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Google Places Review Response (NEW)

CAORYAN

Boss
May 28, 2009
354
11
First Name
Ryan
Google sent me an email saying we can now respond to reviews on your google places account. They give advice like don't curse them out, etc...

How do you plan to use this? Is it going to help, you think?

Most people just look at the star rating if you ask me.
 
Most people just look at the star rating if you ask me.

Yep, and the reason why dealers should have a strategy for getting customers to leave reviews on Google Places because the other review sites are not pushing stars back to Google. Or should I say Google is not picking stars up from other review sites like DealerRater or Edmunds.
 
Yep, and the reason why dealers should have a strategy for getting customers to leave reviews on Google Places because the other review sites are not pushing stars back to Google. Or should I say Google is not picking stars up from other review sites like DealerRater or Edmunds.
Alex - I read a great article today that's partially on point. It was geared towards larger companies and Facebook, but the idea still applies. Have a plan in place to deal with negative revues or inapropriate postings. Here's a link Does your org have a Facebook Page comment escalation flow-chart?

And here's a sample flow-chart:
4668895145_489a453616.jpg
 
We're asking customers to write reviews on CarFax before they leave the dealership. We have about 20 so far, all positive, but I'm questioning whether to continue using CarFax for reviews or change our process to start using only Google Reviews. I think we would get 100+ times the return. What are your thoughts? Do you think Google will ever pick up CarFax reviews? Do you think CarFax reviews are effective at all? I think I know the answers but just want to confirm my beliefs. Thanks for bringing the topic to light. It's something I've been thinking about a lot.
 
Hi All,

As someone who works with dealerships across North America working on Local SEO and online reputation management, I feel I can weigh in on the topic.

1- Yes, respond to your customer reviews (both good and bad) in your Google places page. From my internal chats with other experts in Local SEO, we feel that this may be a ranking factor in Google's 7-pack in the near future. The best way to think about is that a business who is more engaged with its customers is not only likely to convert better than one who doesn't, but also that Google is likely to perceive such a business to be more relevant.

2 - Follow Google's review response guidelines - Instructions for review responses - Google Places Help

3 - There are few major citation sources where Google does aggregate dealership reviews and CarFax isn't one of them. Edmunds, Car Dealer Check.com, InsiderPages, CitySearch, YellowBot are all good places to leave reviews which then get picked up by Google places. Encourage your customers to log into their gmail and leave a review on Google places before they leave your premises.
 
Yep, and the reason why dealers should have a strategy for getting customers to leave reviews on Google Places because the other review sites are not pushing stars back to Google. Or should I say Google is not picking stars up from other review sites like DealerRater or Edmunds.

Speaking with Chip over at DealerRater - their star ratings should soon push to Google. If that's the case - no more having to share the love between DR and Google Places. I'd rather manage 1 less site and get the same benefit.
 
It only makes since to me too focus on Google then the others because Google will end up being the way a tech savy customer researches your dealership.

mhilger,

No offense intended, but I think you showed up to the game at the 7th inning stretch. Tech savvy customers have been researching dealerships using Google, Yahoo, Bing, Dogpile, Alta Vista, Ask, alltheweb, hotbot, live, gigablast, aol, lycos, youtube, facebook, and countless other engines for a long time. Maybe the future tense in your post was unintended, but this long list of alternative search engines was not.

What do Managing Your Money, WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3, PageMaker and Prodigy have in common? Maybe Quicken, Word, Excel, Quark, and AOL will jolt your memory. Every one of these products had a commanding and seemingly insurmountable market share lead that disappeared remarkably quickly. Lotus 1-2-3 dropped from 70% marketshare to 20% in the 4 years that Excel climbed to 80% penetration, Prodigy dropped from 60% to under 10% from 93 to 97 while AOL grabbed a 60% share.

I know that today Google is synonymous with search, but history would strongly caution against carrying all your eggs in one basket very long. Besides that, 10% of the search market still represents an awful lot of eyeballs.
 
Future tense was intended because the purpose of my post was that customers and dealers are begining to trickle away from autotrader.com and the like. That leaves google the other search engines are so far behind its not worth mentioning in a short post.
Also if you optimize for google the others follow suite,they are behind google, and easier to optimise for so it only makes since to spend your time and money on google and the others will follow. Also SEO is not accounting Software or spread sheets you can optimize for them both, unless you are talking PPC whitch is not SEO that is SEM and SEM is a whole different subject.
By the way Quark has been supplanted by Adobe's Indesign at most print shops I deal with so maybe there is yet another shift. It wasn't that long ago that I had to have a quarkxpress expert on staff just to get art to plate not the case anymore. Your comment also reinforces the strenght of google for the present. The MSFT products you allude to are pervasive because they are ubiquitus and even free software is unable to make a dent on MSFT.
 
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