Why Is It Important to Keep Getting More Online Reviews

Online reviews have been around for well over a decade now. It grew in pop­u­lar­i­ty thanks to ser­vices like Ama​zon​.com. It then began to find a place in the home improve­ment indus­try, espe­cial­ly in Google’s local search and ser­vices like Yelp. Con­sumers are rely­ing less and less on what their neigh­bor’s think about a ser­vice provider and putting more faith in the reviews they see and read about online. Can you blame them? Most of us don’t con­nect much with our neigh­bors any­more. We whip out our smart­phone to do our research now!  So why is it impor­tant that your home improve­ment com­pa­ny keeps up with get­ting more reviews online?

Mobile Search Dominates

First, mobile search now out­ranks desk­top search­es. Soft­ware com­pa­nies are mak­ing it eas­i­er for con­sumers to write reviews using their smart­phones. There­fore, it is get­ting eas­i­er for a home improve­ment con­trac­tor to ask and attain more reviews from their cus­tomers because of the use of smart­phones. I have dis­cov­ered that it is eas­i­er to ask a cus­tomer in per­son to write a review if they have a smart­phone. Doing this from a desk­top nor­mal­ly takes a few extra steps. When a con­sumer search­es for a ser­vice provider from his or her smart­phone, reviews are dom­i­nat­ing as well. Here is an exam­ple. I opened up my Google Maps App on my iPhone. I typed in the fol­low­ing in the search results, ​“painters in San Diego.” Look at the results and how reviews are promi­nent! Notice that it does not show the total amount of reviews on the app unless I click to learn more. This is actu­al­ly a bless­ing in dis­guise! One has to click to learn more! Yet what is impor­tant is your over­all rat­ing. We’ll talk more about that below. 

Main­tain a Good Rating

Peo­ple tend to be more reac­tive than proac­tive. If you do not have a lot of reviews, all it takes is for 1 or 2 bad reviews from a sour client or past employ­ee to make you take the defen­sive, reac­tive stance. By keep­ing up on reviews and main­tain­ing a good over­all rat­ing — you will be ahead of the game. Where­as a cou­ple bad reviews won’t both­er you so much…and you can sleep at night! I have seen a num­ber of home improve­ment com­pa­nies that do not work hard at ask­ing for online reviews. I know that these com­pa­nies do great work over­all. How­ev­er, here is where the prob­lem occurs: If your com­pa­ny does a good job on some­one’s prop­er­ty, a cus­tomer is hap­py and sat­is­fied. Chances are he or she will not feel oblig­at­ed to write a review because your com­pa­ny did what you said you would do. The online reviews hap­pen more organ­i­cal­ly when your com­pa­ny makes a mis­take that real­ly upsets the cus­tomer OR when your com­pa­ny goes beyond the norm (extra mile). So a cus­tomer will write a neg­a­tive review if they were pissed off or they will write a review when they were over­whelmed by you going the extra mile.  Yet let’s face it, most of the time, we run a busi­ness to do what we say we will do. Our goal is not to piss off a client, right? It is also dif­fi­cult to ALWAYS go the extra mile on every project. So get­ting and main­tain­ing reviews online is a chal­lenge. Yet if you are not care­ful, your com­pa­ny can be in dan­ger of hav­ing an over­all rat­ing that is not impres­sive. To get past that, your com­pa­ny has to have a plan to active­ly ask for reviews. This can­not stop! It must con­tin­ue to be part of your busi­ness plan.

Reviews Do Get Old

One final rea­son to con­tin­ue to get reviews. I have seen com­pa­nies have a review blitz. I watched one paint com­pa­ny basi­cal­ly have NO reviews on a review site called ​“Houzz.” In 2 – 3 days, this paint com­pa­ny had over 30 reviews. It looks like what they must have done is emailed or called cus­tomers ask­ing to write a review on Houzz. Good for them! It worked! Great job, right? Yes and no! It is nice to see that this com­pa­ny now has a strong com­pet­i­tive edge over their com­peti­tors. Yet what began to hap­pen is that the reviews began to taper off on Houzz. All reviews on that site have a date! So you’ll see 30 reviews that hap­pened all at once and then noth­ing for almost 9 months. Con­sumers will just be get­ting smarter in the years to come. They can look at the dates and know that those dates get stale. They might be able to fig­ure out that the com­pa­ny had a review blitz. Hav­ing a more con­sis­tent and steady approach to build­ing and main­tain­ing reviews will always prove to be more effec­tive in the long run. You won’t have to wor­ry about a neg­a­tive review here and there. As you enter anoth­er year of busi­ness, make sure you keep up on online reviews. It has many benefits!