Welcome back. Now we were just talking about why don’t reviews stick? What I want to do now is show you a couple of tricks that can help or facilitate reviews sticking for your business on one of these review sites. Just remember that these reviews will kind of oscillate back and forth, especially on Yelp between the “recommended” “not recommended” side, depending on the engagement of the user, but there’s some other things that you can do to indicate to their search algorithm that this review is important and a value. Depending, obviously, if you have more people in your organization, the better here.

What I’m going to do is show you something. Now, this doesn’t work 100% of the time, obviously I wish it did, I wish it was some sort of konami code, if you will to make sure these reviews stick, but it can greatly help any small business in terms of improving the ability for these reviews to stick.

When you go on to any review inside of Google or Facebook or Yelp, there’s typically under that review the option to either like or favorite or say, in the case of Yelp, it’s useful, funny, or cool. What I always recommend my clients do is to go in there, at least have them or a couple members of their staff if possible, all go in with their different Yelp accounts and then go click on these buttons underneath these reviews. What that’s going to do is that’s going to be a social indicator to the search algorithm or the review filtering algorithm that, “Hey, this review is useful to other users,” simply because it’s getting “a vote” from the users on the platform.

Typically, what I recommend is for example, I’m on a Yelp page right here. Underneath the review after the written part, you’ll see three little buttons that say “useful”, “funny” and “cool”. Typically, I always click on the “useful” and the “cool”. If it’s funny, then I’ll click on the “funny”, but I don’t want it to be a little too obvious that they’re just getting votes straight across. Coming down and just making sure that you’re doing this to every one of your reviews.

One of the things that’s really beneficial is if you can get in there and you can do this within the first day, simply because the chances are that you’ll be able to actually give that “social vote” before the review filter comes around the first time to wipe it off of the review site. If you and your staff, however large you are or maybe your family members can jump on there real quick, hit “useful” and “cool” or like these different reviews, the chances are higher that it is going to be able to actually stick and stay there.

That is just one insightful way to do it for you. I would also publicly thank them if you’re a business, that’s another way to engage each one of these reviews as somebody that’s come in to the business.

Hopefully that helps, that’s just a little sort of inside scoop there, but it also is just a big indicator to your customers that you really care and you’re engaged.