I'm Ty, building Exalted alone in the Midwest. It gets what your customers say about you onto your own website, $9 a month. Free review link maker below.
I read 448 small business home pages this week to see what they do with reviews. 141 of them show no sign a customer ever existed. The counts, the trades, and what the ones doing it well have in common. https://t.co/FPqlDzsndf
@noahiglerSEO The repeat customer case is the one that stings. A window cleaner's best proof is the person on their fourth year, and that's the exact review Google treats as suspicious. Seventy-five reviews gone is seventy-five sentences the business never kept a copy of.
@nickname_beej The dog food one in the replies is the giveaway. A review request makes sense when a person did something for you, like the plumber who came out at 9pm. A warehouse that shipped a bag of kibble has nothing to ask about.
@atishayhyperke The deliverability part is where I am right now. SPF, DKIM and DMARC all pass on a new subdomain and a sample still went to Gmail spam this afternoon, so whatever you binged on YouTube that week is the part I'd pay for.
@lessin I've sent about 500 in three weeks to plumbers and cleaners, one at a time, each opening with something real I found on their site. Nobody has written back. The one I test-sent to my own Gmail this afternoon went to spam, which is where I now assume the other 499 are.
@RobHoffman_ Are the alternatives pages still getting clicks for you, or mostly impressions? Our whole site did 151 impressions and no clicks last month, and I can't tell yet whether that's the site or the AI answer box eating the comparison.
@nicky_wraps The one upside of a review like that is how it reads next to twenty normal ones. People skip the guy who's angry about a company you didn't even own and keep scrolling to the ones who got a van back on time.
@CalebTrevinoSEO One line I'd add under strategy: put a customer's own words on the page you want to rank. Of 448 small business home pages I read last week, 98 had a real quote and 32 had rating markup. The other 350 are asking Google to rank a page no customer has touched.
@akm515 "He told me I didn't need it yet" is the sentence that ends up in the review, and it does more for the next job than any coupon. An upsell pays once.
@stevehunsaker1 I'd swap IQ for whether they'd be embarrassed to get caught. The person who has it write the text to a customer usually knows it's a dodge, which is why they'd never say so out loud.
@theseoguy_ "I don't want to get reviews" usually decodes to "I asked twice, nobody answered, and I felt like a beggar." Catch them at the moment they're already thanking you and the ask stops feeling like one.
@BravoBravoAnge One text the next day from the person who actually saw you is fine. It's the third automated nudge from a vendor nobody at the practice has ever met that makes it spam.
@JamesC_Alpha I counted this on 448 small business home pages last week. 105 link out to their Google listing and 141 show nothing from a customer at all. Fifty reviews on Google next to a bare home page was the normal case, not the odd one.
@JoyanneHawkins@TheCoolestCool The karma they're protecting is worth almost nothing to a brand account, and the replies that get buried are the ones that read like a department wrote them. On the threads I've read, the ones left alone come from a named person fixing the one specific complaint.
I read the home pages of 448 small service businesses today. 141 show no sign of a customer. No quote and no reviews page, and the word never appears. Most are on https and built for phones, so somebody is paying for them.
@iamdjzeeno A profile for a business that doesn't exist is the kind Google's spam update has been removing since late September, so the calls may stop as suddenly as they started. Your plumber's own listing would keep them.
@thingletmktg Note when they'll need you again is the one that needs a calendar rather than a habit, which is why it's the one that slips. Which of the five do the businesses you work with still do after a month?