Managing Google reviews for multiple locations is a strategy that will undeniably benefit your brand.
It’s one of the best and most cost-effective ways for multi-location companies and enterprise-level organizations to improve the visibility of their business online and in the community. Managing Google reviews is also a useful tactic if your team is looking for new ways to engage with customers, listen to and act on their feedback, and deliver better customer experiences.
Google Reviews for Multiple Locations: Checklist for Brands
Google reviews significantly influence the way customers think about your company. They are also crucial for businesses looking to get discovered in search results.
By managing Google business reviews, you can showcase your brand in the best possible light and minimize the impact that negative reviews or low ratings might have on your reputation.
However, managing Google reviews for multiple locations is no easy task. To help you get started, we created a checklist that should ensure that your efforts are on the right track.
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Tip 1: Centralize the Management of Google Reviews
The first step you need to take when managing Google reviews for multiple locations is to centralize the process. This means assigning ownership and identifying people in your organization who will be directly involved in managing and responding to reviews.
The ideal candidates are usually your brand or location managers, the marketing team at your corporate office, or members of your customer service department. It’s crucial that whoever steps up as the head of your online review management program should understand Google review policy as well as the guidelines of other business review sites.
Tip 2: Create a Review Response Policy
If your company operates in multiple locations, chances are that more than one person will be assigned to directly manage Google reviews.
This makes it crucial to have an organization-wide policy that guides your company on how to respond to negative reviews, which positive review response examples to follow, and other important actions to take whenever new customer reviews are posted online.
Your policy should cover things like what language and tone to use that best reflects your brand, what the timeline is for getting back to customers, with whom in your organization should the reviews and unsolicited feedback be shared, what your enterprise reputation management toolkit should be comprised of, when do escalations become necessary, what the ideal response rate is, and other items that may affect how your company handles online reviews.
The timeliness of your review responses is particularly crucial. The more clearly defined your policy is on Google reviews for multiple locations, then the more smoothly your review management program will run.
Tip 3: Streamline Management of Your Google Business Profiles
Multiple business locations = multiple listings on Google. These listings are necessary to build your brand (and each location’s) visibility on Google Maps and in Google Search.
At some point, the process of managing these listings on Google can be overwhelming, particularly if you’re managing a brand with hundreds or thousands of locations.
If there’s a brand-wide change in your product or service offering, or if you simply want to change the corporate phone number displayed in the listings or promote a new marketing campaign, you’ll likely need to switch between multiple Google business accounts. This isn’t to mention that you’ll have to frequently manually check and type replies to any new reviews that may have been added to each listing.
If this sounds like a problem that you have to deal with, consider investing in a local listing management solution. This allows you to manage your listings on Google using one dashboard and automatically sync any changes and updates you want to make across all your listings. Ideally, the solution you choose should also help you get all your listings on Google verified in bulk.
It’s also worth noting that Google rewards brands for having consistent and accurate NAP (Name, Address, Phone number) information across all listings. With a local listing management tool, you can be alerted when there are inconsistencies in your online listings and automatically push real-time changes to ensure data accuracy and high online rankings at all times.
Tip 4: Analyze the Data from Reviews
Your strategy for managing Google reviews for multiple locations should not begin and end with simply collecting the data and responding to feedback.
All the reviews you’re getting should serve (and therefore be used) as a valuable source of information that your team can analyze and transform into insights that will improve the way you do business.
Similar to how savvy brands are using social listening to extract insights from social media mentions and comments, your organization can also harness reviews in order to gain insights into the customer experience.
By tapping into precious review data — using analytical tools and technology like enterprise feedback management, sentiment analysis, and natural language processing — you can achieve a better understanding of customer expectations and experiences. With these insights, your organization can make actionable changes.
Tip 5: Encourage Reviews by Asking Customers
Reviews are a powerful social currency on Google. More importantly, reviews provide social proof essential to improving brand awareness and fostering consumer confidence.
As part of your strategy for managing Google reviews for multiple locations, be sure to encourage new reviews by directly asking your customers, who may already be poised to give you 5 stars and just need a little nudge.
Apart from giving you an amplified search presence and possibly an instant reputation boost, asking for reviews can also help strengthen your company’s customer relationships. It connects your brand to the voices that matter the most: that of your customers.
Tip 6: Invest in Tools that Drive Efficiency
Managing reviews on Google and other business review sites is a lot of work.
To ensure efficiency, consider investing in an online reputation management software solution that centralizes your reviews and helps your team stay on top of what customers are saying on Google.
You definitely don’t want to be logging in and out of every review site or Google My Business / Google Business Profile account manually. Remember: the clock begins ticking once reviews are posted, and customers are waiting to hear back from you.
The best reputation management software should be able to help you streamline your efforts and blend management strategies, such as adding multiple local listings, review site profiles, and even social profiles under one account. It should also offer enough flexibility for your corporate office to be able to track brand performance and trends, while allowing location-level users to access and possibly respond to their own reviews.
