest to get because everyone has an account.

      By far the most important point, no matter which review site your talking about, is ASK for reviews. Not in a pushy way, but as part of customer service, if people seem happy with your service, just ask for a review.

      Brian Jensen Congruent Digital

      My number one tip is to give your satisfied customers options.The reality is that not everyone is an active Yelper, has a Gmail, or is on another social profile that you’d like reviews on. If you only provide Yelp as an option and a client creates an account for the sole purpose of leaving you a review, it’s very likely the review will end up in the dreaded “not recommended” section.

      You’ll also want to ensure that you’re adhering to each platform’s TOS (terms of service). For example, you definitely shouldn’t offer any type of compensation, and Yelp even takes it a step further by suggesting you shouldn’t even ask for a review!

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      We’ve found a happy medium is to let your customers know you’d value their honest opinion on how you performed to their expectations, and where they can leave online feedback, should they choose to do so.

      To make it as simple and intuitive as possible, one approach is to create a reviews page or an email template that lists and links back to the social networks that are most important to your business.

      Google’s filter is much less aggressive than Yelps. One trigger for Google that could prevent a review from being displayed, is if two reviews are submitted from the exact same IP address. As an example, if two members of a client’s team decide to leave you glowing feedback from their office network, one of those reviews may not be published.

      Brandon Seymour Beymour Consulting

      Age of a user’s account – Google and Yelp both consider how long an account has existed. If it appears that the account was created just to leave a review, this will likely result in the review being “hidden” on Yelp, and even removed from Google.

      Account activity – This one mostly pertains to Yelp’s review process. If a Yelp user has only left one review, the majority of the time, the review will be hidden and not factored into the average rating. That said, I wouldn’t be surprised if Google eventually took a more scrupulous approach to vetting reviews, such as factoring in email and search activity.

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      Profile picture, personal info., and friends – This one also mostly applies mostly to Yelp. If an account doesn;t have any friends, and lacks a profile picture and personal info., that review is more likely to be flagged and hidden.

      User location in relation to business – If your profile says that you live in New York, and you’re reviewing a business in Los Angeles, it could be seen as suspicious.

      Of course, there are exceptions, such as when users travel to different cities and states. This isn’t a major factor, but worth considering if you’re asking your friends and family for reviews, and they live in different locations. In other words, if the majority of reviews are from a different location, it might look suspicious, but a few here and there shouldn’t be an issue.

      Bonus tip for Google Reviews: If you have access to your customer’s email addresses, you can filter out the Gmail addresses, and send them emails asking for reviews. Just keep in mind that there is a fine line between “asking for” “soliciting” reviews. The latter is frowned upon by Google, and could even lead to legal trouble.

      If you have access to your customer’s email addresses, you can filter out the Gmail addresses, and send them emails asking for reviews.

      Just keep in mind that there is a fine line between “asking for” “soliciting” reviews. The latter is frowned upon by Google, and could even lead to legal trouble.

      Just keep in mind that there is a fine line between “asking for” “soliciting” reviews. The latter is frowned upon by Google, and could even lead to legal trouble.

      The key difference is how you do your outreach. Emailing a few customers here and there (such as those with Gmail addresses) is ok. But constantly blasting your customers could indicate spam, and if Google recognizes a suspicious pattern, they could flag some or all of your reviews.

      Steve Pritchard It Works Agency

      The main reason many reviews do not pass Yelp’s filtering system is because you are not an active user on their website. Users who actually keep their page updated and have a lot of reviews are much more likely to not get filtered. On the other hand, if you have no friends on Yelp and only a couple of reviews, your reviews will almost certainly be filtered.

      My advice for small businesses wanting to get their reviews on Yelp is to be an active user on the site. Get involved, network and make friends.

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      This will show that you are loyal to their service and actively interested in using their website all the time, not just when you want to gain from it.

      My #1 tip for getting good (and honest) reviews is:

      Be excellent. This may sound simplistic but anything less and you don’t want the reviews to begin with. Google is a bit easier to deal with as you’re allowed to simply ask for a review whereas this is against Yelp’s policies.

      A little trick that can be used to obey both is to create a thank you email to all clients inviting them to review you but only requesting Google.

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      This section would read something like:

      “If you feel there are any ways that we could improve our service we wholeheartedly welcome your feedback. Please let us know (like to form setup for this purpose). As the Internet can be difficult for some to navigate if you’re happy with the service we offer we invite you to share your experience on Google to let others know.

      You’re also invited to read our other reviews on:

      • Yelp
      • Other niche-specific locations or review sites you feel are important

      You’ve requested the review on Google where it’s allowed and simply made the user aware of other locations they can see reviews of your company. I like to close with an offer not tied to the reviewing process to leave on a high note though it doesn’t apply to all businesses. Any offering will do in those cases (free ebook, etc).

      Ajay Prasad RepuGen

      Authenticity is a huge concern in today’s online community.

      In order to earn honest reviews from your clients and have them pass through Google and Yelp’s filters, it’s best to target people who are already actively posting reviews.

      You can also urge them to add a profile picture because it demonstrates they are a real person.

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      There are many ways you can ask your customers, such as offering a discount for every review or publicizing your page on your website. The most effective by far, however, is simply asking in person or through a sincere message.

      Sarah Nelson Staylisted

      Because our main objective is to get small businesses ranking online, review education is a big part of our education. Obviously, the legitimacy of a review is the best way to make sure it won’t get filtered out.

      But moving past the obvious, direct linking your Yelp page can increase the chances of a review getting filtered out. To Yelp, people leave reviews naturally by going to Yelp and searching for a business or discovering them through an outside search engine.

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      When someone is directly linked to a Yelp page, it is an indicator that the review is solicited because it is unnatural behavior.

      Because of this, I always suggest to my clients that they simply ask their happy customers to find them on Yelp and leave them a review, rather than sending them a direct link.

      Here are some pointers I have for generating reviews on Google, Yelp and elsewhere:

      1. ASK for reviews

      People don’t tend to think about reviewing a business provider unless they’re upset, or you’ve absolutely blown their mind with fantastic service or products. If you’re in communication with a happy client, give them a nudge! “I’m so glad you’re happy with the service you’ve received! If you’d be willing to, we’d really appreciate it if you spread the word!” And then provide them with the link to the Review service of your choice. Send them as directly as possible to the review screen, don’t give them the opportunity to mess things up or get frustrated.

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      2. Be Strategic

      Don’t take a scattered approach to your review gathering process. Prioritize the review sites you want to target and build up a healthy number of reviews (at least 5-10 depending on how hard they are to come by) on your highest priority first, before moving on to the next. Use the following criteria to pick a traffic source that you know to be:

      • High volume (Lot’s of eyes)
      • Preferred by your target audience
      • A good source of actionable leads

      3. Bury the negatives

      When a negative review comes in, learn from it, respond to it, make it right if you can, and hopefully, the author will retract it or at least, adjust it. If not, work hard to earn 2 or 3 new glowing endorsements that will bury the negative one in obscurity. Many review sites automatically highlight a positive and a negative review, so there’s no guarantee you can bury it completely, but you can definitely push it lower on the list of most recent reviews.

      4. Use good tools

      Use tools to help you in your quest for good reviews. Whether it’s as simple as an email template that you’ve saved to use when you know a client is happy, or a more complex tool that filters the negative from positive reviews and channels positive reviewers to your priority listings, always be looking to expand your toolkit! Get.ureview.me is a great example of the latter and is actually one of the several tools that serve a similar purpose, so there are definitely options out there!

      Aaron Watts Duo Call

      When it comes to reviewing a business on Yelp & Google, sometimes the filters get in the way. There are many reasons as to why responses are filtered; however, the lack of interaction on reviews is one of the key reasons that they’re so regularly filtered out.

      My top tip for ensuring that your review passes Yelp & Google’s filters is to ensure you interact with your reviewers.

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      ‘How can I interact with my reviewers?’ I hear you ask. Well here’s just a few ways that you can:

      • Connect with the reviewer (friend/follow)
      • Send the reviewer a message
      • Respond to the review (which is good practice)

      These three interaction methods are extremely simple and not time-consuming at all.

      As well as aiding the process of passing filters, interacting with people who leave you a positive review is excellent from a customer service standpoint. It gives you an opportunity to add personality and personability to your business; something which is very rare in the modern world. Potential customers or clients will no doubt look favorably on you if they can see that you’re willing to take the time to engage people.

      Danielle Isbell Odd Dog Media

      We work with our clients daily on getting reviews for their business. It can be a challenge. While Google and Yelp both filter their reviews differently, here’s my #1 tip for business owners:

       Ask your customer what review platform they already use

      It sounds easy, but many business owners don’t do this. Ask if your customer uses Yelp or Google to leave reviews.

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      If a user already has several reviews they have written on Yelp (bonus if they’re an “elite” user!) then Yelp will be less likely to filter their review. Same goes for Google reviews. Google will try to filter out fake reviews, but can only do so much. Having a Google account that has already left several reviews, means that Google review will have more trust built in with Google.

      Nick Leffler Exprance

      Getting reviews that pass the Yelp and Google filters isn’t difficult if you get valid reviews that have helpful content in them.

      If the person leaving a review has a valid account that’s marginally established filters shouldn’t be an issue.

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      When the reviewer has an established Google or Yelp account the review simply needs to be helpful to other people looking at the profile. If the review is helpful and provides more than “did a good job” then there’s a good chance it will pass filters.

      I manage the local SEO for a multi-location self-storage business so I constantly work with our managers to help them get honest reviews that pass Google and Yelp’s filters.

      With Google reviews, the best way to get more reviews is to ask and then remind your customers to leave you reviews! It is completely within Google’s guidelines to ask customers to leave you reviews–so always be doing that.

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      We’ve found creating simple instruction sheets instructing clients how to leave a Google review greatly boosts the number of reviews we receive.

      Two sure ways to get your customer Google reviews flagged or removed, however, would be to set up a “review station” like a computer/tablet where customers can submit reviews to Google at your location or offering incentives for customer reviews. Doing either of these could easily get many or all of your Google reviews removed.

      With Yelp reviews, it’s best to just tell your customers to “find you on Yelp”. Yelp is very aggressive at calling out companies who ask for reviews or incentive customers to leave reviews so it’s best to just let all your customers they can find you on Yelp but don’t ask them to leave a review. This will give your business the best opportunity to receive honest reviews on Yelp that pass through their filters.

      Lana Goldenberg Noxster

      In my experience, Yelp and Google favor reviews from trusted users.

      My #1 tip to get your review to show up is to maintain an active, regularly updated profile on Yelp and Google.

      A user that contributes content regularly online is more valuable on these platforms than a “fake profile” that was created just for the purpose of posting a review.

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      Reviews for small business owners are a necessary part of earning new business, and getting the right reviews that stick can be difficult.

      My biggest piece of advice for small business owners to get reviews is to simply ask for them, and to be specific in what you ask for in the review.

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      For example, if you are a business that ships products, ask customers to provide feedback on the shipping speed or the ease of ordering. Doing this will help focus customers in on the parts of your business that make you unique and you want to highlight.

      Additionally, reviews that are specific look more natural and will, therefore, stick better than reviews that are general in nature. And make sure to interact with reviews as they come in. Respond to them and vote them funny, useful, or whatever. Real businesses respond to reviews and reviewers love to know their voice was heard.

      Matthew Boley Marketing of America

      Google has a great feature that allows users to leave reviews of various establishments, including restaurants, bars, and shops. While this is very helpful and informative, many users are faced with the problem of having their reviews filtered by Google’s spam software. While this can be a headache, there are some steps that you can take to ensure that your reviews post on Google.

      For one, you should avoid repetition of words and phrases, as this is known to trigger Google’s filtering software. It is also recommended that you do not insert URLs into reviews, as this is likely to flag your reviews as spam.

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      You should also avoid posting the same review to several sites, as the Google filter will think you are blasting your review for marketing purposes.

      While on the subject of blasting, if a business owner gets a huge amount of reviews that post at once (say, dozens on the same day), there is a good chance that most or all of these reviews will be filtered, as it is a potential indicator that reviews were solicited. As the old saying goes, “slow and steady wins the race.”

      Feuza Reis Next Level SEM

      We handle reputation management for our clients and the best tip we have for passing the reviews on Yelp and Google is ” The more the merrier”.

      The more authentic reviews you get the better the chances that they will pass the filter tests.

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      It is a lot easier to get reviews passed in Google then it is on Yelp. Sadly Yelp is very strict and rejects even some great reviews while leaving strange and offensive ones.

      Another tip we have is to use a service like Customer Lobby or Testimonial Engine. For example with Customer Lobby, they have an app version where brick and mortar businesses can have an iPad and customers can leave reviews. This has helped one of our clients get ten times the amount of reviews. Which in turn helped their SEO rankings dramatically.

      People are so busy and typically don’t have the time to go out of their way to find you online and leave a review, so these services guide them with direct links to Yelp, Google etc.

      We also have an SEO strategy which is more advanced and has to do with creating microsites or getting on other review type sites to outrank Yelp etc.

      David Head Design Live

      When our clients want to write a review for us and ask for tips, we advise them to talk about their situation before coming to us, how we helped them, and if they’d recommend working with us and why.

      This helps the reader empathize with the client’s situation. Then they can determine for themselves if our service is right for them.

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      We’ve found this to be effective at bypassing any kind of review filters. It’s specific enough guidance to be effective, yet still allows for the client to craft their own unique message

      Catherine Simms Web Dezine It

      Yelp: Small business owners should ask their most active customers to post reviews. Yelp tends to not filter the reviews posted by people who have a full profile, post photos, recommendations, and reviews.

      Google: They should ask only for a few reviews at once. Too many reviews too fast will look like spam to Google.

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      Mikhail Korev I know SEO

      I’ve never come across issues with Google reviews for businesses and they always passed and displayed on the maps. Make sure your clients have a pic and real name on their profile to make the reviews look more credible. Always reply to their reviews with thank you and some meaningful comment. It will help your local SEO efforts and will increase your chances to appear on the first page results from the map.

      If you are adding reviews on behalf of your customers make sure to use different IP, browser, and phone number to create their Google accounts and don’t post them at the same time. Spread out through the 1-3 months and you should be OK. Yelp, on the other hand, filtered so many legitimate and passed so many spam/fake reviews. If you ask your customer to register on Yelp just to leave your business a review, the chances are those will be hidden under the non-recommended link.

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      To bypass that, you need to age your Yelp profile, add a profile pic, review other places with useful and meaningful comment and do it on your phone using your cellular data (so reviews will be published from unique IP, not from your company’s wifi). If you see that your reviews are being published, go ahead and add one for your business.

      Don’t make it to promotional or filled with keywords as those might be red flagged by other users or later removed by Yelp admins.

      Stephanie Caudle Black Girl Group

      One tip I encourage all of my clients to do to ensure their Google reviews passes through is to leave the review while in my office. The catch is they must do it using their data and not my WiFi or on my computer.

      Don’t make it to promotional or filled with keywords as those might be red flagged by other users or later removed by Yelp admins.

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      Chirag Khasia Taktik Consulting

      I believe that happy customer reviews among various platforms are one of the most important factors for local search and overall business branding in general. These reviews are like low hanging fruits, very easy to obtain if you have got some customers already. Having positive reviews on popular platforms like Google+, Yelp, Yellow Pages, etc. increases the credibility of your business. Your potential clients and search engines look at these reviews as social proof that you provide top notch service, you have got happy customers, they love what you do, and they are sharing their experience.

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      We recently got a client who needs help with their online branding. We successfully implemented a system to send an email to their past and new customers requesting to leave reviews on different platforms, engage with them on social media and encourage them to send new referrals, and we offered them some intensive in return. The incentive could be something simple, like a coffee card or gift card or some discount.

      The best time to send these emails is when you deliver your product/service as they will be happy with you at this point and they will be more likely spend their time in leaving you reviews.

      Here is the email template you can modify and use for your business. And YES, having large icons with hyperlinks in an email work like magic. The average customer is not that tech savvy, and they just have to click on the image and leave you a review, it makes their life easier.

      “Thank you for working with XXXXXX for XXXXXX. Our business relies on word of mouth and client referrals, and online reviews are a big part of this. We would appreciate it if you could take a few moments to write on Google, Facebook or your favorite review site about your experience with us.

      Likes and shares of our social media are also welcome! Leave us social media reviews and we will send you a small token of our gratitude. We also have an excellent client referral program that gives you XXXXXX for each successful referral that results in a mortgage.

      ”We then include icons that link to Facebook, Yelp, Yellow page, and our social profiles.

      Sam Borcia CoFlex Marketing

      In order to get a review to pass Google or Yelp’s filters, my number #1 tip is to not have a review station set up at your business.

      This means setting up a laptop or computer at your business specifically for your customers to give you reviews. If you do this, then Google or Yelp will see that your business has lots of reviews all coming from the same location (through your IP address).

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      Instead, make sure you get your customer’s email addresses and then send them an automated email after they finish their appointment or session at your business. That way they can write a review from their own phone or computer.

      Nate Harris PercentSharp

      It’s very prudent to remember that Google recently updated their guidelines for local business reviews. It’s against their terms to source third part reviews, to pay to generate them, to vet for negative reviews, and to aggregate reviews from a greater franchise for smaller properties.

      That said, I’ve found success with two types of captures:

      An un-incentivized call-to-action at the property itself, specifically if there’s a part of the customer experience that includes idle time or a wait

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       Assuming email addresses were at some point recorded, a follow-up email campaign.

      Hotel chains do this best (they’ll email you asking for a review 1,2, or 3 times)

      If your customers are on different IPs tied to legitimate Google or Yelp accounts, and they put even a little bit of effort into the review process, you’ll see results stick.

      Sergey Alakov Alakov

      I have worked with a lot of local businesses and have seen quite a few issues with reviews.

      The first thing to keep in mind is that Yelp prohibits review solicitation in any form. Google, on the other hand, doesn’t. While both are important for local businesses (and increasingly so), I would be very careful when it comes to asking for yelp reviews.

      Google’s review filter is not as strict as Yelp’s and is straightforward in most cases.

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      Among many factors I think Google looks at, I would highlight the following four, that I think are most common reasons for reviews being filtered:

      1. Reviewers’ IP addresses match business’s and are not diverse enough;
      2. The same review is posted somewhere else on the internet;
      3. Google’s algorithm can see a possible connection between a reviewer and the business (i.e. reviews from employees);
      4. A lot of reviews are acquired in a very short period (i.e. business that only had 3 reviews acquired 30 reviews in 2 days would raise a flag).

      Yelp is a lot tougher.

      Reviews that stick on Yelp are usually written by active Yelp users (single reviews from new accounts are often get filtered). These reviews usually go into detail (are fairly long) and include pictures.

      Rohin Dua Rank Me Up

      Reviews have been a great source of genuine info, feedback & credibility of sellers & service providers engaged in almost all walks of life. Every learned & informed user today is aware of the need, use & benefits of checking reviews online before making a purchase decision.

      While there are an overwhelming number of websites & business providing reviews of products & services, there’s no match to Yelp & Google Reviews when it comes to looking for a feedback of local sellers & service providers.

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      To keep the trust of the users intact, Yelp & Google have even put in place active filters to make sure the reviews that users post are genuine and fool proof. These tips mentioned below should come handy when getting Yelp or Google Reviews to be sure that the reviews get pass the filter put in place by Yelp & Google.

      Yelp: Always go for the genuine reviews, motivate your customers to post reviews if they are satisfied with your service.

      There’s no alternative to getting genuine reviews. Yelp verifies the authenticity of the reviewer. Users with a little info on their profiles, users who are in the friends & family list of the service provider, highly positive or extremely negative ratings are bound to go in for a beating. Vague and unrelated users will find it difficult to pass on the rating. Though the filters are not perfect but still they are efficient enough to make the distinction among genuine & forced or fake reviews.

      Google: There’s a detailed guideline document laid down by Google to help user post genuine reviews to get through its filters. Reviews can only be written on Google’s Local Business Page & not on personal Google+ or non-local business page. Google Filters are too sharp when it comes to distinguishing between a genuine & spammy review. It can dig down to your geo-location, IP location as well as if you have really experienced the service of the business or not. Don’t try to copy paste a review.

      David Roch MarketGoo

      Sign up for Google’s Verified reviews (if you have an online store)! It’s relatively new but no doubt those reviews will come out on top.

      As for Yelp, it seems reviews are more likely to be relegated to the “not recommended” section when it’s a first-time reviewer (since chances are higher of it being spammy). So when you ask your clients for reviews, encourage those already on Yelp to leave a review there, and leave your Google Review link as well, so users not yet on Yelp may self-select and leave a review on Google instead.

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      Chris Hornak Blog Hands

      I like to think most potential customers are pretty smart at detecting fraudulent reviews and are highly motivated by organic reviews.

      My tip is to simply focus on getting real reviews from real customers.

      If a client gives you positive feedback then ask if they’d be willing to share that feedback in a Google review. 

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      If they provide a review be sure to thank them, maybe even send them a thank you card or a gift.

      Another idea is to hold a customer appreciation period every quarter or bi-yearly. Where you sent your customers a thank you gift. Along with that gift is a provide us your testimonial postcard. That takes them to a landing page on your site that explains how they can share their experience with your business.

      Jimmy Dalgleish Snap Back Media

      The number one tip on this occasion is:

      Set up a consistent system for ethical reviews that doesn’t aim to game the system.

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      What does this mean?

      This involves getting reviews ethically and consistently that aren’t purchased in bulk from third parties.

      So you’re a small business and you want to get more reviews? There is no better place to go than your existing customer base.

      If you do have an existing customer base do NOT send a bulk email to a large email list requesting reviews it will raise flags but start out sending a small batch of emails possibly 10 a day to start.

      The best way to get past the filters is to set up an ethical system that generates constant reviews from an honest source.

      How do I implement this for my own clients?

      I set up an automated email reply system that sends an email to a customer that has purchased an item or service 3 weeks after that purchase (to allow time for delivery – if delivery is longer delay the email further)

      Without going into my exact script please do not offer any incentive for a review but ask for an honest review of their experience with your service or product.

      Set this up and your review generation is on autopilot from an ethical source… your own customers!

      I work with quite a few local and national brands that have a big focus on organic SEO.

      When it comes to getting a review I always say the phone is your best friend.

      The most effective way I have found to get great reviews is to reach out to them directly and ask if they’d go to google/yelp and post one.

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      You’d be surprised how often people are happy to help you as long as you’re actually providing a quality service.

      I have actually left over 100 evaluations, have more than 50 good friends and I have a practical evaluation distribution between 1 and 5 stars. As a result, my evaluations never get filtered and even much better, my Yelp business reviews constantly appear on the front page. The ability to get my reviews to stick is due to the fact that I am genuine and Yelp’s filtering is able to determine this. If you are looking to get your yelp reviews to stick, then follow these simple yet effective steps:

      1. Leave real, beneficial evaluations to services I regular and appear like a genuine individual to Yelp.
      2. Take 10 regional companies and leave Yelp evaluations for them. Keep in mind, Yelp desires genuine individuals providing genuine evaluations.
      3. Link your account to Facebook. It’s more of a hassle and Yelp perceives the effort as you being genuine.
      4. Connect with other evaluations by marking them Helpful, Amusing, and so on.
      5. Interact with others. Yelp accounts with buddies are more likely to appear genuine.
      6. Leave pointers. Take little extra effort to leave pointers in a review and not leave just evaluation ratings.

      Ease into doing reviews. Do not go from 0-100 evaluations in a weekend. Take a slow consistent approach and consistent reviewing over time will develop your credibility

      Becoming a trusted Yelp reviewer is possible with a little work. I suggest taking 10 minutes two times a week to interact on Yelp and within 2-3 weeks your will have developed a trusted profile and will off to the races to remain in great standing with the Yelp Evaluation Filter. You may even be welcomed to join their sought after Yelp Elite Team if you keep it up for an extended duration.

      Max Robinson AIMS Web Design

      If you’ve asked a friend or previous customer to provide a positive review for you on Google or Yelp, it’s a good idea to ensure that they’ve reviewed other businesses or services beforehand.

      Moderators can easily tell if a user has never reviewed anything before, and if there are a few new accounts reviewing your business, they will almost all be inspected and possibly even removed.

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      Bradley Shaw SEO Expert Brad

      Yelp does not allow a business to “ask for reviews”… however….

      In order to get around the yelp filters here are my suggestions.Only ask your customers that you know have at least 10 or more reviews already on Yelp and/or lots of friends.

      Yelp wants active participants, so if you have no friends and only one or two reviews, then the reviews are going to get filtered.

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      Download the Yelp app and Check In. If you are hooked up to a mobile phone, it’s more likely that you are real.

      Have a filled out profile info (profile photo, additional info, link to Facebook, etc.) Avoid short reviews, more details, and specifics the better. Photos are a big plus.

      Also, reviews can bounce in and out of the filtered section, depending on the strength of the user’s profile. A tip to have a filtered review unfiltered is to increase the user’s Yelp standing.

      First, add them as a friend or follow them. If that doesn’t work, try reaching out to them through Yelp’s messaging platform. Explain to them that while you greatly appreciate their feedback, their review has been filtered by Yelp. Request that they fully complete their profile and update the review with more detailed information including a photo if possible.

      Lauren Pawell Bixa Media

      My best advice for small business owners who want to generate honest client reviews that pass Google and Yelp filters is:

      Automate your review requests, send them multiple times using both email and SMS, and allow for reviews on multiple sites.

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      Generating regular, frequent feedback from clients who aren’t first-time users of the review site will help you pass their filters.

      Tom Brodbeck Edge of the Web

      There are a great number of tools to help small business owners get and ask for reviews on Google and Yelp, but to get a review approved – it has to be authentic. You can’t fake it.

      When a real review is written by a real person, it will always get approved – whether it is a positive or a negative.

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      Louie Luc Buzz Nitrous

      My #1 tip to get a review approved (or unfiltered) by Yelp and Google’s review filters is to act like an active user on those platforms.

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      Meaning:

      • Write several quality reviews (100% original, long and with no typos) on other businesses first (not all at once but across time);
      • Add lots of friends;
      • Connect your social accounts to prove you’re a real person;
      • Finish setting up your profile (add your picture and provide more information about yourself);
      • Participate in the forums (where applicable);
      • Build lists of places or locations;
      • Engage with other users’ reviews;
      • Use their mobile apps and check into locations (especially if you’re going to review them) to prove you’ve been physically there;
      • Don’t make the mistake of writing a review only to log out and log in to your business admin page.

      In summary, be a normal user, not someone just trying to game the system.

      Simon Ponder Image Freedom

      Yelp and Googles filters are difficult to game specifically because they are built to filter out spam from SEOs and local marketing people.

      They tend to give credence to more established accounts offering real feedback.

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      One of the best strategies we have to help improve the scoring factors we have found is through honest customer service. This is our number one tip. For our customers, we have designed a specialized postcard, on the one side it asks for a review of the companies service, on the opposite side we have provided the customer with a phone number they are free to call if they have less than stellar service.

      That phone number is a special number that goes directly to the CEO of the company. Depending on the CEO’s availability, the voice mail is routinely checked and any customer complaints are dealt with swiftly, preventing negative reviews from cropping up on Yelp or Google.

      Michael Bertini iQUANTI

      The number 1 tip I would give to someone that wants to get a review to pass Yelp & Google’s review filters would be to keep the review sounding as natural as possible.

      Many people have bad writing skills given we are in the age of using internet words everywhere IMHO (see what I did there).

      The key is for the review to not look as if it was generated by a software.

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      With that being said there are a few other things you can do but this definitely tops the cake.

      Aaron Norris The Norris Group

      I love it when I see a competitor cheating the rating systems on social media. It’s clear they hire foreign vendors that promise them a number of fake reviews on Facebook or Google for a price. Unfortunately, this black-hat strategy is very short sighted. What goes on the Internet stays on the Internet. When these social giants decide to penalize companies who do this, it will be nearly impossible to unwind the damage.

      Companies need to focus on white-hat strategies.

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      Provide a great experience or awesome customer service, and THEN ask for the review.

      In my experience, even in an industry that is often behind the curve on the technology front, most prospects and/or customers are willing to give a great review if you provide value to their life.

      For our team, we’ve been producing free resources for our network for years. For our 20th anniversary, I asked out network if they appreciated our work to please consider leaving us a review on Facebook or Google. I then provided them with direct links and directions on how to do so. Facebook was the dominate review site and we continue to look for opportunities for the ask in emails and over the phone.

      We see this as increasingly important as artificial intelligence looks at social data to help deliver the most relevant and helpful referrals to the end user. I call it, voice search optimization. I’d I bet reviews will play a HUGE role in making that a reality.

      Ellen Biggs Pretty Home

      As a business owner of a furniture and home decor curation site, having good reviews on Yelp, Google and Amazon are extremely important for me. People would like to know about the quality of my products I curate and recommend.

      I always ask my customers to write an unbiased review about my products along with a photo of them using the products I recommend.

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      This helps add more confidence and not only does this show that it is a genuine review and that the photos are authentic, it also helps improve my sales as people can see how happy people are. So my number one tip when it comes to having a review pass Yelp and Google review filters is to use photos. Request your customers to add photos in their reviews.

      Danielle Kunkle Boomer Benefits

      My number 1 tip is that Yelp usually won’t post a review if it’s a brand new Yelper who just created an account. So don’t try to convince clients to go sign up for Yelp and then post a review, because unless they start doing other reviews, that will probably never get displayed.

      Instead, put the Yelp emblem out there on your site or you could even try in the signature line of your emails and let the clients see that naturally.

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      People who are regular yelpers will see that and then they can go and leave a very natural review for you.

      When looking to get reviews for your business, the best thing you can do may also be the simplest…ask!

      Encourage your customers to leave reviews by including a quick note on their receipt.

      For example, handwritten at the top “How was your service today? We’d love to hear. Leave us a review on Yelp.” When receiving reviews, be sure to respond to every single review (both positive and negative) and thank the reviewer for their feedback.

      Alexander Reichmann iTestCash

      Generally, with both Google and Yelp, authentic reviews should usually be accepted without a problem.

      It is when Google and Yelp see an IP address making numerous accounts to leave reviews on the same site that they would remove the reviews.

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      But if you’re using one Google or Yelp account and your IP doesn’t have a history of spam you should generally have no problem getting your reviews passed.

      Eric Bowen Broadband Search 

      The best way to avoid having reviews removed from either Yelp or Google is to continually respond to them, both positive and negative.

      Reviews are typically flagged because the algorithm marked it as fake.

      If you interact with the reviewer by adding them as a friend or responding to their post, the review will stand a greater chance of staying put. Making the customer happy is another added bonus because they like to know that their opinion was heard.

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      The key to bypassing the filters is to not sound too corporate.

      Writing over complementary reviews with mention of any kind of services will make the review sound like a promotion.

      The review needs to be simple and sweet and mention specifics about your experience only, such as “The salon was really cute” as opposed to “The salon had amazing features such as hand-made curtains, chandeliers, and plush seating area.

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      Kelly Jacobson Illumine8

      My biggest tip to get reviews pass Yelp and Google’s filter is to avoid buying reviews.

      Not only will you have inorganic reviews of your small business, this practice triggers Google and Yelp. It looks like you solicited reviews, which is against the rules. These websites prefer profiles that are built exponentially over time for a natural look.

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      Cody McConnell Keller

      I’ve never had issues with Google reviews not sticking, but I’m assuming this could happen if the efforts are not sincere. When we ask customers for a review, we send it at the right micro-second: when you’ve exceeded their expectations, and we send a direct link where they can click and leave a review in seconds. It’s gotta be easy or else they won’t do it.

      Yelp is tougher because a Yelp user needs to be established.

      Your customer needs to actually use Yelp to an extent, so if you want a review, ask customers who actively use their accounts.

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      Otherwise, creating a Yelp account just to leave 1 review will not stick. The most you could ask is for them to create a full profile and review several companies, but this is asking a lot.

      As a product review based website, we get a LOT of review requests on Google and Yelp, many of the reviews are sent to us and we then need to add them to Yelp/Google on our own. The problem with this is that, since a lot of reviews come from one IP address, Google/Yelp can potentially ban the account.

      To solve this problem, I use the below strategy:

      1. Schedule only one new review per week and on different days
      2. Use zenmate extension to hide my IP (it’s a free proxy chrome extension)
      3. Always make sure that the location of the person who has reviewed and the IP location remains the same.
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      For example, if the reviewer is from Nevada, post it via a Nevada IP address.

      So far I am happy to say that all my reviews have been approved by both Google and Yelp.

      Rudy Dewatine HoverDNA

      For me, I would say that the best way to attract yelp google, or other reviews from your customer is to offer them some kind if incentive in exchange for the review.

      Think a free drink, a discount on future purchases, anything that the customer might enjoy depending on your what your business is about.

      It is better to ask for a review on a website on which your customer is already a member. More often than not, that is facebook or google. First-time reviews tend to be filtered out, and your listing could be reviewed for fraud if the majority of your reviews come from first-time users.

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      Before asking for a review, ask your customer if they are satisfied with their purchase.

      This gives you the opportunity to provide constructive feedback (and avoid negative reviews by not asking for it) if they had any concern.

      Mark Tatum Tatum Insurance

      Yelp reviews are very important to independent insurance agencies. If you aren’t aware, asking for Yelp reviews is against Yelp’s review policy. At Tatum Insurance, we train our employees to NEVER ask for reviews. Instead, after we sell an insurance policy, we will ask the customer, “Are you on Yelp?.”

      If they answer no, we will encourage them to sign up and to do so using their Facebook profile.

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      We have noticed that more reviews will pass through the Yelp filter if a reviewer signs up through Facebook.

      Once we receive a review, we try to respond immediately to the review with a message similar to the following:

      “Thank you for your business and for sharing your experience on Yelp. Yelp reviews are crucial to businesses like ours to help us understand what our customers did and didn’t like about their experience. Yelp only keeps reviews visible that they deem to be a quality review. To ensure your review of us is available to other on Yelp, we recommend that you share your opinion of other businesses, add photos and complete your profile, and connect with others on Yelp. Thank you again for your honest feedback.”

      This takes very little time to do and will dramatically increase the number of reviews that pass Yelp’s filter.

      The best advice I have to get your Yelp Reviews passed through their filter are the following:

      Yelp likes to see reviews from someone that has reviewed multiple businesses in the same area.

      They like reviewers that have given many five stars and two stars. As opposed to someone that is just out giving five-star reviews.

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      They like reviewers that have friended people on their network and that have a photo of themselves and contains personal information about the reviewer. They are also more concerned about new accounts. Lastly, they really like long-form reviews, say more than 300 words.

      Google is slightly similar but not so much. Google has it much easier to catch rake reviews because they likely already have lots of information on you. Make sure the reviewer is logged into google and is someone that has a google plus account and or an email account. If it is a real review of a business that is listed on their Google local service then you have a good shot of getting it passed.

      Matthew Massee The Advocates

      As a small business personal injury law firm, many consumers are wary of my industry. One of the most important things for our company is our reputation online and in the community. Online reviews on reputable sources like Yelp or Google are key to success. Here are three tips on how to keep your reviews online and have them pass all the filters from Yelp and Google:

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      1. Make them authentic: Make sure to get reviews that are from customers or clients. Odds are that when you ask for a review, you’ll get one. So don’t just rely on yourself and your employees because that doesn’t get you very far.

      2. Use different IP addresses: Make sure you aren’t having customers just use your computer on your IP address.

      This must vary or the search engines will flag the reviews as not authentic and they won’t pass the filters.

      3. Be slow and steady: Rather than asking 100people for reviews on one day, spread it out. Ask 5 people a day and keep the review coming in slowly but at a steady and consistent pace. This will ensure your reviews don’t get flagged as fake.

      Bryan Clayton GreenPal 

      When we launched our office in Nashville we were unlucky in getting a negative review right off the bat.

      The reviewer never actually even used our service, however, left the negative review confusing us with another service.

      We appealed to yelp but they would not take the review down we even reached out to the person to get them to correct the review and they never responded.

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      We were distraught because it is very difficult to overcome the coldstart when launching a new market and negative reviews with no positive reviews can be almost impossible to overcome.

      We knew we had to develop some sort of strategy to get reviews no matter what to push the bad review down with positive sentiments.

      After brainstorming we came up with an idea to tap into our customer’s soul through their pets. When a homeowner signs up for our service we gather information on if they have pets, and if so what are their names. We do this so our lawn vendors know to be careful when entering the lawn.

      We decided we could use this info about our customer to send a personalized gift to our customers’ pet, addressed to them.

      This really wowed our customers, we received personal thank you notes, photos being posted to Yelp and FB and thank you tweets, it worked really well for the time and money we invested. As the Nashville office now has 27 positive reviews.

      We have seen several yelp reviews that specifically reference receiving the gift for their pet so we are going to continue the strategy and engaging our customers and making a personal connection.

      Both Yelp and Google have stated they do not want business owners providing incentives for customers to leave reviews, so you have to be careful how you ask and promote this.

      We have a fair amount of reviews on our Yelp account. There are about 10 reviews that Yelp filtered out. When I dug in to find out why Yelp didn’t display these I found out that the reviewer did not have any other reviews submitted to any other businesses.

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      So to Yelp it looks like this person’s review could be fake, or requested by the business. They think the Yelp user only created his account solely to leave a review for one business.

      Tip: If the reviewer has already left reviews for other businesses, and leaves an honest review of your business, it should pass Yelp and Google’s filters.

      We do encourage our customers to please help us out by writing an honest review of their experience with Yates & Co Jewelers. Many of our new customers come to us because they read our reviews, and these reviews come up high in a google search result. They mention this to us, then we ask them to leave their own.

      My company is Uptown Down Entertainment, a wedding entertainment company. So far I haven’t had any trouble getting reviews passed through from my clients. Once the wedding/event has taken place, I follow up a week or so after, thanking the client for trusting us with their event, and letting them know that reviews really help to build our business and spread the word.

      I then link them to our Google reviews page and ask them to leave a short, 1-2 sentence review if they feel so led.

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      If I don’t hear from them after a few days, I send them a $10 Starbucks gift card and ask again for the review. This is a double-win, because not only do they feel a little more driven to leave the review (because of the gift card), but Starbucks also lets me know when the gift card has been opened, so I know whether they’ve seen the email or not!

      Deborah Sweeney My Corporation

      We have had honest, genuine reviews removed by Yelp (but not google). It’s interesting. We feel that the focus has to be on actual experience and to encourage our customers to provide yelp feedback over time.

      If we do an initiative promoting yelp feedback and we get too many customer yelps in a short period of time, they start deleting good ones (or hiding them). Google reviews usually stay up (good or bad).

      It has been our experience, however, that bad yelp reviews are left up no matter what and good ones are often defaulted to be removed. So, the key seems to be slow and steady.

      Ask customers (via links or email to a raving customer) to give a yelp review.

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      If they are regular yelpers, it is more likely to be deemed valid than if they open an account just for the reason of writing this one review.

      My #1 tip for getting a review to pass through Yelp and Google filters is giving your customers tools to leave a review in the first place.

      We created a generic document called A 5-Step Quick Guide on how to leave a Yelp review. After we have built a positive relationship with someone and they express interest in leaving a review, instead of just hoping they follow through, we give them tools to help make it happen.

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      Walking people through how to correctly build a profile and including tips such as building your profile with a variety of reviews will help profiles filter through as credible ones. This is what will get reviews to stick on a page for the long term.

      Ostap Bosak Marquis Gardens

      We have discovered that the best tactic is to straight forward e-mail recent clients with a direct link to review page asking to leave an honest review about their experience.

      I would recommend to do it after 2-5 days after successful transaction/deal/sale, so it is still fresh in the memory, but don’t look intrusive or desperate.

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      Ajay Dhasmana Rishikesh Yoga Dham

      We run a yoga training program in Rishikesh which is the best place in the world to learn yoga. The most important thing as a business owner to get reviews from your clients who will pass the filters of Yelp and Google are ask them to use visual media.

      The most important thing as a business owner to get reviews from your clients who will pass the filters of Yelp and Google are ask them to use visual media.

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      Today you can add images and videos to the reviews and not only do you get traffic from Google and Yelp local places listings with goog image and video based reviews, you also get traffic from Youtube and Google Image search.

      In the world of Instagram and Snapchat, it is very important to have a review which will have visual media. It is not only from the perspective of passing the review filter but also more importantly for building trust in the mind of the visitor and help them decide to use your product/service.

      We are a small business who asks for reviews that does something a little bit differently.

      We have a TV in our showroom that shows all of our reviews from Facebook, Google, and Yelp.

      It even shows the bad ones talking about how overpriced or bad we are. We do it because we have a high score overall and we feel it brings more creditability to our good reviews (as well as showing customers that we do read them with the hope they will leave them too).

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      Andrey Goncharov Less Stress Removals

      1. Identify what is important for your customer (price or quality, customer service, and attention or value for money of the product or service you provide etc.) and make sure that relevant (most important) part of his/her experience is “over delivered”. Exceed their expectation in that one aspect. This makes people say: -” yes, these guys are definitely better!”

      2.. That “extra mile” makes people give something back to you, not just pay for your product/service. Review online would be one of the things you may get as well as a box of chocolate posted to your office or a postcard. Although your prospective clients will not know how good your service or product was chocolate and cards will keep staff motivated – everyone wants to know that they do something that others need and being rewarded.

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      3. DO NOT FORGET to remind your happy customers that you have your business listed on Google and yelp etc. by email and include links to review pages.

      Leaving reviews on G or Y is somewhat time-consuming (if you are not registered already and can remember your password). Do some of that work for them – find that page!

      4. Incentives. Always worked, always will. Think what you can offer your customers in exchange for honest review. 10% off next order or £10 grocery voucher – try it.

      My #1 tip to get past the Google and terrifying Yelp review filter is…. Quantity!

      Try not to focus on and get frustrated by the non-published reviews. Focus on getting more reviews. Ask you clients via face to face, email, social media, etc.

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      Nirav Dave – Capsicum MediaWorks

      One of the best ways, that has always worked for me, to pass through the filters set by Google and YELP is to ask your customers to be as descriptive about their experiences as possible when reviewing your business. Both Google and YELP look for reviews that are accurate and provides personal experience and as such, a short (Great website!) or an overly positive review that lack details can be treated as spam.

      It also helps if your customers are active users on both of these platforms. Since, these filters are in place to weed out fake and spammy reviews, an individual who has reviewed other establishments on Google & YELP, are more like to be viewed has an honest reviewer, thus making their review on your business seem genuine.

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      Further, make it easier for your customers to leave a review. Since, “if you don’t ask, you don’t get,” nudging your customers in the right direction, by posting a small note ‘please leave a review’ at the end of an email newsletter or on the website, will help you get an honest review for your site.

      Also, remember to respond to all reviews, whether good or bad. This sends a positive message, showing that you care for your customers and value their opinions, which will help build customer trust and help you grow your business.

      Lastly, make sure that you read & abide by the guidelines stated by both of these platforms. For instance, both Google & YELP have clearly stated that businesses should not offer any kind of payments or incentives in order get a review for their business. Both Google and YELP can easily detect a bias or a deceptive review and thus, violating any of these guidelines is not in the best interest of your company.

      Thank you so much to all the experts that participated in this interview! Share this post with your followers and subscribe to our blog for more tips that will help you take your business to the next level.

      ABOUT THE AUTHOR

      Minuca is a freelance writer specialized in creating expert roundups. Her posts provide quality content, bring huge traffic and get backlinks. She also helps bloggers connect with influencers. You can contact her at her blog, MinucaElena.com.

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        WHITE HAT VS BLACK HAT SEO

        WHITE HAT VS BLACK HAT SEO

        EMILY LYNCH

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        Why Are We Talking About Hats? What’s The Difference?

        ‘White Hat SEO’ refers to those SEO strategies and optimization techniques that fall in line with the policies and recommendations of major search engines, like Google. These search engines develop their algorithms to reward what they can detect as ‘white hat’ SEO with higher rankings. White hat SEO focuses on optimizing for a human audience and increasing organic traffic through natural patterns of site quality.

        On the other hand, ‘Black Hat SEO’ are those tactics that focus on exploiting search engine algorithms in ways that don’t take the audience and users into consideration. They are often spammy, annoying for users, irrelevant, and unattractive. They are tactics that if recognized by search engines to be ‘black hat,’ will get your site penalized.

        Here’s the Good News…

        Today, it is easier than ever to choose between white hat and black hat SEO, and I don’t mean based on principle. Search engine algorithms have become so advanced and refined that they have reached a peak point, where black hat SEO just doesn’t work that well anymore and white hat SEO does. And as those algorithms are constantly being refined, SEO will continue to move in this direction.

        You’re busy. Really busy. We get it. So, if you don’t have the time or attention to read another 1000 words,

        We Put Together a ‘SparkNotes’ Version, Just For You.

        Clean, well-organized, engaging, informative, user-friendly sites.

        Really good, original, content that readers enjoy with relevant external and internal links and a high ‘sharability’ factor.

        Orderly keyword optimization with good, relevant keywords.

        High-authority, relevant backlinks obtained honestly.

        Accurate information regarding your business and location.

        Disorganized sites designed around manipulating search engines, not helping users.

        A lot of poorly written copy stuffed with irrelevant keywords and information that is unhelpful to users and often stolen or duplicated.

        A lot of low-authority backlinks from sites that have little or nothing to do with the site’s industry or consumer base.

        Inaccurate business information that is contrived and scattered across the internet in order to make a site seem like something it’s not in order to manipulate search engines or users.

        Still want to know more? We put together some more detailed comparisons of specific SEO techniques. We show you some ‘black hat’ tactics to DEFINITELY AVOID in your SEO campaigns, and giving you the inside info into some GREAT ‘white hat’ techniques you can start using today!

        WHITE-HAT SEO // KEYWORDS

        Keyword Optimization

        Even though keywords have been abused by the black hats for a long time, they are still one of the most important factors of on-page SEO. But there is a RIGHT way to use them.

        Adding your keywords to meta titles and meta descriptions is a solid and incredibly important SEO technique that is encouraged by search engines,

        {{ brizy_dc_image_alt uid='wp-541304a47cbf909349beb256130d7c62' }}

        ‘IF it is added in a CLEAR and RELEVANT way.’

        It can also help to add them to image titles and descriptions on the backend of the site that users never see.

        Likewise, keywords should be relevant and each page on your site should only be optimized for one; maybe two on occasion and only if it makes sense to. Don’t try to rank your homepage for 5 different keywords.

        Another mistake that is easy to make with keywords is trying to rank two pages for the same keyword by putting the exact keyword match in the titles and meta titles and descriptions. If you want to rank more than one page for the same keyword, don’t use the exact match keyword in the same order for all of them. Google won’t penalize the pages, but it will split the authority for that keyword between those pages. Instead of one page ranking really well for a keyword, you’ll get two or three ranking less well for that keyword.

        It is important to have your keywords somewhere in the h-tags so that when search engines crawl your site, they see those keywords as being important information about your site. H1s, H2s, and H3s will make a difference — H4s, H5s, etc. don’t as much; they’re more for stylistic purposes.

        It is good practice to make sure that your pages are properly organized with H1, H2, and H3 tags in the correct ordered and that keywords are included in as many as are appropriate and make sense to the usability of the page.

        WHITE-HAT SEO // COPY

        Great, Relevant Copy

        In today’s blogging world, search engines encourage and reward longer, more relevant copy that is targeted to the proper audience for your industry.

        Blog posts (like standard pages) should not be stuffed with spammy links or keywords—they should be orderly, pointed, well-written, and ORIGINAL.

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        Search engines want to see good content. It’s that simple. It doesn’t have to be put out every day or even every week. It just has to be GOOD. It has to be something your target audience or consumer base will actually want to read.

        “But how do search engines know what good copy is?”

        Simple. The readers tell them. Part of Google’s ranking criteria is based on something called ‘bounce rate.’ When a user accesses a page and then immediately leaves because they don’t like the content or find it useful, it’s called a ‘bounce.’ High bounce rates mean that high percentages of users are leaving your pages quickly.

        Google rewards sites with low bounce rates because it shows that the information on the site is engaging enough that users want to stay and read it.

        Original Content

        The originality of your content is incredibly important. Readers want useful information that they haven’t seen already and they want information that’s relevant. So, make sure your content is tailored to your specific industry and company, and not just copied from another site that’s ranking better than you.

        If you need to have two pages with similar content, just make sure that the copy on those pages are worded significantly different and make sure that having multiple pages is necessary and user-friendly.

        WHITE-HAT SEO //BACKLINKS

        Today, search engine’s algorithms are designed to ignore irrelevant links and reward pages for high-authority, industry-related backlinks. A good ‘white hat’ link building practice is simple content marketing.

        Write really great content that other leaders or locals in your industry will want to republish on their sites, and offer them the content for free or very, very cheap. They will publish it with a link back to your site. Not only will you gain a great, relevant backlink that will help increase your authority with search engines, but users who really like the content will follow it back to your site and look further into your services or other content. It’s often referred to as ‘Guest Posting’.

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        Another good practice would be to get a business listing on good, RELEVANT directories, where the backlink will increase your authority with search engines AND the right kinds of clients and consumers can find your content and services.

        Sites that have been around for a while and may have rebranded or changed their domain and urls once or twice often benefit from a technique called ‘Link Reclamation.’ Link reclamation involves finding content, whether images, video, articles, etc., that originated from you or your site or somehow mentions those. Reaching out to the sites that published your content, you may find that many are willing to update their content to your updated domain, url, brand, etc. And there are a lot of techniques out there for finding content and reclaiming it.

        WHITE-HAT SEO // LOCAL SEO

        One of the most foundational ‘white hat’ practices for local SEO is creating a Google Location. It’s important for rankings that Google knows your business has a legitimate location and has images, business hours, reviews, your website link, and other important information.

        Linking your site to Google Business and Google Webmaster Tools is one of the easiest, most important ranking factors that you can control.

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        Another really effective ‘white hat’ technique is building ‘Local Citations.’ A citation is an online reference (usually in a directory) of a business’s name, address, phone number, and website. Many of these can be manually added for free—some require membership and a membership fee. They’re a great way to drive locals to your business page and increase your local SEO rankings.

        BLACK-HAT SEO // KEYWORDS

        Keyword Stuffing

        Littering your site’s content and meta data with keywords and phrases in order to boost organic rankings is one of the most common page-level spam techniques. We call it ‘keyword stuffing’ and it is considered ‘black-hat’ for two reasons.

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        1. It is unfriendly and uninformative to the user.
        2. It is useful for nothing apart from attempting to manipulate the search engines using the high keyword density factor.

        Because it is also one of the oldest spammy tactics, all the major search engines today have removed high keyword density and meta keywords as major factors in improving search rankings and have in fact developed their latest algorithms with the ability to scan pages for particularly high keyword densities and penalize those pages for keyword stuffing.

        Another issue with keyword stuffing, is that it usually involves using a lot of semi-related but overall irrelevant keywords in order to artificially inflate the probability of coming up in SERPs. Search engines reward good, relevant copy that users enjoy—not pages filled with useless keywords. Trying to rank a single page for multiple similar keywords that are scattered throughout the page is a red flag to search engines and is terribly annoying for site users.

        Another trick that will get you on Google’s naughty list is adding exact keyword matches into the links on your site. Your navbar should never look like this:

        BLACK-HAT SEO // COPY

        Bad Copy

        It used to be common practice to put out multiple blog posts a day with short content that was mostly irrelevant, just to get more text and more pages and more keywords on your site consistently. And once upon a time, search engines actually rewarded that behaviour with higher rankings.

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        Today, putting out a lot of short, irrelevant copy is considered ‘black hat’ because it is spammy and done only to artificially inflate rankings. While updating content on a consistent basis is still good, it now makes no difference to search engines whether you put a post out once a month or ten times a day.

        Duplicate Copy

        Duplicate content is another BH tactic. Duplicate content is when you have two pages on the same site with the exact same (or almost exactly the same) copy. Search engine algorithms look for it and penalize it. Don’t try to duplicate a blog post or a page and optimize them each for different keywords.

        Scraped Copy

        Scraped content is another BH practice. Scraping involves taking content from other sites and republishing it on yours. It is considered ‘black hat,’ not only because it’s a copyright infringement, but also because it adds no value to your users, who need to content that is reflective of your unique business, not generic information about your industry or misleading information stolen from a competitor.

        BLACK-HAT SEO // BACKLINKS

        It is no secret that backlinks are today one of the most important factors for organic SERPs ranking. Likewise, it should come as no surprise that backlink building has now become one of the more abused SEO tactics today.

        One of the ways black hats abuse the link system is by engaging in what search engines call ‘link schemes.’ Buying & selling links that pass the ‘Page Rank’ algorithm is considered by Google and other search engines to be ‘black hat.’

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        Another ‘black-hat’ tactic is the excessive exchanging (or link trading) of links between sites. Some even create whole sites and networks of sites for the sole purpose of cross-linking between them all. SEO experts refer to them as PBNs or ‘Private Blog Networks.’

        While this link-building tactic, thus far, has been difficult for search engine algorithms to spot, it is a technique that is on their radar and you can be sure that they’ll be working towards troubleshooting this blind spot in their next algorithm builds.

        Spamming other sites with links back to yours in comments or through malicious behaviour such as injecting hidden links into a site by exploiting flaws in its security are other common ‘black hat’ SEO tactics. Not only is it frowned upon by Google as a link-building technique, it damages the rankings of the site you breach and annoys both their users AND yours. And you can be sure that the webmaster you hacked will make every effort to take down your links and increase their security, so the links won’t stay long anyways.

        BLACK-HAT SEO // LOCAL SEO

        Over-optimization almost doesn’t sound like a bad thing, right? When it comes to local SEO, the truth is that trying to rank for more than 2 or 3 locations will actually get you penalized and detract from your rankings.

        A perfect example of this is duplicating services pages or even whole sites that are exactly the same, except for the locations. ‘Black hats’ will often publish 10 – 50 service pages with the location name changed. Sometimes they’ll even publish pages with just titles with keywords and a city name, with no content anywhere on the page, and leave them unlinked on the rest of the site.

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        Creating lists of locations and keywords in footers is also a bad practice, though it doesn’t make significant difference either for good or bad when it comes to your rankings.

        Another ‘black hat’ tactic is creating multiple Google Locations or Brand Pages for locations that you don’t actually have. Using either P.O. boxes or fake addresses is considered misleading and unfriendly to consumers.

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          BRAND NEW YELP ADS AGENCY AFFILIATE PROGRAM

          BRAND NEW YELP ADS AGENCY AFFILIATE PROGRAM

          ANDREW LOWEN

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          Note: This is a super useful article that is fully driven by our desire to publish useful articles about useful stuff. This is not Yelp’s guest blog on our site. 

          They finally did it… Yelp just sent me an e-mail today about their Agency Affiliate Program. This is a program that has been in a closed beta since March 2017, and as of August, released to the agencies and freelancers everywhere.

          Yelp is now willing to give a cut of their PPC revenues to marketing agencies willing to “represent Yelp Advertising directly to their clients” along with a myriad of marketing tools and incentives.

          It’s about time.

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          I asked about this program on July 31st, and they said they didn’t have it ready. August 11th, I got this e-mail.

          Now, I know what you’re going to ask right away, so let me address this first before I explain everything else:

          ARE YELP ADS EFFECTIVE, AND SHOULD MARKETING AGENCIES PROMOTE THEM?

          The short answer: If you have substantial reviews (I recommend 10+), then it can make a big impact. But it depends on your industry!

          If you’re new to Yelp and someone is trying to convince you that Yelp Ads will bring tons of clients, take a step back and consider what that person has to gain… Do they stand to make money with their “advice?”

          I have seen more business owners get burned by caving into a slick salesman speaking the following line than almost anything else:

          CLICK TO TWEET

          ‘Yelp salesman trick #1: You’d pay for the whole program with just a few sales.’

          While this may be true, it is irrelevant to the real questions you should be asking here. And since marketing agency people are more likely to be reading this than business owners (although biz owners will certainly find this helpful, too), here are the questions I recommend asking…

          If the answer is no to either one of these questions, don’t sell Yelp Ads to your client… unless you like short term gain more than long-term success for your clients.

          Question #1: Is this the right time for Yelp Ads?

          Based on our experience, small business owners should be focused on establishing their marketing channels in the following order (as a general guideline):

          1. Word-of-mouth referrals.
          2. Establishing strategic referral partnerships via networking.
          3. Website development (to enhance effectiveness of #1 and #2).
          4. A systematic way to earn reviews.
          5. SEO, PPC ads, and/or Direct Mail Advertising.
          6. Everything else.

          As you can see, Yelp Ads would fall into #5 (under PPC ads). If you’re still working on getting a professional website up and running, there is no way you should be paying for ads. But if you have a decent website (which functions as a second look for potential customers), and you’ve earned a solid number of Yelp reviews on your profile (10+ with 4-5 star average rating), then it may be the right time for ads!

          Question #2: Can I afford this?

          If you’re asking this question (for yourself or for your client), you should be applauded!

          You’re going to get roped into a 3-month, 6-month, or 12-month commitment if you’re serious about Yelp Ads (along with slightly better pricing and perks with longer term lengths).

          So you better have a good idea of if you can afford to spend all this money without a single customer phone call. Are you willing to gamble this money? If you’re not willing to consider the risk of losing your investment, then re-consider if you or your client can afford this.

          Yelp Ads can be extremely profitable, or they can bust, and so if you’re averse to risk, then consider other marketing channels that require shorter term commitments instead (like SEO Marketing or Direct Mail Ads).

          Somewhat reassuringly, Nielsen recently published a study about Yelp Ads, reporting an average greater than $1,000/mo earned for $300 spent on Yelp Ads.

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          Straight from Yelp’s Infographic. It may be true, but these stats are not a guarantee!

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          Our Desktop CTA drives people to a website to learn more & call us.

          CTA for Mobile:

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          Our Mobile CTA is a “click-to-call” button. Instead of driving traffic to a website, we skip a step and ask the customer to call us!

          Question #3: Will this get clients to call?

          Ads will not get clients to call on their own merit. All they’re going to do is draw people to your page.

          If the content on your Yelp Listing is rushed, poorly thought out, or sparse… you’re probably not going to get the dream customer that is looking at your listing to call you.

          Proper Calls to Action (CTA’s) are super important to get customers to convert. Here are two quick examples of CTA’s that we use for our own Yelp listing:

          IS LOOKING INTO THE YELP AGENCY PROGRAM WORTH YOUR TIME?

          Yes. You should at least be educated on this as an Agency, and for a client that is determine to use Yelp, you will certainly be able to give them way better deals than if they did it on their own.

          For the right client, you can give them a good return on their investment. But don’t look to sign people up for the commission check, or you’ll be sorry when your client is pissed at you for locking them into a contract without telling them the full story.

          And for your clients, you’ll finally have a single dashboard that can monitor all your clients’ account performance. No more logging in and out of multiple Yelp Business accounts to get things done. Hooray!

          OUR YELP ADS CASE STUDY

          Currently, we decided to try out Yelp Ads for 6 months to determine if they’re worthwhile for us. We expect a good case study to arise out of this, and we have metrics in place to track exactly where our leads come from. We know how many leads we get on average from Yelp, and we know if they clicked ads or not.

          Check out our current metrics from ads:

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          Our Yelp Ads stats as of Aug 11th, 2017.

          How many sales have we closed from ads so far? Zero, but our services are expensive, and “professional services” generally require more time for people to consider before they reach out. Check this out:

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          Professional Services Stats from Nielsen’s Yelp Study

          Who knows — we could have 3-5 potential clients looking up our stats and reading our blogs (hello, potential client if that’s you!). If we did earn one client for every $160, I would probably have to buy an island every few years for all the new Yachts that would arrive in my private collection.

          So based on numbers, we’re willing to gamble roughly $6,000 over a 6-month period to test out this case study for ourselves before we really start recommending Yelp Ad services to our clients. After all, why would a prospective client trust a company that is telling them to do something that they haven’t done themselves?

          Can we afford to waste $6,000? While I get high blood pressure thinking about lighting $6,000 on fire, I see it as a manageable risk and am willing to give it the good ol’ college try. We have 19 unfiltered Yelp Reviews at the moment, and we feel that this is plenty to give it a solid effort and see a positive return.

          For reference, check out our current ad:

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          Ads can pull lines from customer reviews or from the business description, depending on what a user types in as a search query.

          HOW CAN YOU GET YOUR AGENCY INVOLVED?

          I expect this section to be updated, but you should really give the person that reached out to me a call. Their name is Jessica, and their e-mail address is jcarlin@yelp.com. They will likely freak out with glee at all the agencies that want to sign up under them from this post, so go for it if it suits your fancy.

          Remember, this is not going to work for you if you’re a small business owner looking to get “the best deal” on Yelp Ads. If you’re looking to get the best deal on Yelp Ads, contact us instead.

          Hopefully this was helpful to y’all! I’ve been really inspired lately to write about Yelp, so expect more to come in the near future!

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            HOW DO YOU KNOW IF SEO IS RIGHT FOR YOU?

            HOW DO YOU KNOW IF SEO IS RIGHT FOR YOU?

            ANDREW LOWEN

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            HOW DO YOU KNOW IF SEO IS RIGHT FOR YOUR COMPANY?

            I had an experience in a recent business meeting that will shed light on this question for you. Mind you, there isn’t one end-all answer to this question. The most general, accurate, and non-helpful advice you’ll get all over the internet is this: it depends. It depends on your business, your current website, your budget, your service area, bla bla bla…

            So I’m going to skip the useless advice! Let’s jump right into my thought process:

            This is how you know:

            If you make $50 or less from a client, than you probably can’t afford SEO. If you make $500 per client, then you can’t afford NOT to be using SEO!

            Okay, I admit that it’s not *exactly* that simple. If you’re a restaurant that needs a high volume of $50 paying customers, then Local SEO will help tremendously. If you’re McDonalds selling Big Macs for $1 each, you’re going to be spending millions on SEO every month. But you’re not McDonalds, and these types of situations don’t normally apply, so we’ll move right into the story that is going to help you get it:

            The Story

            I had a meeting with a potential client this week… Any time someone starts a conversation with: “Let me tell you what we need, and don’t try to sell me something else,” it’s a bad sign. Now, when a person speaks from a place of “I know best” and speaks in a way that clearly shows they haven’t done their homework on this subject at all, it is a recipe for disaster!

            So I asked what their margins were on their service…

            STOP! Read this important interlude with some relevant insight:

            The critical question for SEO in your company is: What is your margin on your product or service? You can sell a widget or make a service call for $1,000, but if it costs you $800 to buy the parts and perform the labor, you’re working with a $200 margin. And your cost per customer acquisition needs to be lower than your margin if you’re going to make any money. So if you’re spending $1,000 a month on SEO, you need to sell at least 5 widgets a month to break even, and more to turn a profit. So it makes sense for a true professional SEO company to consider this, doesn’t it?

            Back to the story… When I asked what the margin was on the service they wanted to sell, they responded harshly with a big “I DON’T UNDERSTAND WHAT THIS HAS TO DO WITH ANYTHING!” What they were really trying to say was, “I’m not telling you. I want to make sure you charge me as cheap as possible, because I don’t trust you.”

            The moral of the story:

            Needless to say, I gracefully found a way to tell them that we couldn’t take on their job. Our clients need to start with trust in us if the relationship is going to work (SEO results don’t come overnight!). In the story person’s case, they needed a more robust plan than they wanted to hear. So when it came to “selling something” or losing a sale, we chose to lose it.

            I won’t ever sell something that isn’t going to work.

            The sad truth:

            The sad truth is that some people need to get beaten up by crappy SEO companies, ripped off by freelancers and 1099’s that will take their money and not provide service, or waste money by buying into a “cheap” plan that satisfies their curiosity for a while and gives their competitors enough time to overtake them online.

            Some people need to understand the value of being told what you NEED to hear even though you might not want to hear it. I’d rather lose ten deals in a row telling people the honest expert truth than gain one deal through telling someone what they wanted to hear. If I had a service business or a product to sell and was looking to hire an SEO professional, that is how I would want to be treated.

            Over 50% of our clients come with a sad story of their own. They have paid 3-5 other companies to get results and have failed as many times.

            If you are frustrated with SEO and want the truth, or if you want to deal with a company that actually shows what is being done each month aside from sending a bill or charging your card, maybe you should do what Ryan did…

            We are not “yes” people. We are “get it done right” people. If you would like a no-cost consultation, we give out a limited number of 30-minute time slots each month. Just follow this link and fill out the contact form.

            I wrote this article with fire in my belly… I hope it helps someone out there avoid the pain of an evil SEO company!

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              WHAT IT COSTS TO BUILD A WEBSITE

              WHAT IT COSTS TO BUILD A WEBSITE

              ANDREW LOWEN

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              HOW MUCH DOES A WEBSITE COST?

              I am asked what a website costs by small business owners more frequently than any other question, followed closely after by a request to explain why it costs what it does. So I thought it’d be a good idea to put time into a blog post that would explain it for me.

              Fast forward to over 100 hours of time invested thus far (with new updates coming in all the time), and my original plan of saving a few hours here and there in explanation seems silly!

              But you have access to the most comprehensive explanation of what a small business WordPress website costs out there, so mark one in the win column for you!

              THE QUESTION YOU HAVE

              What does it really cost to build a quality business website and why? What goes into it? How many hours does it take? Unless you’re a website designer or have had a professional website designed for you in the past, you probably have no idea.

              The subtleties of web development often escape business owners, and when they get a quote to build a new website, the hours and charges are a complete mystery.

              In order to alleviate some of the confusion as to what exactly goes into “building a website” (a quality one at that), we’ve put together a guide to show you what level of design, functionality, and professionalism your particular budget will afford you in the web-building world.

              In this article, we will cover the main costs associated with building and maintaining a business website to help you gain a better understanding of the budget allocations so that you can make an informed website purchase decision for your company and vet the process by asking the right questions.

              WE WILL COVER:

              1. Design and development costs
              2. Content costs
              3. Functionality costs
              4. and on-going / post-launch expenses

              This post is meant primarily as a website guide, so we will only lightly touch on post-launch marketing tactics like SEO (Search Engine Optimization) or PPC (Pay-Per-Click) Advertising.

              So, if you’re curious about one over the others, feel free to use the table of contents to skip to the next section.

              Since WordPress is by far the most commonly used small business web development platform in the market today, we have chosen to use WordPress as the baseline.

              But if you’re not sold on going with WordPress, fear not! The info you’ll read will will translate to other methods of web development, too.

              SECTION 1. DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT COSTS

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              Before the actual “building” process begins, the developer has to estimate the number of hours it will take to both design and develop (build with code and web tools) each page, factoring-in potential complexity due to the custom functionality requirements of the client.

              There is also a question of whether or not the client will use a standardized theme or a completely custom-designed theme, as the man-hours will vary significantly.

              Below is a breakdown of where, specifically, design and development hours go. We’ve given two examples of industry-standard website packages along with the associated pricing based on development hours.

              Keep in mind, these are based on a typical rate of $75/hour from a web marketing agency. Rates will vary depending on WHO will be designing your site.

              DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT TIME

              Standard Theme | Base Cost for Website Built Using a Standard Theme | $3,500

              Client can choose between many standardized themes

              Agency has creative control – no client revisions

              6 pages total – client provides logo, text, image, and video content

              1 custom form

              Simple functionality: header with navigation, footer, social media links, contact forms, blog, newsletter sign-up, galleries, organized word content

              Estimated 46 hours of development time rated at $75/hour

              6 hours: Strategy and wire-framing

              12 hours: Homepage Design

              15 hours: 5 additional pages (3 hours per page)

              13 hours: Front and back-end development for UX (User Experience)


              Custom Design | Base Cost for a Website Using a Custom-Designed Theme | $5,000

              Fully-customized design with client-specific branding

              Client has creative control

              6 pages total – client provides logo, text, image, and video content

              1 custom form

              Simple functionality: header with navigation, footer, social media links, contact forms, blog, newsletter sign-up, galleries, organized word content.

              Estimated 66 hours of development time rated at $75/hour

              8 hours: Strategy and wire-framing

              15 hours: Homepage Design

              20 hours: Additional pages (4 hours per page)

              13 hours: Front and back-end development and UX

              13 hours: Client communication and revisions

              THINGS THAT MAY COST EXTRA

              Strategic Planning

              Strategic planning means brainstorming and thinking through the layout and functionality of your website. Usually, this is simply included in the estimated design and development hours.

              The more complex a website is, the more important it is to think through and develop the design, layout, and navigation for a good user experience.

              You may want to spend more money here if you have a clear vision for your website and want it to perform the best that it can right from the start.

              Graphic Design | $150 – $1,500

              The model above assumes that you already have company branding features, like a logo. If you don’t, you can have one designed. A low-quality logo will cost you $150 or $1,500 and up for a decent, professional-level branding.

              The more professional and unique in quality, the more expensive the logo. So, you can end up spending a lot more than $1500 depending on your budget and quality needs.

              Theme | under $75

              Sometimes companies charge this as a separate expense. Just be aware that this charge should be no more than $75.

              If you see this as a line item on an invoice for a few hundred…then your web guy has some explaining to do.

              SECTION 2. CONTENT COSTS

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              There are three basic kinds of website content—word content, images, and video. Word and image content have always been industry standard, and video is quickly moving in that direction in certain business circles.

              The question of content costs really comes down to time and quality. You, as the client, can provide the content or you can outsource it to professionals. Of course, the ideal would be to have professional-grade word, image, and video content that convert browsers into buyers, but budget has to be considered.

              Here is a breakdown of the content options available to you with associated pricing, so that you can choose what works best for your brand based on your budget and quality needs.

              WORD CONTENT

              OPTION #1

              “ Provide Your Own Word Content ”

              FREE-ish

              The benefit of providing the word content for the website yourself is twofold. First of all, it’s free!

              Secondly, you know your industry and your company better than anyone. If you have great communication skills and you know exactly what you want your readers to know about your brand, services, and products, than this could be a great option for you.

              If, in fact, you or someone in your company that is already on your payroll has the time and really is a great writer, it would also be very beneficial to consider setting up a blog section on your website as well.

              However, if you do not have a tenth-grade English teacher on your payroll or an all-around confident writer, you may end up with copy that reflects poorly on your company.

              Make sure that if you plan to write the content, that you actually have the time. If it ends up being left on the back-burner for you, the whole web design process is held up. The web designer can’t move forward, and everyone is left frustrated.

              Also, are you a marketing specialist? A large part of SEO (search engine optimization) is done in the word content of the website. If you don’t know how to research what keywords are best for bringing your company more quality clientele or how to optimize your pages for them, your content won’t reflect well in the search engines.

              OPTION #2

              “ Outsource to a Content Writer ”

              $50 – $100 per page

              The benefits of using a professional content writer are quality and speed. Because it’s what they do for a living, they usually get the job done very quickly. No project hang-ups.

              Content writers are usually freelancers who don’t specialize in your industry or know your company specifically, so you need to plan on at least looking the content over and revising it with the writer. Otherwise, you risk spending a lot of money on content that is only ok in quality.

              When hiring a content writer, it is helpful to hire one that is willing to put the time into researching your industry. We also recommend reading a writing sample of theirs or looking at a site they have written the content for.

              Another potential downside to outsourcing to a content writer is that they may not have SEO experience. You or your marketing agency will often have to provide keywords before they get started with the writing.

              Content writers can be expensive. They generally charge about $50 – $100 per page.

              OPTION #3

              “ Let the Marketing Agency Handle It ”

              $75 – $150 per page

              If your marketing agency writes the content, it is going to be well researched and it will include your input. A marketing agency wants to earn a long-term relationship with you so they typically go the extra mile.

              They may have an in-house writer or they might outsource to a content writer—but it will be one that they are familiar with and trust. It guarantees a certain amount of quality control over the content, even if the first draft is outsourced, because the agency will provide the final draft.

              An agency can provide keywords and optimize the content for those keywords so that your site will have a lot of SEO value and rank better in the search engines.

              The biggest downside to having the marketing agency handle your content is that they are the most expensive option. You are paying for the writing, research time, SEO optimization, and a quality guarantee.

              The cost of having a marketing agency handle your web content ranges from about $75 – $150 per page, and they may consider SEO to be an additional expense.

              If you go with the marketing agency option, be sure to ask if SEO is an included or additional expense, so that you can be sure exactly what you will be paying for professional quality content.

              IMAGE CONTENT

              Below are the options and associated costs for your website images:

              OPTION #1

              “ Provide Your Own Images ”

              FREE

              The main benefit of providing your own images is that the cost is free.

              Poor image quality from a cell phone camera may make your site look unprofessional and cause visitors to equate the quality of your services with the quality of your images.

              Great written content will not redeem poor image quality. So, if you plan on taking pictures with your phone, stage them and take them with a steady hand.

              OPTION #2

              “ Use Stock Photography ”

              $10 – $100 Per Image

              The benefit of using stock photography is that it is professional-grade quality that you can see before you pay for at a very low price.

              The downside is that they are not images specific to your company or brand—they are generic to industry, and they may already appear on several other sites.

              The cost for stock photography is generally $10 – $100 per image.

              You can find free images, but they are often generic, low quality, and are on a lot of other websites.

              You can either pick the stock photography you want or ask the web designer to do it as he develops out your site.

              OPTION #3

              “ Hire A Professional Photographer ”

              $500 – $5000 Per Site

              Hiring a professional photographer would be the ideal choice if your budget allows for it. They can take action shots of your team at work, custom shots of your products, and if you hire the right one, they probably have an eye for capturing the essence of your company itself.

              Professional photographers generally charge for blocks of time, like half-day rates or full-day rates. Each block of time may include a certain amount of edited or printed images, or it may be an expense on its own.

              If you decide to hire a professional, make sure you know exactly what is included in the costs. What is the cost per hour? What is the cost per image file? What is the cost per image edit?

              Also, make sure you research them and ALWAYS look at their portfolio beforehand to determine whether or not you like their shooting and editing style. Photographers are artists—they each have their own personal style and flare that is subjective. Some styles will work better for you and your industry than others.

              You can ask your web marketing agency if they have recommendations. They may have professional photographers that they recommend to clients because they are familiar with their work.

              The cost for professional images can vary greatly depending on the location, subject matter, quantity of images you need, photographer’s prices and rights to the images, but you can expect that it will run anywhere from $500 – $5,000 for your entire project.

              This is always something that you can do later, but we especially advocate for this option if you are an ecommerce business.

              VIDEO CONTENT

              Adding video content is another option you can consider. It has not yet become industry standard, though it is moving in that direction. Video has the potential to help increase conversion rates by capturing viewer’s attention and engaging them.

              OPTION #1

              “ You Provide The Video ”

              FREE-ish

              Again, you can provide video content yourself for free. It will cost you a lot of time, however, as video production usually produces only about a minute of footage per hour of filming and many other hours editing and rewriting. So, it is important to keep in mind that time is a big factor when producing your own video content. Once again, steady hands and staging the set will help tremendously.

              ****IF YOU HAVE NEVER FILMED OR PRODUCED A VIDEO BEFORE…DON’T!!!!

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              OPTION #2

              “ Hire A Freelancer ”

              $1,000 – $5,000 Per Project

              This can be a huge win or a huge loss, depending on the quality of the freelancer and whether or not their style fits your brand. If you decide to go this route, make sure you do your research and ALWAYS look at their portfolio beforehand.

              The rates for hiring a freelance videographer can vary greatly depending on the content and quality. They generally range from about $1,000 – $5,000 for a small project of between 1 to 5 minutes of complete, edited footage.

              OPTION #3

              “ Hire A Video Production Company ”

              5k – 15k Per Project

              Though this generally ensures a high-level of professional quality, hiring a company that specializes in video production can be very expensive. These are the kinds of production companies that big businesses hire to shoot their TV commercials and such.

              Depending on how complex and involved the video is, it could cost you as much as the website itself. You’re looking at $5,000 for the baseline, simple, but good-quality video and upwards of 15k for a more dynamic project.

              SECTION 3. FUNCTIONALITY OPTIONS

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              There are websites that consist of pretty pictures and fancy words and then there are websites that actually do things. The more they do, the more expensive they get.

              In nerd speak, this is due to the time it takes to design, develop, and incorporate the functionality that “does stuff.”

              Higher budget websites usually include some sort of automation, like ecommerce. Additional features such as a customer log-in, event calendars, and interfaces to third-party analytics and reporting are relatively commonplace.

              Let’s dive into the most common functionality add-ons and the costs associated with each.

              ECOMMERCE | $1,500 +

              A simple ecommerce website has a shopping cart with 1-100 products. Woocommerce for WordPress is a very popular option to handle this level of ecommerce, but many other options exist.

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              Ecommerce allows you to sell a product and take payment directly from your website. There are various types of functionality involved in this process.

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              Here are a few examples of ecommerce functionality:

              Automated shipping calculation

              Merchant gateway integration (to take credit cards)

              PayPal

              Authorize.net

              Recurring charges for things like membership dues

              Batch label printing

              Here is a breakdown of cost estimates to add ecommerce to your website:

              Basic Ecommerce

              1 – 100 Products

              $1,500 – $3,500

              Basic Ecommerce

              100 – 1000 Products

              $3,500 – $10,000

              Basic Ecommerce

              Over 1000 Products

              $10,000 – $250,000 +

              CUSTOMER LOG-IN | $1,500 +

              Customer log-in functionality is great for membership sites, product sites, or other organizations that have information on their website that their customers would want to access.

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              Adding a customer log-in to your business website can provide an automated customer service that reduces time your staff has to spend troubleshooting with clients over the phone.

              For example, an Ecommerce webstore can allow a customer direct access to their order information. They can use this to track the shipping status of their orders, manage returns, or save a wish list for future orders.

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              Instead of requiring your customers fill in their personal information each time they order from your website, they would be able to log in and make purchases with all of their stored account information.

              We used an Ecommerce example to keep your brain from exploding, but there are so many other practical uses for the customer log-in feature.

              The cost for building this into your website typically starts at $1,500.

              API INTEGRATIONS | $500 – $8000 +

              API (Application Programming Interface) Integration is a fancy way to reference a bridge between your website and another application.

              Many mainstream companies develop APIs for you, so integrating them with your website is a vastly simplified process. Integrating your website with simple APIs generally runs around $500 for a developer’s time.

              Simple API Integrations$500 +

              Shipping integration with FedEx or UPS

              Email Marketing (Mail Chimp, Constant Contact, etc.)

              Affiliate Marketing (Amazon, Etsy, Ebay, etc.)

              Payment Gateways (PayPal, Authorize.net, etc.)

              Inventory Management / Point of Sale Systems

              Some programs or systems do not have any default integration that allow them to connect with your website. Many times these must be coded from scratch by a qualified developer.

              Advanced API Integrations$8000 +

              Advanced mobile apps

              Fully-custom web apps

              Custom ecommerce

              Applications requiring high levels of security (i.e. online banking, classified military or federal, etc.)

              If your website requires many advanced APIs, you’re probably not using WordPress as a development platform. Most of the time, these advanced APIs begin at $8,000 and increase based on level of complexity.

              CMS CUSTOMIZATION | $1,500 +

              WordPress, by definition, is a content management system (CMS). A CMS is a user-friendly software that provides admin tools for users with little knowledge of web programming languages to create and manage website content with relative ease.

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              It is very cost-effective to have the ability to update basic web content such as page text, images or contact information without having to pay your website developer for each and every little change that you want to make to your site. This is included with every WordPress website by default.

              But sometimes, a business will benefit from customizing the back-end “admin” area.

              You may want to customize WordPress to suit your unique business needs if…

              You want different levels of employee access (admin, manager, blogger, etc.)

              You want to have different user groups (retail/wholesale, members, distributors, etc.)

              You want to simplify navigation (for non-techy content managers / business owners)

              Multiple websites within a single login

              If a company needs a more customized solution to effectively manage their content, an advanced CMS runs around $1,000 and an enterprise level CMS customization runs $10,000 and up.

              PLUGINS | FREE – $500

              Plugins are third-party coded modules, developed specifically for WordPress that allow a developer to add specialized functionality to a website without writing the custom code from scratch.

              Essentially, plugins are pre-developed “plug-and-go” modules that extend the functionality of a WordPress website. This is way cheaper than what it would cost to have a developer build it just for you.

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              Popular Plugin Functions Include:

              Event calendars

              Business directories

              Analytics tracking

              Social sharing widgets

              Lead-capture forms

              Plugins can range anywhere from $FREE – $500 per feature and are a very cost-effective way to add flexibility and functionality to a website.

              ANALYTICS TRACKING | FREE – LUDICROUS

              Collecting data on how your website visitors find you, how they behave when they get to your website, and what percentage are converting to leads by filling out contact forms, making purchases, or completing another desirable action is vital to understanding if your website is performing well.

              This information can help you better position your products and services, and realign the content and calls to action on pages that are not performing well.

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              Google Analytics is a free app provided by Google that you can add by copying a small snippet of code and pasting it into a plugin or directly into your website code.

              If you need more advanced segmentation or deeper analytical reporting, that is going to cost you extra. Google Analytics premium costs a cool $150,000. If that price turns you off, there are many other affordable marketing automation softwares, such as SilverPop or HubSpot, that can be integrated into your website for a much more reasonable $3000 +.

              SECTION 4. ONGOING / POST-LAUNCH EXPENSES

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              A common misconception is that once a website is finished and bought and paid for, the expenses will stop.

              The initial design and construction of the site is certainly the largest expense. However, there are additional, much smaller, ongoing expenses that are necessary to keep your site up and running and secure.

              Here are some post-launch expenses that you should expect to pay after your site is finished.

              It is important to note that these costs aren’t manufactured by your web designer in order to keep syphoning your money after the project is over. These costs are universal—all professional websites require them.

              WEB HOSTING | $10 – $400 / month

              In order for your website to appear on the internet, the actual data that makes up your site has live on a physical hard-drive somewhere. It has to be stored on a server—a secure server that can’t be hacked and has backups in place so that you won’t lose all the data to your site in the event of an electronic failure.

              When you pay for web hosting, you’re basically paying for space on a secure server that is owned and operated by a company. You pay for the time it takes to make regular data backups and repairs and for the electrical costs to keep the server running.

              It is very important to have a reliable web host so your website is never offline and is not left vulnerable to computer viruses or hackers.

              The cost of web hosting will depend on the size of your site and the amount of data and space it uses on a secure server. You can expect to pay between $20 – $60 / month for hosting a small business website.

              Larger sites that use more bandwidth because they have more pages, more content, advanced functionality and database applications will naturally cost more to host.

              If you require your own server—rather than just space on a server shared with other websites, hosting fees can cost up to $400 / month.

              DOMAIN REGISTRATION AND RENEWALS | $10 – $15 per year

              A domain name is basically a web “address,” where your site can be found by visitors (i.e. www.yourwebsite.com).

              The domain name has to be bought and registered so that you will own the rights to that web address and no other business or entity can use it.

              Owning a domain name will incur a recurring yearly expense, or you can pay for a block of years up front. The good news is that domain name registration costs are fairly low—usually around $10 – $15 per year.

              Purchasing a domain name that has never been used is very low cost as well.

              However, if you want a domain name that has been previously purchased by another company or entity, they may only sell it to you for a premium price. It could cost you hundreds or even thousands of dollars for the initial purchase fee.

              MAINTENANCE AND SECURITY | $150 – $300 per month

              Maintaining a WordPress website involves updates to code, themes, and plugins, regular website and data backups, and defensive software to prevent malicious attacks (like hacking or viruses).

              Website backups by themselves are like insurance, and may be worth their weight in gold if you happen to fall victim to a malicious attack. Spending a lot of money on a significant website project and then losing it to an attack happens more often than you might think, and it is easily prevented.

              At a bare minimum, you should keep backups of your website files as well as update your website quarterly to prevent data loss or corruption in the event of a hack or virus.

              Other common attacks involve redirecting your customers to pornography or a site that contains a virus, which causes damage your company’s reputation. These attacks are much more subtle, and without a maintenance plan in place, you will often only find out when a customer tells you!

              Maintenance costs run at about $150 – $300 / month.

              ONLINE MARKETING | Options starting at $300 / month

              After sifting through all of these options, you may find that your website has reached a good place—one where the quality and functionality compliments your company needs and has real potential for client conversions.

              The common next step for sites that have reached this point is to begin investing in marketing. This can be a highly profitable post-launch investment.

              A true explanation that does this justice would be another 5000 words (at least). Hopefully, you’re satisfied with a short summary for now. This is, after all, a blog about web design, not marketing.

              SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process of optimizing your site to rank better on search engines like Google for particular keywords that are significant to your industry. When people search for a keyword, you want your site to come up on the first page, and there are many things that contribute to this ranking.

              SEO involves back-link building, content development and promotion, social media marketing, on-page SEO, and analytics.

              SEO will cost you anywhere from $300 – $3,000 per month for small business plans.

              PPC (Pay-Per-Click) Advertising is another method of bringing traffic to your site. Through social media ads, shopping ads, and paid search ads, you can target a specific kind of clientele and drive them to your company website.

              PPC Management will cost you anywhere from $300 – 20% of your monthly ad budget (i.e. if you’re spending $10,000 each month on PPC ads, you should plan on paying 20% of that [$2,000] to a marketing company as a management fee).

              Email Marketing can help you to get more sales from repeat customers. This service involves email list building, designing email templates to target return customers, and managing the email campaigns.

              Email Marketing will cost you anywhere from $400 – $2,500 per month, depending on the number of emails and level of complexity of the plan.

              CONCLUSION

              This is a lot of information, and perhaps all the numbers stacked-up seem overwhelming.

              But, it is important to note that you don’t have to spend all of this money on every feature at once. These additions can take place over time.

              To build a professional-quality website, you will need a starting budget of $4,000. This will afford you a basic, professional-quality website, plus required post-launch and maintenance expenses.

              From there, you can slowly spend more to customize your theme, upgrade the quality of your word, image, and video content, and add more functionality and features as your budget and your brand grow.

              The point of this article is not to overwhelm you, but rather to provide you with realistic expectations and tangible options based on the many varying degrees of quality and functionality that go into web design.

              Armed with this new knowledge and understanding of what goes into building a professional website, we hope that you will be able to make a more informed decision regarding your company’s online presence.

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