Business & Marketing Tips
How to Respond to Google Reviews (with Examples)
Learn why and how to respond to Google reviews—both positive and negative—with real examples to model after.
Consumers give online reviews a lot of weight. And a recent survey found that prospective customers see service businesses and tradespeople as part of the top three industries where reviews matter most.
If you’re not actively generating more online reviews for your company, you could be taking yourself out of the running for new business. Yelp is the second-most-popular review site (right behind Google), so amassing a healthy number of reviews there is critical for companies that want to grow.
If you’ve been wondering how to get more Yelp reviews, never fear! This guide will help you draw attention to your Yelp page and build up reviews from customers past, present, and future.
Table of Contents
- Claim and optimize your Yelp page
- Add Yelp icons to digital assets
- Promote your Yelp page in real life
- Don’t solicit reviews directly
- Highlight positive reviews
- Respond to Yelp reviews
- Know what to do when you get a bad review
Claim and optimize your Yelp page
The first step to getting more Yelp reviews is ensuring you control your Yelp page. This is important for all of your business listings.
If you’re just starting your business, you can submit a request to Yelp to establish a page for your company. If you’ve been around for a while but have never been on Yelp, your company may already have a presence there – anyone can submit a business to be listed. In that case, here’s what you need to do.
Head to Yelp for Business to search for your company’s name. If a page already exists, you’ll have the opportunity to claim it. Yelp will ask for information proving you’re a legitimate representative of the business. Once Yelp verifies your identity and business affiliation, you will gain access to your business profile and can make updates.
After you’ve claimed your page, you need to optimize your Yelp presence. This will ensure anyone visiting your page has a great experience. An optimized Yelp page should be updated to include the following:
- Contact information. Include your company’s logo, phone number, website URL, and physical address. Make it easy for prospective customers to get in touch!
- Business hours. List out your hours of operation for each day of the week. Update your hours whenever they change – whether a permanent shift or one due to an upcoming holiday.
- Business description. You can add an overview of your company, information about your history and leadership, and a full list of services offered. Make a good impression on visitors by adding more details about your business.
- Photos. A picture is worth a thousand words! Incorporate images that showcase your work to capture visitors’ attention. These pictures can highlight your office, past company projects, or even your team members.
- Answers to any user questions. Visitors can submit a question in the “Ask the Community” section of your Yelp page. While anyone with a Yelp profile can respond, it’s even better if the answer comes from your business’s official source of truth: You!
Add Yelp icons to digital assets
Once you’ve claimed and optimized your Yelp page, you'll want to let your audience know it’s there. You can spread the word about your Yelp page via digital assets with icons and quick verbiage. This helps prospective customers find more information about you. It also lets current and past clients know they can add their own reviews.
Most people are busy – even if they have a wonderful experience with your company, they might not go out of their way to find your Yelp page and leave a review. When you feature your page prominently across your digital assets, you make it easier for happy customers to leave feedback, which can help you get more Yelp reviews.
Fortunately, Yelp provides business owners with downloadable image files to promote their Yelp presence on other digital assets. You can download the Yelp favicon or buttons to add to your business website and email signature. You should also link your Yelp profile to your business’s social media pages.
Promote your Yelp page in real life
Yelp also makes it easy to spread the word about your Yelp page offline. You can order stickers from Yelp and place them at your brick-and-mortar locations or on your service trucks.
You can also incorporate the Yelp logo into any printed materials you create for your business. Add the logo alongside a message proclaiming “We’re on Yelp!” to postcards, business cards, flyers, other handouts, or even a booth. This is a great way to get more Google reviews, too.
If you don’t want to add the logo but still want the exposure, consider adding a QR code to printed materials that directs people to your Yelp page. The easier you make it to find your profile, the more likely you are to get additional Yelp reviews!
Don’t solicit reviews directly
Here’s why it’s so important to spread the word about your Yelp page: You can’t actively solicit reviews. Doing so violates Yelp’s content guidelines and can result in the company placing a Consumer Alert on your page.
Offering incentives in exchange for reviews also violates Yelp’s guidelines, and you can’t ask your friends, family members, or employees to review you, either. Unlike Google reviews, you can’t ask customers for reviews. All reviews must be organic.
Yelp is invested in providing its audience with unbiased, fair, honest reviews and is strict about these non-solicitation rules.
This means it’s even more vital for business owners to spread the word about their Yelp presence as a passive way to drive reviews. Rather than asking customers to share feedback, include language or signage on your physical and digital assets that lets everyone know they can find you on Yelp.
Highlight positive Yelp reviews
Just because you can’t solicit Yelp reviews doesn’t mean you can’t talk about positive feedback when it rolls in. In fact, knowing that these Yelp reviews are a genuine reflection of how customers feel about your business – not something you sought out – should make you feel great about sharing those positive reviews. Sharing these reviews is a great marketing tactic and can help bring the right customers to your business.
Where should you shout out your positive Yelp reviews? Everywhere you can! Post the review on social media with a thank you to the customer who wrote it, especially if the customer is a member of your target audience and matches your customer persona. There are also tools that allow you to embed a carousel of positive reviews from third-party sites – like Yelp – on your company’s website.
Sharing positive feedback doesn’t just help you build trust with prospects; it’s also a gentle reminder to existing customers that they can review you on Yelp, too. Plus, it lets the customer who left a review know that you’re listening and active. That’s a win-win-win!
Respond to Yelp reviews
You know the saying, “What you feed grows?” Well, it’s certainly true of online reviews. If you want to get more Yelp reviews, take the time to nurture the reviews you already have.
Whenever you receive a Yelp review, leave an official response on behalf of your business. The responses don’t need to be lengthy or involved. A simple acknowledgment or thanks to each reviewer can go a long way.
Responding to reviews makes the customers who left the review feel seen and heard. At the same time, responding might encourage others to leave their own feedback. Customers may feel more compelled to share their thoughts if they know your business listens and responds to what clients have to say.
Know what to do when you get a bad review
Of course, it’s easy to respond to positive online reviews – who doesn’t want to engage in mutual appreciation with happy customers? What’s harder is dealing with bad Yelp reviews.
The first thing you should know is that bad reviews happen to everyone. No human is perfect, so no business is perfect. At some point, someone will have a negative experience with your company.
The good news is that negative reviews aren’t the end of the world. In fact, consumers are suspicious of businesses with only five-star ratings; it seems like they’re gaming the system. Surveys show that people actually prefer companies whose ratings hover just above four stars.
The real challenge comes with accepting negative feedback and responding gracefully. Do not get mad or defensive in your response, even if you think the customer is wrong. Instead, take a deep breath, remove your ego from the situation, and listen to what the unhappy customer is saying. Respond properly so you can look at what has happened without burning the bridge to the customer entirely.
Leaving a diplomatic, thoughtful response to negative feedback doesn’t only serve to repair your relationship with the angry reviewer. It also shows others reading the interaction that you run your business with integrity and genuinely care about doing what’s right for your customers. Once you’ve left a public response on Yelp, reach out to the individual directly via email or phone to see what else you can do to make things right.
Wondering how to get more Yelp reviews?
As you can see, there is no magic bullet to help you get more Yelp reviews for your business. If you want to amass more reviews over time, follow these steps:
- Claim and optimize your Yelp page
- Add Yelp icons to digital assets
- Promote your Yelp page in real life
- Don’t solicit reviews directly
- Highlight positive reviews
- Respond to Yelp reviews
- Know what to do when you get a bad review