Online Reviews Made Easy: 5 Steps to Build Your Google Review Link

[Erika Simms]

It is a well-known fact that your online reviews are your first foot-in-the-door with a new customer. It is also widely known that it is essential to respond to ALL reviews - be they negative or positive - but the struggle with online reviews is keeping them up!

Your dealership may be one of the lucky ones. You may have a dedicated staff member that daily monitors your online reviews, but if your dealership is one of the many that do not, I'd like to show you a great way to continue to build consistent online reviews, by creating your Google Review Link.

As technology progresses, consumers collectively have become more and more reliant on what is "easy." How many times has a company directly asked you to review them online, and you think to yourself, "I'll get to it when I get to it."? Most likely that has happened more than you can count, but think of the times when a company has directly sent you a link that you just click on to review them. I know that as a consumer myself, I am 100 times more likely to click on that link and post a review of my experience if the source to do so is sent directly to me.

Setting up a Google Review link for your dealership is easy, and it only takes 5 steps to get started.

Step One - Head to Google Maps Place Id.

Step Two - Search for your dealership's name.

In the text block on the map, you will enter your dealership's name, and your exact location should populate.

Step Three. - Copy the ID

Copy the ID directly under your dealership's name and paste it into the BOLD section of the URL - https://search.google.com/local/writereview?placeid=<place_id>

Step Four - Save this code in a safe place on your desktop or phone.

There is nothing worse than making an effort to create a new tool and then lose it. Paste the completed code on your desktop so that you know exactly where to find it when you need it.

Step Five - Follow up for reviews

Use the link to send as a follow up to customers who have recently made a purchase. Not only have you provided a new customer with a new car, but you have made it extremely easy for them to rate and review your dealership at the click of a mouse.

 

[Amber Miles]

Hi there - I had been looking for how to do this! Thank you! I wasn't able to make it work though. I think I might be putting the ID in the wrong spot of the URL. I tried it in both places it says place ID, together and separately. No luck. (No part of the URL was bold on either browser I checked this page on)

Also, do you know if there's a special URL that jumps instantly to your dealership's Google reviews other than giving a customer a link to a google search of your dealership's name?

 

[DavidRozek]

We use to do this, but we had a culture change a few years ago and made it part of our staffs bonus to ask customers for recommendations. We did this by using the reputation.com app (which comes with a desktop portal also).

The app actually made it easier for us to ask customers after their service repair or after the sale if they would recommend us. Once the consumer stated yes, we simply ask them for their cell phone number and a text comes from reputation.com asking them to share their recommendation with the world.

They click the link and pick from Google, Facebook, or Cars.com and leave us a review. We went directly to reputation.com and we pay a small amount per month per store. The coolest part is we get notified of each review posted and we have teams that get notified when a less than perfect review is listed. Our team of managers review the negative ones daily and respond to them online, take the posted online, and then we reach out to the customer to fix the issue when possible. Reputation.com answers all positive unanswered reviews within 24 hours for us.

We do an annual contract since it is a software license agreement but is it broken down to a few hundred dollars per month, per location with the response service. The portal has all the reports we need, but we ask our staff to keep a record since it is part of their pay plan. Training and set up are easy.

I prefer not to set up links on our staffs desktop since they are connected to our wifi connection and I am sure it would look fishy if a bunch of review were coming from the dealerships IP address which is also why I use the app to send a link to the customers phone.