Playing the Ratings and Review Game

So you’re a small business owner and you know you have a great product or service, but when you look at sites that review your work, you notice that you don’t have many ratings.

Since businesses need to participate in the ratings and review game you need to find ways to get your customers involved in creating authentic reviews.

Let’s say you’re a small coffee shop that hosts a wireless hotspot.  One innovative way to get customers to review your shop is when the customers log in to the hotspot, they go to your home page which has information about menu items and happenings at the shop.  The home page should also have a prominent image that invites the customer (and links them to a site) to write a review. By focusing on a specific review site like Yelp, you should see an increase in ratings.  This will in turn boost your rankings on the site, gaining you more visibility!

For other types of stores or restaurants, maybe you want to create a small business card (or mini menu/event list) especially tailored for reminding people to go to a specific website and leave a comment.

What are you doing to keep reviews top of mind for your customers?

-Patrick