Negative Results Course: Dealing With Review Platforms
Script from the lesson The Negative Results Course
Jason Barnard speaking: Review platforms. This lesson goes way beyond dealing with review platforms that show low ratings on your Brand SERPs. I’ll cover an overall review platform strategy, so even if you don’t have a low scoring review platform on your Brand SERP, the lesson will be helpful to your business.
Jason Barnard speaking: What’s the situation? We’re looking at platforms that collect reviews from your audience about your brand. This lesson doesn’t cover individual reviews by journalists or bloggers. Those are covered in the lesson about blogs and articles on your Brand SERPs. Reputable review platforms are good candidates for ranking on your Brand SERP. Great stuff, but the knife cuts both ways.
Jason Barnard speaking: A review platform showing high scores for your brand is very positive and very convincing for users and for Google. One showing low scores for your brand is very, very negative. There are three main types of review platform that tend to rank well on Brand SERPs. Firstly, service reviews. These are an evaluation or opinion about your overall service or your overall brand. Service reviews are a rating of how well your company treats your customers.
Jason Barnard speaking: That includes not only sales and after sale service, but that rating also includes your client’s perception of your site, which is especially important if they make an online purchase without ever talking to your staff. And that last point is a great reason to invest a lot of effort into an amazing UX on your site right from the landing page, through the checkout process, to the confirmation page, the email confirmation and any follow-up emails. You might have a low fail rate for checkout confirmations or email delivery or any other part of your sales process, but however few fails you have each fail is a person and that person is a client who can give a service review. Remember that when it goes wrong for them, and they are frustrated, a bad review is the probable outcome.
Jason Barnard speaking: Secondly, product reviews, obviously that’s about your products. These are much less likely to rank on your Brand SERP. If they do, then adapt the approach I set out here to that product. If you’re a uni product service sector business, the distinction might not be clear in your mind.
Jason Barnard speaking: So, quick clarification of the term service review. If your product is a service such as a consultant or a plumber, then the term service reviews is confusing. The distinction is that in the case of a service as a product, the product review is the quality of the work you did. And the service review is how well your company treated the customer.
Jason Barnard speaking: Thirdly, employee review sites. These rank quite well especially if they’ve managed to collect a lot of employee reviews, and in this context, a dozen is a lot. Glassdoor is an example that comes up in Brand SERPs time and again. Whatever the type of review platform, low scoring review stars look very bad on your Brand SERP and
they send out a very negative signal to people Googling your brand name. This one star looks very bad. Even three stars still looks bad. When you get four stars, that’s where things start to look good. Importantly, review platforms rank well on Brand SERPs today and they’re not going away anytime soon. Data from AccuRanker indicates that over 75% of Brand SERPs contain review stars and the review stars are drawn from these review platforms.
Jason Barnard speaking: So, you have to face up to these platforms and make sure your clients are sufficiently happy with your products and services to give you a great review every single time. As we’ll see, just a few unhappy customers can easily ruin your writing. A quick side note, up to September 2019, brands could cheat and get stars on their own Brand SERP with a page on their own site.
Jason Barnard speaking: But then Google updated their approach on how they display service level review stars in the SERPs. And as of September 3rd 2019, Google no longer shows the review stars if the page is on the brand’s site. So, even if you create a reviews page on your site, add genuine reviews to it, and get it to rank on your Brand SERP, you won’t see the stars on the SERP.
Jason Barnard speaking: What if you have a low scoring platform on page one? There are several choices. Firstly, you can try to improve the score on that platform. That’s covered in this lesson. Secondly, you can encourage Google to rank another platform in its place.
Jason Barnard speaking: Google is unlikely to put more than one or two review platforms on your exact match Brand SERP, so give it a reason to put another platform in the place of the negative one. Make another relevant platform irresistible to Google. Two factors come into play here. How relevant the platform is to your industry and the sheer volume of reviews that platform has for your brand. A relevant platform with significant numbers of positive reviews is a stunningly good candidate for your Brand SERP.
Jason Barnard speaking: Thirdly, you can drown it by using the leapfrog technique. Watch the lessons in this course about leapfrogging to see how to do that. Now, reviews, maths, and scoring. For any review platform at low levels of engagement by your clients, it’s all a bit death-or-glory. The margins are very thin and ratings can flip from positive to negative very easily, so be aware of the task ahead.
Jason Barnard speaking: Now, here’s the maths and don’t worry if you aren’t comfortable with maths, this is kind of a math story. The story is that the less reviews you have on a platform, the easier it is for a great rating to flip to a bad one. If you can get a lot of reviews, the writing will be much more stable.
Jason Barnard speaking: So, the aim is to collect a large number of four and five star reviews on any given platforms, keep your ratings and visible reputation positive and stable. Now, for the sums, I hope I’ve made it reasonably simple and illustrative. Let’s look at a bad result. Starting off with a single one-star review, you have a 20% average, that’s bad.
Jason Barnard speaking: If you then get one five-star review, what happens? You have one very happy client and you might think that counter balances the unhappy client. Unfortunately, review stars and ratings are far from a one-to-one trade-off. You now have 60%. That’s three stars. That wonderful five-star review hasn’t completely drowned the one-star review and the results still looks bad on your SERP. If you get another five-star review, that’s really nice, but what’s your score now? Two five-star reviews still can’t counteract the single one-star review. Your rating is still only 73%. That’s still in the three-star bracket. You’re still not looking good enough.
Jason Barnard speaking: Four stars is the lowest bar I consider to be good enough. Anything below that makes people think twice about your brand. So, the ratio is three great reviews for every bad review. That doesn’t seem too bad, but if the next reviewer only gives you one-star review, look what happens, it drops quite a long way, well below that four-star target you’re aiming for.
Jason Barnard speaking: Now, we all know that getting five-star reviews is pretty hard. Getting four-star reviews might appear to be enough, but once you have any single review that’s below four stars, no number of four-star reviews will ever get your average back up to four. So, relying on your clients to give you four stars, isn’t going to work.
Jason Barnard speaking: Now, look at this data. I know it looks a bit complicated, but look how slowly that average creeps up with each additional very good four-star review, and with only four-star reviews, it will never get to four, you need five stars in the mix somewhere. In this typical example, I need six five-star reviews to actually get that average back up to four. And I need to get 15 extra reviews to achieve that. That’s quite a big ask. Now that’s at low volumes. What happens if we scale up a bit? Imagine that you have 100 reviews already collected and the average score is three.
Jason Barnard speaking: Now, look at how slowly that average rises with each additional review. Very, very slowly. The good news is that any new one-star review won’t have much impact. The bad news of course is that neither do the four or five-star reviews. So, you need boat loads of reviews and you need a lot of five-star reviews.
Jason Barnard speaking: Now, a word of warning. Even when you’re in the seemingly safe situation, you need to keep your eye on the ball. This example appears to be plain sailing at 4.1 stars, but it doesn’t take much to ruin that and drop below the four-star score that wins and keeps customers. In this example, just four one-star reviews, pulls that seemingly safe score below the average we’re looking for.
Jason Barnard speaking: And once you’ve dropped below, even if it’s only a tiny bit below getting back is tough. In this example, it takes another 14 five-star reviews in a row to get back to your starting position again and feel relatively safe. In short, review scores are very hard to build up, very easy to lose, and they’re very hard to regain when you do lose them.
Jason Barnard speaking: The more reviews you have on a platform, the more stable your rating will be and the more you can happily welcome that platform onto your Brand SERP. Now, the bit you really wanted is the general rules for collecting reviews, and these are quite scary, so take a big breath. As a general rule of thumb, if you are to have positive-looking ratings on a review site, then the ratio of good reviews to bad is three to one. That doesn’t seem too scary, but that doesn’t mean making three quarters of your clients very happy. Unhappy clients are very much more likely to give you a review. And however much you encourage your happy clients, the ratio of happy clients giving you a review is always much lower than for unhappy clients.
Jason Barnard speaking: A realistic ratio of unhappy to happy clients you need to aim for is close to the nine to one.
Jason Barnard speaking: You need to satisfy 90% of your clients and just to push the point that one bad review can be triggered from any single, less than perfect experience with you. So, let’s say there were 12 touchpoints during and after purchase. That’s 12 opportunities to get things wrong. Any one of those 12 can trigger a negative review, none will ever trigger a positive review on its own. To get a great review, you have to get all 12 100% right and that’s quite scary. Now, a big question. Do you want these review platforms on your SERP? A resounding yes if you’re confident your products and customer experience will get great reviews. If you can get those yellow four-star reviews on your Brand SERP, that sends a very positive signal to people who are googling your brand name especially when those stars are on an independent platform they recognise. Better still, what Google shows in your Brand SERPs is a reflection of its opinion of the world’s opinion of you.
Jason Barnard speaking: So, if it’s showing these positive reviews and ratings, then Google feels positively about your credibility and is happy to communicate that confidence to its users via your Brand SERP. But obviously when you have bad reviews and ratings on your Brand SERP, and for me, even three stars is bad, it sends a negative signal to people googling your brand name.
Jason Barnard speaking: And it also indicates that Google has a bad impression of the world’s opinion of you. And obviously if you want your brand to succeed on Google and SEO, Google needs to have a good opinion of you. It needs to be convinced that you’re a credible, reliable, and trustworthy solution. Reviews are key to that. In short, whatever the state of reviews on your Brand SERP, a solid intelligent strategy for gathering reviews on authoritative and relevant platforms is vital to your marketing strategy.
Jason Barnard speaking: Just a quick aside, if you aren’t confident you can sustain four stars without having to filter the clients you ask reviews for, then either your products and customer service need to be upgraded or you’re acquiring the wrong customers. Both of those questions are well outside the scope of this course.
Jason Barnard speaking: So, what do you need to do? Within the scope of this course, if a platform that shows a low rating for you ranks on your Brand SERP, then you either need to deal with it by pushing positive reviews I described below or drown it using the techniques I explained in the leapfrogging lessons in this course.
Jason Barnard speaking: So, make the choice. Will you improve the result and make it welcome on your Brand SERP? Or would you try to push it off your SERP? If you decide to push it off your SERP, don’t touch it. Don’t update your profile or encourage your clients to give reviews. If you hope to push it off your SERP, the less up to date it appears to be, the better. If you decide to make it look better either because it’s important to you or because it’s relevant to your audience, then include it in your overall review strategy and make it priority number one.
Jason Barnard speaking: Next, review platform strategy. Rather than focus on specifics of individual platforms, I think it’s more helpful to look at how you can make your global review platform strategy effective, both client facing and Google facing. So first, you need to set out the battlefield. You’re not going to be able to push your review scores up on every single platform, there are too many of them. Find those that you should concentrate on by searching for your brand name plus the word “reviews”. Make a list of all the review platforms that come up on the first two pages.
Jason Barnard speaking: Some will be the major players such as Trustpilot, Better Business Bureau, Yellow Pages or Glassdoor. Others will be specific to your market. You need both types. Now, you have your list of perhaps a dozen platforms, maybe more, maybe less, depending on your company and the industry, the first thing you need is to claim and update the profiles.
Jason Barnard speaking: Some platforms allow you to control your profile, some don’t, but claim all you can. For any of that you’re not going to be working on actively once you have claimed them, don’t update them. You don’t want them to look fresh in Google’s mind. Optimise the others, provide as much information about your brand as possible and make sure all the information on your profile is accurate and up to date: the phone number, the description, the logo, and so on and so forth. Most importantly, your brand name needs to be exactly the same as it appears on your site. Now, pick your battles. Choose two or three from the list that have either four stars already or that you can push up relatively easily to four stars.
Jason Barnard speaking: When you’re making that choice, take into account these factors and choose those that strike the best balance for your business. Number one, the current score. The lower, the score, the more you need to improve it, obviously. Number two, the number of reviews on the platform already, the more there are the harder it is to move the needle, but also the more reviews there are the stronger the signal to Google. There’s a balance to be found there.
Jason Barnard speaking: Number three, the authority of the review platform in Google’s eyes. Number four, the authority of the review platform in your audiences’ eyes. Number five, the relevancy of the platform to your audience. If one exists, a niche platform that is popular with your audience is a better choice than the big hitters.
Jason Barnard speaking: Relevancy can often outrank authority. Plus, they’re more likely to send qualified traffic that’s easy to convert. Number six, ownership of the reviews. Look at whether they retain the ownership of your reviews. Getting tied into a review platform is definitely not ideal especially if there’s a fee attached. Number seven, control. Be wary of platforms that limit your control of your profile. Number eight, cost. Look carefully at the short and long-term costs to you. Promoting to a paid platform might be sustainable short-term but not long-term. Be careful about ongoing costs. Once you have your list of two or three platforms, push your clients as much as you can to those and get as many reviews as you can.
Jason Barnard speaking: If you get sufficient positive reviews on the two or three platforms that you’ve chosen and you’ve chosen wisely, then one, perhaps two, will hit page one and stay there. If you had a less than positive review platform on your Brand SERP, it will drop off onto page two and out of sight. Now, once you have a four-star review platform on page one, not only does your Brand SERP look much better to people searching your brand name, but you will also have improved Google’s opinion of you.
Jason Barnard speaking: Now, onto the practicalities. Asking for review. Since people who are happy with your products and services are less likely to give you a review than those who are unhappy, you have to ask for reviews. You can do this at several stages. With the website sales, you can ask on your site at the end of the checkout process. As long as the user experience on your site is amazing, this gives great return of positive reviews. You can ask in an immediate post-sale email, or you can ask in their user account post-purchase or on the support site, or as part of a post sales phone call, or perhaps as an integral part of a later follow-up email, or even as a dedicated email a few days or weeks after purchase. Now for offline sales, you can actually ask face-to-face at the time of sale. People often forget that. You can also ask in a post-sales email, but obviously you need to get their email, which isn’t always practical. Lastly, you can also ask in a post-sales conversation if that person comes back to your shop or you deal with them again face-to-face. When asking for a review at time of sale, you rely 100% on a great purchase experience. When you’re asking later on, you rely on the client being 100% happy with the value your product has brought them and your sales process.
Jason Barnard speaking: You need to use your good judgment to decide which is best for your situation. As an offline business, you’re probably used to asking for reviews person to person. As an online business, you may have lost sight of the fact that talking to people is surprisingly effective. The idea of saving on staff by minimizing contact with clients is a good business move.
Jason Barnard speaking: It might well be, but it might also be profitable for you to build direct contact with your clients into your review strategy. Using email to ask for reviews is the easy option and it’s currently the most fashionable. Emails are very powerful, that cheap and easy way to encourage reviews, but they can also be very annoying.
Jason Barnard speaking: We’ve all become used to receiving multiple email follow-ups when we make a purchase. Some are much more annoying than others. Try not to be too annoying.
Jason Barnard speaking: When planning your follow-up email strategy, think about your own experience as a client. We’re all used to receiving these multiple post-purchase emails. When they’re done well, they’re actually helpful. When they’re done badly, they kill any chance of getting a review and they could potentially lose the client. As a client, we’ve all been subjected to bullying by email. You hate it, I hate it, and so do your clients. Don’t do it. When you’re asking for a review, be very careful about the wording. How you word the request has an enormous effect on both the content of the review and the rating. Asking directly for a positive rating offer specifics in the wording of a review will often have the opposite effect. So, try to guide them towards expressing explicitly that they’re satisfied with your products and services without asking directly. Importantly, don’t ask direct questions about aspects of your product or service since they’ll tend to encourage simple yes and no answers that make no sense to the outside world.
Jason Barnard speaking: For example, “Did our noise reducing headphones live up to your expectations?” might very well elicit a great rating with a review that simply says yes, and that makes no sense to anybody. So, when you phrase your request, bear in mind that people often simply continue your line of thought and that’s a powerful insight.
Jason Barnard speaking: Starting with we hope you were satisfied with whatever puts the word satisfied in their mind. With that phrasing, the review could easily start with I was very satisfied with or an open question to encourage them to create context. “What was the best feature of the headphones?” encourages the client to describe their experience, the best feature or I loved or these headphones saved my life in a long flight.
Jason Barnard speaking: Importantly, be positive. Negative questions encourage negative replies. Positive questions and statements encourage positive replies. As I mentioned earlier, you really want the overwhelming majority of reviews to be super positive, at least 80%, maybe 90%. If you’re struggling there, you may want to filter out who you reach out to and avoid reaching out to customers if you aren’t reasonably confident they will give you a good review. That’s an option. But if you do need to filter, do some soul searching. Maybe your product isn’t as good as you think it is. Maybe your client service needs an overhaul. Maybe the UX on your website isn’t quite good enough. Maybe you’re attracting the wrong clients.
Jason Barnard speaking: Now, if you do filter, don’t overdo it. Having only five-star reviews over a period of time is a big red flag to Google that you’re cheating. Filtering in this manner is against Google’s guidelines and excessive positivity is easy to spot for Google. From a business perspective, perhaps you should take a look at those you filtering out. Try to resolve their issues and then ask them for a review, that isn’t explicitly against Google’s guidelines. And then if less than 80% of your clients are super satisfied with your products and your service, then you’re fighting an uphill struggle that you’re likely to lose.
Jason Barnard speaking: Now, how to dialogue on the platforms themselves. The important word here is dialogue. This is a conversation. Your clients are expressing their opinion. Reply to every review, positive, negative, or middle of the road. That’s great for your relations with that existing client, but also sends a very positive signal to prospects and to Google that you’re looking after all your clients.
Jason Barnard speaking: So, if they’ve given you a five or four-star review, reply, glad we were of service something friendly. Now one, two, or three stars, respond to their complaint, offer a solution, and if they aren’t clear about quite what was wrong, ask them we are sorry you weren’t fully satisfied with whatever. What could we have done to make your experience with us better and take the dialogue off the platform, if possible, until it’s resolved. Importantly, bear in mind whatever the review score and whatever the content, your client took the time to give the review. The fact that they made that effort, merits that you make the effort of replying properly. I’ll go into that in a little more detail later.
Jason Barnard speaking: Now, do this first for the platforms you’ve chosen to focus on, but over time, reply to every review, even on the platforms you aren’t focusing on. An additional tip, take this opportunity to push out to Google additional information you want to communicate about your brand and your products. Google gets a lot of information about businesses and products from reviews. It has a patent that confirms this. A demonstration is that when I searched for a coffee shop with free Wi-Fi, the result I’m shown often shows a review that indicated great free wifi. So, this is an opportunity to communicate specific attributes of your product such as color or size, taste, presentation, geo location, or the fact that you’re open 24 hours a day. Whatever it might be, you can actually add this into your replies and Google will pick up on it.
Jason Barnard speaking: Quick warning, drip feed this information and be subtle. Keep it as natural as you can. They’ll be heavy-handed and make your replies a sales pitch. Reply to the review and stick to the topic of the original comment. Add only one tiny bit of information at a time. Now, some specifics about handling individual less than four-star reviews. You might not agree with their rating, but when you’re answering them, show that you’re open to a dialogue and that you’re looking to improve.
Jason Barnard speaking: Listen to them, be empathetic to what their problems are, and let them know that you want to fulfill their expectations. Offer a dialogue. The first answer you give, make sure you offer to dialogue with them, but try to take the discussion off the review platform. There are multiple reasons for this. Number one, you reduce the risk that it goes horribly wrong and the text attached to the review become even more damaging for you. Number two, in a specific case like this, you run the risk of giving out private or sensitive information. Number three, review platforms are not designed for after sale service. I can’t imagine many people really want to read the entire case history of a specific client on a review platform. Whatever that problem, actually act on what they’re saying, solve their problem, make them happy.
Jason Barnard speaking: Then put a concluding comment on the review when everything is resolved. At that point, you might even ask them to change their rating and possibly their review. If they switch a one-star rating to a five-star rating, that’s a very strong, positive signal to Google. Google remembers the old one-star rating and the bad review. And when that changes to five stars, it shows Google that you’re taking care of your clients after the sale, even if they weren’t initially happy about your business. It clearly shows that your brand is committed to making every client you work with completely satisfied with your service and your products.
Jason Barnard speaking: And in my experience, this type of converted client is often the most vocal about how wonderful your business is. Now, if you feel an individual review or rating is unfair, you can try to get it removed. Drowning bad reviews is all well and good, but you need a heavy ratio in your favor. Having them removed is much, much better.
Jason Barnard speaking: On most platforms you can ask for removal of individual reviews on a case by case basis and this is often more successful than you might think. Most review platforms will remove a bad review in these cases, black hat, spam, bad language, excessive, vindictive, the person is not a client, negative SEO against you perhaps by a
competitor.
Jason Barnard speaking: To make this happen, you need to be Sherlock Holmes. You need to become a detective, investigate the review, build a solid case and prove to the platform that that review is not positive for their brand. In all the cases I listed, whether dishonest or fake or a ruse, the review is negative for their brand image. Out of pure self interest, they will probably remove it.
Jason Barnard speaking: Now, try and be self-aware. If you’ve got a bad, bad review, take a good honest look at yourself. Be honest with yourself about your service and your product. Improving your product or service is the best way to avoid fighting negative reviews in the future.
Jason Barnard speaking: And lastly, a quick word about employee reviews, get them off your Brand SERP. It’s very, very, rather than an employee review platform is positive for a company.
Jason Barnard speaking: Employee review platforms are notoriously very volatile. Employee reviews are a very delicate question and sites that collect reviews from employees are a no for your exact match Brand SERP.
Jason Barnard speaking: Thank you.
