I know this is a very common frustrating issue and it even happens to us at Ironclad. In this video we show you step by step video on how to deal with this.
What is up everybody? Welcome to the Restoration Rundown Podcast, the podcast that’s dedicated to you, restoration business owner. My name is Ben. I’m your host. I’m also the CEO of Ironclad Restoration Marketing, where we help restoration and cleaning business owners, more sales just by getting their internet marketing right.
Today, we’re gonna talk about Google reviews. I know we talk about Google reviews quite a bit, and they’re very important, but today we’re not gonna be talking about how to get ’em; you should be getting them; what to do when somebody leaves you a bad one.
Today we’re gonna be talking about the big pain in the butt that’s been going on for the last 14 months or so is, that Google reviews are just not popping up and or just getting deleted from your Google business profile with no resolution insight.
Well, finally, after 14 months, Google has finally put together a process on how to reinstate. Missing reviews. Reviews that aren’t posting up. Know we need to get the reviews. So it’s extra frustrating when they just don’t pop up or they just disappear. So we’re gonna share this presentation with you real quick.
If you’re listening in on the podcast, tune into YouTube, either at Ironclad Restoration Marketing or at the Restoration Rundown. You’ll be able to follow along with the slides that we have. But the one thing I wanna say is when you’re dealing with a missing Google reviews, the one thing, and I know this from experience, is don’t punch your computer.
So this guy’s getting ready to haul off and punch his computer. All it does is hurt your knuckles, hit your computer, and force you to get a brand new one. I’ve had to do on multiple occasions. Okay, so just a little background. Google released, introduced a new AI based review filter, so you’re getting a lot of spam reviews.
Other companies are spamming reviews platforms. It’s the wild west out there when it comes to Google business profiles, which is why they make so many changes, which is why they sometimes tighten the reins. They overtight ’em, and then they have to step off and, Google being the omnipotent being that it is, they never admit mistakes.
They don’t admit ’em until they’ve already fixed everything and now they’re saying, “Oopsie”! So something similar has happened. So I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the last year, maybe even two years, reviews are just disappearing from your account aside of all the suspensions that have been going on.
Or when a customer leaves your review, they don’t pop up on your Google business profile. And that’s a pain in the ass because it’s hard enough to get reviews in the first place, let alone now reaching back out to a customer to say, “Hey, can you go ahead and leave me another review? They’re probably not gonna do it. And that stinks, especially when you’re really trying to do this stuff in-house.
Now, if you partnered with a third party like Liftify they’re really great at making sure this process goes through for you and talking to your customers. So you have no worries there. But if you are one of the DIY guys out there, finally Google, once they admitted their mistake, released a process.
What was happening is, legitimate reviews from legitimate businesses were just disappearing or new reviews weren’t posting. When you reached out to Google Support, their generic support line, you were just getting some, you know, boiler plate email return saying, “Google Review removes reviews that violate its process, policies, and, you know, they’re not gonna do anything about it, which stinks.
So most people just give up after that. We’re a little bit more. Assertive. So we’d hit ’em up a few more times, but we really didn’t have much luck until recently getting these reviews reinstated. So we’ll walk you through the process. It’s a little long, it’s a little cumbersome, but I think that’s by design.
Google doesn’t wanna make anything real easy for you because if you can imagine how many businesses, how many millions of businesses are out there globally that were dealing with this problem and are still dealing with the problem. We put a lot of the work on you. They are so important that you should be going through this process and more so just learning, getting to, getting used to going onto the support forums and the boards and everything like that, and getting these things taken care of for you with any problem you have with your Google Business profile.
What you wanna do, contact their support at this link, support.google.com/business/gethelp. Again, check out YouTube, you’ll be able to look at this link and kind of follow along with this video. If you’re just listening to this in one on one of the streaming services, driving around in your vehicle, you’re gonna log in as a business owner, right?
So you wanna make sure you’re logging in with the Gmail that you use to create your Google business profile in the first place. And also, just to let you know, it also allows Google local guides, anybody that’s using the MAP platform. To report their own missing reviews. So let’s say you did work for somebody you know very well and you have a relationship with, or you’re in an ongoing process, mediating some jobs for them, or it’s a commercial account that you’re doing a bunch of carpet cleaning for.
That person can actually follow the same process. See this dropdown here, the selections are, you own the business, you’re an employee of the business, a friend or family member acting on the behalf of the owner or an agency, so when we manage people’s Google business profiles, we’re able to go in and create support tickets like this, or just a regular maps user that actually left the review.
So if you have a good relationship with them or people reporting the missing review, the better. Okay? You’re gonna wanna check this off. And for the purposes of today, let’s just pretend that you’re the business owner. You wanna select that. You’re gonna type in.
There’s a lot of different things that you have issues with and you’re missing a review or review was posted and didn’t show up on my Google business profile. That’s the best way to describe it on there. Again, the more pointed you can make these descriptions, better odds that you may be able to figure this thing out once you do send in this ticket.
The next step you’re gonna put in, fill in all the information you’re asking for as accurately as possible. Your name, full name, full email address. If you are the person that owns the Google business profile, use the email that you used to create that Google Business Profile, phone number, what your relationship to the businesses, and actually the business name that’s on your Google Business profile. Okay? Don’t abbreviate. Make sure you’re as accurate as possible with this information. Right?
Then you’re gonna want to add your business ID. Now they’re saying it’s not required, but I would go out on the limb and say, just do it. They wanna make sure that Google’s looking at the right listing, especially if you’re a franchise, wanna make sure that they’re looking at the exact business ID of the account that you’re managing it.
If you don’t know how to find your business ID, it’s pretty simple. If you look here on this picture, this is a snapshot of what your profile manager looks like when you log into maps or you’re actually on Google’s search engine, marketplace engine. Over in the top right of that, right next to your picture, there’s three dots.
If you click that, you’ll be able to see a dropdown. It says, Google Business Profile Settings. Hit Advanced Settings, and then you’ll see your Business Profile ID. There’s a button that you can copy that ID. Go ahead and paste it into that form there. Make sure that they have the correct business. Okay? It’s very important to do so. So it’s not required. But you should do it.
If your profile belongs to an elementary school, which it doesn’t. This is just something I wanted to throw in there. You’re not eligible to get new reviews anyways, so they’ve disabled any educational platforms from being able to get reviews. You always wanna click no, you haven’t been recently suspended or disabled. If you have, you just pick no anyways and make sure you do select this.
Make sure you write that, “No, you’re not an elementary, secondary, or high school or educational institution” in there. Or they won’t even not gonna get anywhere. If you are, and I mentioned this before, if you have an agency working on your behalf, this is a great option, your agency, to be able to submit an attachment.
So when you get a Google Review as a business owner, you’re gonna get an email, right? “So-and-so left you an x star review.” When you open up that email, it’s gonna show the user that left you the email. And so what I’m getting at is you have proof, right? That you did get a review.
So if that review didn’t stick, or you are doing well, and you’re saving these emails, some people delete ’em, but. Again, this is a reason to save these emails. You have proof that somebody left you a review. So that’s what this section’s all about.
So this step, whether an agency’s managing your account or you are, you’re able to actually upload an attachment, a screenshot, a PDF copy of the email showing the person who left you a review that left you a review. Okay? Again, this is more about the information gathering process with Google. It’s just making sure that you’re covering all of your bases.
This is something that if your agency does not know something, you can send them this video or just let them know that they need to be saving these reviews just in case they go away. Again, they’re not strictly required for this process, but again, it helps and I think that you’re gonna have really good luck on your reviews reinstated in the recovery process if you do provide a picture.
So again, they’re gonna send you, when you get a review, you get an email, get a notification. Save those emails, just screenshot ’em, go to your Google Business profile page, screenshot that review with that username on there cuz they will ask for the user right now this is said to be the best way to do it, right?
So if you keep a copy of that, this is something here you can, so now the other option is, so let’s say you didn’t keep the email, but you have some sort of relationship, an ongoing communication with this client if it’s been filtered as Google as spam. So if it didn’t pop up, As a review after they left it, these local review, the local guides that I told you can actually find a history of their reviews and are actually able to screenshot this and provide it to you, or they can do it for you, themselves if they’re, if you did a really good job for ’em.
Again, this is stuff that it’s gonna be difficult to get going, but at least you have some sort of light at the end of the tunnel. There is some sort of way. To get this recovered if they’re not popping up, and again, this is a lot by design. I would imagine they’re making this a very cumbersome process, but inkling that over time it’s gonna get easier and easier to be able to get this done.
Again, they are mitigating a lot of spam that comes in here. There’s a lot of people that go out there. There’s a lot of businesses that do black hat tactics and spam the heck out of people’s Google Business Profiles. Funny is if you do have a client or you’re a relative of somebody that’s used this business, just open up the Google Maps app, click contribute.
View your profile and you’ll see all the reviews that they’ve submitted. So if you’re missing a review, so and so, and say, “Hey, here’s a process. Do you mind doing this for me real quick on your phone and sending me a screenshot?” You will see them and you will be able to send that information over to Google.
Remember that the reviewer name doesn’t match the customer name a lot of times. You’re gonna need their actual Google account reviewer name or request will be rejected. So, you are able to select how many reviews are missing from your profile. There’s no new reviews being published on a profile, which was a huge problem last year.
Like, yes, you’re able to talk about the timeframe, which is when reviews went missing. So again, you’re giving them more information to look into your profile. Making their job really easy for them. The more pointed you can be and the more descriptive you can be and accurate, and when you describe your issue, describe your issue very accurately.
Restate most of the things that you’ve already said in the dropdown menus, you’re gonna have a lot better time recovering. You don’t wanna get this rejected it. It takes them a long time already to respond to you, so you don’t wanna give ’em any more reasons to just ignore your email or reject your request. Right?
So, And to recap you, you can go through. There is a process. It is a lot of work, but there is a way these reviews are worth it. It’s worth getting those reviews back. It’s worth going through this process just to learn. And also, if you can recover some of those reviews that you work really hard to get, that’s even better.
It’s icing on a cake. Give you a lot of other options when it comes to bring your reviews reinstated. If you have any more issues, get In Touch with us at Ironclad Restoration Marketing. Give us a call. Go to our website, some of our other, videos that we’ve had,.
And if you’ve enjoyed this episode, I’d implore you to like, subscribe and share this with anybody that’s in a restoration and cleaning world that wants to learn how to get their internet marketing right and avoid some of the missteps that a lot of contractors out there deal with when it comes to internet marketing and it comes to getting leads for their business, right?
Until next time. I appreciate you guys tuning in. Good luck getting those Google reviews back. We’ll talk to you soon.
Contact Google support at https://support.google.com/business/gethelp
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Benjamin Ricciardi is the founder of Ironclad Restoration Marketing, A digital marketing agency that specializes in the Restoration and Cleaning industry based in South Florida. Benjamin is the author of The No Bulls**t Guide to Internet Marketing for Restoration Contractors and hosts The Restoration Rundown Podcast, a podcast that is focused on everything related to marketing and owning a Restoration and Cleaning Business. Connect with Benjamin and Ironclad Restoration Marketing on social media for the latest tips and tricks on how to grow your Restoration Business.