Don’t Let Google Reviews Strangle Your Law Firm

Plus a downloadable guide and questions to ask when soliciting for reviews

Positive Google reviews help you rank better in Google Maps which means more people will find your law firm.

Then, out of those that are considering hiring your firm, positive Google reviews will help persuade more of those people to actually pick up the phone and call you.

If you don’t focus on this and essentially leave it to chance, you’ll have less people finding you and many of those considering your law firm will go elsewhere.

In other words, this is something worthy of your attention.

In this video, you will learn:

• The importance of online reviews
• Quality (rating) vs. quantity, what’s more important?
• Should we recommend clients put keywords in their reviews?
• Does platform (where the reviews are posted) matter?
• What to do with negative reviews
• Can reviews be taken down?
• How to solicit for reviews – is there a right or wrong way to do it?

Questions to Ask When Getting Reviews for Your Law Firm

From the book, Building a Story Brand by Donald Miller

“Here are five questions most likely to generate the best response for a customer testimonial:

1. What was the problem you were having before you discovered our product or service?

2. What did the frustration feel like as you tried to solve the problem?

3. What was different about our product or service?

4. Take us to the moment when you realized our product or service was actually working to solve your problem.

5. Tell us what life looks like now that your problem is solved or being solved?”

This line of questioning will produce a review or testimonial that puts your client (and prospects with a similar problem) front and center.

The outcome will be a review that takes people through your firm’s “story brand” and therefore, help you sign even more clients.

It will show prospective clients:

• Who you serve
• The problem(s) you solve and the frustrations those problems cause (and that you relieve)
• Why you are the right guide to solve this type of problem
• Why your plan is best
• Transformation of the person you helped

Download the Google My Business Guide We Send to our Law Firm Clients

This is the guide we send to our clients to help them get the most of their Google My Business page. Feel free to download a copy for yourself and for your team.

Google My Business Guide – Download

Video Transcript

– Hey guys, Nick Kringas here. And today we’re talking about the all important reviews, online reviews.

I have with me today, Kellen Bachman, who’s our Client Relations Manager at ApricotLaw. He’s the expert in this stuff. He talks to all of our clients and in particular about reviews and all things reviews related and why they’re important. So I brought him on today, so we can just ask him a couple of questions and Kellen we’ll get s-, we’ll get started. I have a couple of questions prepared for you about reviews.

– Sounds good.

– [Nick] Are you ready?

– Yep. Ready to go.

– [Nick] All right cool. So can you tell us why reviews are important? Just the importance of reviews?

– Yeah, absolutely. So reviews are are only getting more important as time goes by. are only getting more important as time goes by. Reviews are very important. If you think, I don’t know about you, but me every every time I’m looking at trying a new restaurant, looking to try anything new. Really, I am looking at the reviews online to see if it’s any good. I do the same thing with hotels. It transcends industries. It, it, it is really becoming how, it’s becoming more important in how a user or, or a potential client becomes an actual client. So um, so we’d like to put a lot of emphasis on it because a lot of people, especially if they have a big case or they think they have a big case, a big injury case, something like that it’s going to be handling a lot of money a lot of damages, something like that. They’re gonna want to check you out and see that your reviews are good before they hire you. So very, very important nowadays.

– Yeah, that makes sense. So in essence, they probably first find you online but then right before they’re going to hire you they’re definitely going to look at your reviews versus other people that they’re interviewing. And I mean, it’s quite simple to me right? If, if somebody has 1,000 5 star reviews versus someone who has five and the average rating is like a 3.5, I mean, the choice is clear.

– Right. Absolutely.

– [Nick] So that’s pretty straightforward. All right so Kellen, can you talk about like quality versus quantity? What’s more important getting a lot of reviews, like I just actually went into a little bit or the um, or the quality of them?

– Yeah. Yeah. Good question. The answer is both. Quantity and quality. Like you just laid out, the, the quantity is gonna be important because people like to see that you’ve been reviewed multiple times. That you don’t just have one or two or five customers but that you’ve served a lot of people, that you’ve served a big part of the population and, and they have felt either good enough about your service or negatively about your service enough to leave a review to kind of show how you’ve done. So, so quantity is important but the flip side of that coin is also quality. Both are incredibly important. If you’re, if you’re sitting at a thousand reviews that’s a ton of reviews. But if you know, your average rating is 2.5 stars. That means that there’s quite a few bad apples in that bunch. And um,

– [Nick] Right.

– so people will notice that.

– Okay. That makes sense. So wha-, about the review itself, And I’m kind of jumping around here, but with regards to the quality of the actual review, is there any best practices for like, when you’re asking for a review, like, do you want them to add anything specific about you know, in terms of SEO, right.

– Cause there’s, you know, it does have an SEO benefit as well. Especially in terms of maps. So do you want them to include something? Do you want like to be sure to ask for something in specific-, specifically?

– Yeah, absolutely. Whenever you, you reach out to, to ask, you know a past client for a review or something like that it’s always good to have them maybe mentioned in there the type of case, things like that. We’d like to get those keywords in the review like you were talking about like personal injury, you know car accident, whatever, whatever they came to you for. It’s great to have those keywords in the review. Google really likes to see that. So, yeah.

– [Nick] Okay fantastic. So like, Excuse me. So like car accident lawyer for us would be a big one, personal injury lawyer, personal injury case. So just to describe the case a little bit just to make sure to get those keywords in there.

– Right, exactly. You don’t want to put any details or anything like that about the case in there because you know, Google doesn’t want to have any, any personal details or anything like that. So just those, those, the main keywords are, are sufficient.

– All right, cool. That makes sense. And then does it matter where they’re posted, like does it matter if it’s on Google or Facebook or Yelp or

– Absolutely. This is one of the most important things. One of the most important conversations that I have with clients. A lot of them have reviews all over the place. So you’ve got Ovo reviews, Facebook reviews, Yelp reviews and then Google reviews. But since such a large portion of the market share is from Google. Google is certainly the most important. That’s where people are gonna find your reviews. So um, so it’s definitely important to target where the, where your happy clients are leaving those reviews and not just Willy nilly, you know on Facebook or Yelp or something like that. We want those reviews on Google because that’s gonna give you, the most ROI for the review as a business owner, is gonna be through that, that channel that takes up 95% of the, you know, the search engine market.

– Right. That makes a lot of sense because in my mind if somebody finds you from these other avenues from these other avenues they’ll look at the reviews there. But often than not, they’re gonna go to Google to search you. And then Google will obviously put Google reviews like prominently, right on the right next to your business. And then the other ones you have to like scroll down to find. So that makes a lot of sense.

– Definitely. Yeah. And I, I also like to say, you know, I I tell a lot of clients that it’s good to to make the Google review the emphasis and ask for that, but then say, you know you feel free to copy and paste it on our on our Facebook page or, or whatever also so that you are getting reviews on multiple platforms because people do read that stuff. It’s good. It’s just the lion’s share is going to take place on Google.

– Gotcha. So, yeah. That’s the other thing, like is there something that you can do with your positive reviews? Like just um, you know, kind of basically like besides just like leave them there or, you know is there anything else you can do with them?

– Yeah, absolutely. Social media is a great way to sort of promote great reviews especially ones that you’re really proud of. To tout your business or tout your effort on a particular case. Something like that. Social media is a great avenue to do that through. The website is also another great avenue to do that through. So we will create, you know, a landing page on the site or even on the homepage. We could do a slider, with some of your great reviews, just kind of scrolling across the screen. Snippets from a review, you know things like that are great to use elsewhere too. Yeah.

– Gotcha. And I’m just jumping in with things that I think of while you talk. I know you’re the expert here, but um but I think it would also be easy to just take a screenshot and just share that screenshot elsewhere. Cause that, that might be like the fastest way to do it.

– Yeah, absolutely. Definitely. Yeah. Yeah.

– All right, cool. And then um you know, now we’re getting into kind of like the dirty world of negative reviews. Like what can we do with negative, what do we do with negative reviews?

– Yeah. Yeah. Good question. Also very important. You wanna make sure that you remain calm. That’s kind of step number one, you know. It’s, everybody’s um you know, first instinct to kind of fire back especially if you think that the person is not being fair. And you think that they’re, they’re sort of trying to tarnish your name or something like that unfairly. Um it’s, it’s our reaction to wanna spew something back at them, same way they’re wrong. But you don’t want to do that. Definitely don’t want to do that. I always recommend to people, if you get a negative review take a few days and reach out to me before you respond. Just to, just to be safe. Just to kind of, you know, reset and make sure that you’re not responding in anger, that you’re, you’re being thoughtful as the business owner. But it’s, it’s important to respond to them. It’s important to, to definitely acknowledge them. If you just act like they’re not there, that doesn’t work. You need to, to show Google and you need to show other people that are going to be reading your reviews that you are engaging with those those negative reviewers and, and you’re trying to make it right. So even if there’s no way. If you don’t see any way, to possibly make it right with this person, you need to try and and that needs to come through in your response.

– [Nick] Right?

– [Kellen] So putting together a thoughtful response for reviews um where you try to make it right. Maybe leave your phone number and say, give us a call so that we can try and, and make this situation better for you. Things like that are are a good way to handle the negative reviews.

– Gotcha. So yeah, a lot of times I think of it as like you can sometimes turn a negative into a positive.

– Absolutely.

– [Nick] Cause if other people see that you’re like taking it seriously or that you’ve, you know even if you did something wrong and you fess up to it, that shows character and then you can say like how you’ve corrected it.

– Absolutely. Yep. I totally agree. It’s a good way to like, you know to show the people who you are, show these prospects who you are, your integrity, what you’re about. It’s great to showcase that and reviews. Yeah. It’s a good way to do it.

– So what if um can, can reviews like this? Can they be taken down?

– So they can.

– So they can. It, it kind of depends. If, if it’s somebody who is, who is clearly unhinged who is clearly unhinged and just trying to slander your business or something like that there’s definitely steps that we can take to get it removed. We can, you know we can flag it in Google as inappropriate especially if there’s inappropriate content in there something like that. We can, we can get those removed usually by by flagging it and letting Google know, Hey, this is this is inappropriate, um but there, there, there are some situations where that’s not, that’s not possible. Especially if the review happens to be true. For better or for worse, you know, don’t want to don’t want to try and point Google or point out that review to Google and say, Hey, you know this person’s lying when really they’re not. Could just make things a lot worse. So, so yeah, there there is ways to get them taken down and, and, you know we’ll certainly do our best to do it. And, and I can, I can walk people through how exactly to go about that. The flagging process and everything. I don’t know how much detail you want me to go into here. Would you like me to?

– That seem about right. You know, I-I-I agree. And that’s about it. Like they can be taken down, but you said it perfectly.

– [Kellen] Yeah, cool.

– Yeah, cool. So let’s, let’s move on. So the last question I have for you is about soliciting reviews. Like how, how best to get reviews, is there a right or wrong way to do it?

– Sure. Yeah. So there there’s a lot of there’s a lot of platforms that help with soliciting reviews nowadays Bird Eye is one another big one is Podium. There’s a few others like it. There’s a lot of companies that offer chat services and things like that, that are also getting into the review generation business. And those can be very helpful. What I like about those platforms is that they, they reach out to to your happy client with an email or a text message. And they’ll, they’ll, they’ll nudge them after three days. And then again, after seven days if they haven’t left a review yet and then again, after two weeks, something like that. So, so they’re, they’re they’re actively pursuing that review for you. It’s not just like a set it and forget it type of thing. If the review doesn’t come in or well they actually keep trying to get that review for you. And so those are, those tools are helpful for that because a lot of, a lot of users are not gonna remember to do that. You can set a calendar invite or a calendar reminder to say, Hey, remember to Hey, remember to to nudge this client about that review but it’s not a perfect system. It’s not automated, it’s not automatic. So, so those platforms are good for that but a, a great way to do it is just with a personal email and a link to your reviews page on Google and just say, Hey I hope you’re really happy with the settlement that we won you. And personalize it to the client. I hope you’re feeling better. I hope you know, this, that, the other, if you’re if you’re happy with your services please leave us a review at the link below. So I, I think that a personal message is is a really good way to do it. And you can do that within some of those review platforms, but that’s, that’s in my opinion the best way to go about it. And every user’s gonna be different. You know, some people might just be put out that you’re even asking for them to leave a review and they you know, might say, well, if I wanted to, I would have and there’s always going to be people like that. But, but for the most part, people are pretty receptive to to you asking for a review. They know it’s important, just like we do.

– Yeah. That makes sense. All right, Kellen that’s all I had. So if guys have any questions for Kellen, he’s the reviews expert. He deals with this stuff on a daily basis. Make sure to reach out. Email us your questions, put them in the comments. What have you. And as a special surprise, we have a, a script a couple of questions as a supplement to this video that you can use to get reviews, and also that, and also that, to make sure that the reviews are gonna be meaningful. And so that they’re gonna provide that content that makes your business look good and shows how you got them from one place to another. So that makes sure to look at that. And also Kellen has a guide on GMB on, on Google my business and shows, shows a few things and kind of recap what we went over here and some additional, some additional information. So Kellen, thank you very much. To you, watching. Thanks for watching. And be sure to leave any questions you have and thanks and have a great day.