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Ask The Experts: How Can I Get More Google…

August 18, 2010
by Gradiva Couzin

Q: I’ve noticed that Google Product Search shows reviews of my online store. Where do these come from and how can I get more of them?

A: Seller ratings on Google are an important part of your site’s presence on the search engine. Google pulls these ratings from a variety of sources, including the following:

Google Checkout
BizRate.com
Epinions.com
PriceGrabber.com
ResellerRatings
Rateitall.com

Nothing speaks to a potential customer like a testimonial! In the physical world, a shopkeeper would probably feel comfortable approaching a satisfied customer to ask “would you be willing to recommend us to your friends?” But online store owners may not know how to pursue seller ratings.

To put it very simply: if you want reviews, you’re going to need to ask for them. Here are some simple steps to get you started:

If you sell via Google Checkout, or any of the fee-based shopping comparison sites such as Shopping.com, you don’t need to take any extra steps to get a review. These services will pursue a review for your business after any transaction.
If you do not use one of the above intermediaries for selling, sign up with Resellerratings or Rateitall.com (or both) for a free or low cost reviews page for your business. Make sure that your business name is an exact match in spelling and format (including “Inc.” or “.com”) to the name you use in your Google Product feed.
After every transaction, send out an email request to the customer requesting a seller rating. Include a link to your business’s page on Resellerratings, rateitall, or your seller rating venue of choice, to make it easy for your customer to rate your business.

Keep in mind that merchant reviews on Google Product Search are not the same as Google Local (a.k.a. Google Maps or Google Places). In a future post, we’ll discuss customer reviews on Google Places.

Readers! Do you have any more tips on how to encourage seller ratings?

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Tutorial: Monitor Yelp Reviews on Your iGoogle Page

August 6, 2010
by Gradiva Couzin

Editor’s Note: This capability no longer exists. Yelp has removed the RSS feeds feature for business pages. Please visit Yelp API page for other ways you can use Yelp.

Here’s an easy, free way to monitor your business reputation online.

If you have a business, surely you want to know what people are saying about it online. But staying abreast of all of the forum posts, customer reviews, or blog discussions that mention your business can be overwhelming. We recommend consolidating all of this info onto an iGoogle page. Why iGoogle? Simply because this is already the homepage for so many people.

Here are step by step instructions for adding a feed to your iGoogle page:

1: Create a Google Account

Instructions can be found here.

2: Choose a feed page

Different businesses will need to monitor different venues. A restaurant should probably be watching reviews on Yelp or Chowhound, while a hotel will monitor Tripadvisor and a software firm may watch conversations in relevant forums. Let’s suppose your business is Fuel City Tacos, in Dallas TX. A search for your business name on Google shows reviews on Yelp, Urbanspoon, and Chowhound, as seen here:

Let’s choose Yelp for today’s tutorial.

2: Sign up for the Feed

With your company’s reviews page open in the browser, Look for the RSS feed icon next to the address bar where the page URL is displayed. In Firefox, the icon looks like this:

Click on the feed icon and open the feed URL in a new window. Select “Subscribe to this feed using Google”

Finally, select, “Add to Google Homepage”

3: Enjoy Your Feed on your iGoogle Homepage

Here’s how the Fuel City Yelp feed looks:

Keeping an eye on your reviews is a big first step in the important ongoing task of monitoring and managing your business’s online word of mouth presence. We hope you’ve found this tutorial helpful!