How to Get Reviews for Google Maps Local Business Center

According to information obtained from interviews with CitySearch.com, having a review of your business appear as part of your listing on a local search engine, doubles the likelihood that the person searching for a business to provide them with goods or services will take an action. Those actions might be to click to your website, a map, or your phone number. On Google Maps Local Business Center, these actions are recorded for you to see on the analytic that they offer for free when you claim your listing.

So how do you get reviews. Some may come to you without taking any action at all. Friendly customers who appreciated your products or services might just go home and decide to help you out with a review. My experience thus far has indicated that this rarely happens. So, you will likely need to take some pro-active measures to get reviews.

1. You might ask your top ten customers to do a review for you.

2. You might offer customers the opportunity to review you just after the completion of your interaction with them. You may even want to offer some inducement, such as a discount, or gift card, to get a friendly seeming client to do a review. The local search engines frown on this type of incentive effort, but it is happening every day. To speed this effort along, you might have a laptop of other computer handy for them to do the review.

3. While I don't recommend this, review yourself or have family and friends review you. The problem here is that sometimes such reviews come off sounding fake. If you use this method, be certain to use common sense in how you write the review. Again, I don't like this approach, but I know it is very common.

Setting up to do the review on Google Maps Local Business Center is fairly easy. Here is a step-by-step approach for posting the reviews. You may want to email this to your best customers when asking them for a review:

How to review a business on Google Maps Local Business Center

1. Starting from homepage www.Google.com, click on the link that says "maps" in the top-left corner of the screen.

2. At the top of the page, there will be a search bar in which you can enter

-Business name or keywords and a city or ZIP.

(E.g.: "Coronado Bay Urgent Care", or "Urgent Care" and "Imperial Beach" or "91932".)

2. Find the featured listing to the business you'd like to review. In that listing there will be a link that says "Write a review".

Click that link.

4. This opens a pop-up template in which you:

-Title your review

-Give a brief description of your experience there.

Once having filled this out, click the "Save" button under the review box.