At the risk of sounding like a broken record, we want to talk about reviews…again. It’s not that we are trying to be boring and repetitive, it’s just that reviews are really, really important when it comes to keeping your contracting business successful. No matter what kind of contractor you are, you need reviews on your website, your google page, your yelp page, and where ever else your business has a presence. These reviews are good for a variety of things, but the two biggest are that customers can see and read them, and they can influence your online search rankings. Below we are going to dive into why you need to have reviews for both of those reasons.
Influencing Rankings
When people need something, they turn to the internet. Whether it is for advice, entertainment, or information the first thing most people do, is jump onto Google. What does that matter to you? It matters because that is where they are going to find you, or try to find you at least. While there are a lot of different things that contribute to your rankings in online search, reviews are one them so it is valuable to have them. When people are searching for contractors, they are going to get a lot of results because there a lot of contractors. One way to work towards the top of that search is to have reviews (and lots of them) on your google page and on your website. It might not bump you to the number one spot, but if people are looking and see you have a lot of reviews, it’ll make them more likely to click on you even if you are further down the page.
Convincing Customers
Piggy-backing off of influencing rankings, you need reviews to convince your potential customers to pick you. When they get on search, which they will do, they will look at your website, check out your photos and maybe your team, but what is going to make up their mind is your reviews. They want to see what other people have said about you, if your guys were clean, if the job was done correctly, were you attentive to specific needs? Those are the differentiating factors that people look at when they look for a contractor; anyone can do the work for more or less the same price so they are going to be looking for how easy you were to work with and is it worth it to work with you. Having lots of reviews looks good for one, because it shows the volume of your business, but also gives them typically all the information they want because every review will talk about different things.
So to wrap up. Ask for reviews. Then ask again. Ask until every customer you work with fills one out because it is better to have them (even if they aren’t all good).