WEBVTT 00:00.000 --> 00:16.840 When you've got 20 reviews, it's easy to have a perfect ranking of five stars. 00:16.840 --> 00:27.880 It becomes harder and harder as you get more and more reviews because you have to maintain that standard of excellence that puts you up at that top level. And what businesses need to understand today is 00:27.880 --> 00:31.360 that it's no longer good enough to deliver your products on time and to a 00:31.360 --> 00:35.280 good standard. That's exactly what the clients paying you for. They're expecting 00:35.280 --> 00:39.740 that. So just simply delivering that is not going to get you those amazing 00:39.740 --> 00:44.720 Google reviews that go above and beyond. How important are online reviews? And I 00:44.720 --> 00:47.160 ask that because there's plenty of companies 00:47.160 --> 00:48.160 that really ignore them. 00:48.160 --> 00:50.880 And I can tell because I look at the reviews 00:50.880 --> 00:52.640 and they clearly ignore them, they don't respond, 00:52.640 --> 00:54.360 they don't really care if they're bad. 00:54.360 --> 00:56.360 And I've actually had people tell me they don't care. 00:56.360 --> 00:59.260 So tell us about the importance in reality. 01:00.340 --> 01:05.000 In reality, 98% of people read reviews. 01:05.880 --> 01:08.840 Only 2% of people on the internet don't read reviews. 01:08.840 --> 01:13.840 So from that perspective, the prevalence is quite large. 01:14.600 --> 01:17.080 If we look at whether it's a deciding 01:17.080 --> 01:18.800 or influencing factor, 01:18.800 --> 01:20.880 the statistics are also quite powerful, 01:20.880 --> 01:24.200 which is about 94% of people will consider a review 01:24.200 --> 01:28.540 prior to making a purchase. So realistically when people say to me, you know, I'm not sure 01:28.540 --> 01:32.620 whether this review thing will be for me, I always say, are your clients human and 01:32.620 --> 01:36.460 do they use the internet? If the answer to either one of those questions is yes, 01:36.460 --> 01:40.580 then absolutely this works. And it doesn't matter whether you're in procurement or 01:40.580 --> 01:45.000 whatever, you're always going to check out the reviews. 01:45.320 --> 01:46.960 Even if you said to me, 01:46.960 --> 01:48.680 and this is always a massive red flag 01:48.680 --> 01:50.120 when I hear a business say this, 01:50.120 --> 01:52.280 but we get 90% of our business 01:52.280 --> 01:54.300 coming from word of mouth referrals. 01:54.300 --> 01:56.160 That is a really big red flag. 01:56.160 --> 01:59.360 At the end of the day, word of mouth referral 01:59.360 --> 02:02.080 is not a strategic form of lead generation. 02:02.080 --> 02:03.840 If I was a financial advisor, 02:03.840 --> 02:09.440 I would tell you that it's really important that you have multiple income streams. And I guess in some ways as a digital 02:09.440 --> 02:14.080 marketer and helping businesses market their businesses online, what I say to them is you 02:14.080 --> 02:19.760 want multiple lead streams. So this is something else that can happen. And yet I'm astounded why 02:19.760 --> 02:23.920 some businesses think that even though they do it themselves, they think that their clients won't. 02:24.640 --> 02:29.040 So there are more and more people every single day that are reading reviews than they 02:29.040 --> 02:31.720 have before and that's definitely not going away. 02:31.720 --> 02:41.680 SEO, companies want their business to come up. How do online reviews affect SEO? 02:41.680 --> 02:49.440 Yeah that's a great question Lyall. Now, when you're talking about SEO, there's two things that you need to understand. Your Google business profile alone is worth about 02:49.440 --> 02:56.440 33% of your SEO, and your Google reviews are worth about 16%. So these two things together 02:56.440 --> 03:03.000 are nearly 50%, I'll say that again, nearly 50% of your local SEO, and most business owners 03:03.000 --> 03:05.480 out there are just simply not touching it. 03:05.480 --> 03:12.680 Can any business get a five star review and if so, can you give us some steps, some practical 03:12.680 --> 03:16.560 steps that business owners can take to achieve that? 03:16.560 --> 03:17.880 Yeah, sure. 03:17.880 --> 03:19.880 Absolutely every business can do it. 03:19.880 --> 03:24.040 Google is training people like sheep to leave Google reviews. 03:24.040 --> 03:25.880 Now why is it doing this? 03:25.880 --> 03:29.440 Well, if you look at where AI is going, right? 03:29.440 --> 03:30.880 In the near to distant future, 03:30.880 --> 03:32.480 all of your top of funnel searches 03:32.480 --> 03:33.720 will pretty much disappear. 03:33.720 --> 03:36.240 How do you turn a negative review into a positive one? 03:36.240 --> 03:39.360 How do you turn the one star or the two star 03:39.360 --> 03:41.760 who's upset into a five star? 03:41.760 --> 03:43.320 Is that possible either? 03:43.320 --> 03:45.120 Yeah, well, I mean mean you can't physically change it 03:45.120 --> 03:49.360 yourself but you can you know get the client to change it by doing the right thing. So 03:49.360 --> 03:58.400 the three elements that I teach people to do is...