Online Reputation Management Tips
The Importance of Online Reviews
Marketing for Landscapers involves not only promoting your business to get new customers, but also effective marketing of your landscaping business.
For every landscaping job you perform, you need to be focused on providing excellent work. If you weren’t already motivated enough to do amazing landscaping work, you must assume your customer will leave you a review. 87% of customers rely on reviews as part of their process of hiring local services according to the BrightLocal study. 72% of consumers have written a local business review.
You can have the best, most intuitive website design along with a fined tuned digital marketing strategy that delivers high quality landscaping leads to your website. But, if a potential customer for your lawn care or landscaping service offerings checks out your reviews and finds a lot of negative reviews, they will contract another landscape contractor.
To avoid the problem of bad reviews, you’ll need to provide high quality services that result in more positive reviews. You’ll also need to actively participate in review management in order to bolster your online reputation.
Asking for a customer review at the end of each landscaping job is an essential component of landscaper marketing. While you can’t explicitly ask a customer for a positive review, you can ask them to submit a Google review, with the knowledge that if you did a good job that they’re likely to leave you a glowing review.
Online Reputation Management: Review Sources
Your Google Business Profile (GBP) reviews are probably the most important place for you to have good reviews. Your GBP’s appearance for Local SEO searches in the Map Pack – or when people search for your business name – can catch the eye of a potential client.
Google’s Ranking factors for local businesses include Google Reviews and can help to determine where your Landscaping business falls within local map result rankings. According to Google — “ More reviews and positive ratings can improve your business’s local ranking “.
Can I delete my Google Business Listing?
You can’t delete your Google Listing or your company listing on other review websites. Third-party companies are allowed to list your business and collect reviews for your business. They won’t honor your request to take your business off their site.
If you have legitimate bad reviews, you’ll need to focus on reputation management for your business by providing high quality landscaping services and collecting reviews.
Get More Landscaping Reviews Now
It is crucial to get as many customer reviews as you can. This must be done in conformity with the terms and conditions for the review platform. For some review services like Google, you can request reviews.
Yelp is more of a pain when it comes to reviews. They don’t allow landscapers to ask for customer reviews on Yelp.
Based on the review platform, you will need to determine the kind of review collection activity that can be done.
There are many methods that customers can write reviews for review services. Below are the main methods to get reviews for your landscaping services company.
Text a Review Link to Your Google Business Profile Page
Landscaping companies would be wise to text customers a link to review you after each job is completed
Probably the best way for your customers to write a review for you is to send them a text message with a link to your business review page on an online platform for reviews. It’s simple for them, and it’s easy for you. Before sending them a message, ask the client if they would be willing to leave a review.
This should be done while you’re concluding your landscaping installs for the client. This can increase the probability that the customer will leave you feedback since your services are still fresh in their mind.
Google is the best platform to get reviews. It is possible to follow these steps to obtain the review link to your Google Business Profile. From your Google Business Profile, you should be able to click on the “Share Review Form” box to get a link to at you can give your customers to get more reviews Google provides you with a link for you to give to customers so they can easily post their review.
Go to Your Google Business Profile and select “Share Review Form” under the Get More Reviews section
Email a Review Link
You may also send an email to your customer your link to write a review of your landscaping services. It is likely that you will get a lower response rate to an email than a text message. Your email may get flagged as spam – or they may not feel like giving you a review by the time the email arrives. At that point, your services may have happened days or weeks ago and isn’t really in the forefront of their mind.
Online Reputation Management for the Landscaping Industry (Including Lawn Care)
You can either do review generation and management yourself, or you can use a third party – or even reputation management software to help with reviews
Reputation Management Software
There are many software vendors that can help your landscaping business – even a solo landscape contractor – with reputation management.
Software packages vary, with common features including:
Review collection – many software packages automatically send out review requests to customers to assist with review generation and to gage customer satisfaction with your landscaping services.
Review management – once reviews come in, you’ll be alerted and have the opportunity to respond to customer reviews. You’ll want to respond to almost all reviews – both good and bad – to show that you’re a responsive business owner.
Birdeye
Birdeye’s reputation management platform offers a comprehensive suite of tools designed to help businesses generate, manage, and market their online reviews. The platform enables businesses to automate review requests across over 200 sites, ensuring a steady stream of fresh feedback. Birdeye’s AI-powered response assistant helps companies respond to reviews quickly and effectively, while the review monitoring feature allows businesses to keep track of their online reputation across multiple platforms from a single dashboard.
The platform also allows landscapers to showcase reviews on their website, turn them into social media posts, and even incorporate them into Google Ads to improve click-through rates.
BrightLocal
BrightLocal’s Reputation Manager offers a comprehensive review generation tool designed to help businesses increase their online reviews. The service allows businesses to automatically invite customers to share feedback on over 80 review sites that matter most to their industry. This streamlined approach aims to boost the number and quality of reviews a business receives, which is crucial.
The platform provides multiple channels for reaching customers, including SMS, email, in-store devices, and customizable review links that can be shared on printed receipts, email footers, flyers, and in-store signage. Users of the service have reported significant increases in their 5-star reviews, with some businesses seeing up to a 50% increase in just two months, demonstrating the tool’s effectiveness in enhancing a business’s online reputation.
Grade.US
Grade.US is $110/mo. It’s targeted towards marketing agencies. However, you can register your landscaping company for the service and manage it yourself. You can also text 200 customers per month for an additional fee. You can also add a widget on your website that will automatically show reviews from various review websites.
Grade.US also offers a no-cost trial option that lasts for 14 days.
GatherUp
GatherUp offers a review collection service beginning at $99/month. For collecting reviews, you can choose to collect both email (3,000/mo) as well as texts (300/mo).
There’s an online review widget that you can place to display on your company’s website. GatherUp also offers ways to monitor your online reviews. They also have reporting to help you track your review requests and reviews.
GatherUp offers a 14-day free trial.
Review Trackers
ReviewTrackers offers a comprehensive online reputation management software designed to help businesses monitor, manage, and improve their online presence. The platform aggregates reviews from over 100 review sites, allowing companies to track their reputation across multiple channels efficiently. Key features include review monitoring, review response tools, and sentiment analysis, which help businesses stay on top of customer feedback and address issues promptly.
There are many online review platforms that can make the review collection process easier for your company. Two of these are presented below:
Online Review Monitoring
It is important that you’re responding to reviews as often as you can – and every week at the minimum for all businesses. Many of the review sites mentioned in this article offer review monitoring, which automatically lets you know how many reviews have been published across different review sites. You’re going to have to consistently monitor and respond to customer reviews for your landscaping company.
Responding to Reviews of Your Landscaping Services
You should respond to reviews (both positive reviews and negative reviews) posted by your customers on review sites. This will show your customers that you are actively involved in the process and appreciate the feedback. This shows that you genuinely value their opinion. Being active online – especially with review platforms – can really set you apart from your competitors who ignore their reviews.
Best Reviews and Platforms for Landscaping Companies
It is essential to keep an eye on the reviews you receive about your landscaping business through the various review sites online.
One way to find out where people leave reviews on the internet for your business is to enter your landscaping company’s name followed by the word “reviews”. In the screenshot below, I searched for “Mountain Sky Landscaping Reviews” which is a landscaping company in Denver, Colorado.
You’ll notice that there are mentions and reviews of the company on numerous other websites which appear on the first page of results. These listings need to be maintained and monitored. This is a brief summary of what we’ve observed:
Google Reviews
(A) in the screenshot above. This is probably the most important review site of all. It is visible when prospective customers are searching for your business. Set up your Google Business Profile and collect reviews. Monitor and respond to all the Google reviews that you receive.
Yelp Reviews
Yelp reviews are shown as (B) in the screenshot above. Yelp generally shows high up in the search results for most local services providers – including landscapers. You must create a Yelp business page, claim it, also respond to reviews. It is extremely important that you have a good rating because the stars are shown in the search results as you can see in the image.
HomeAdvisor and Angi.com Listings and Reviews
HomeAdvisor is shown in (C) the above screenshot. Angi.com and HomeAdvisor.com are now the same company, although they still have separate websites so your landscaping company may appear on either site (or both). Like Yelp, a star rating is often shown for HomeAdvisor right on the review page as you can see above. It is essential that you claim this listing, do good work, and respond to reviews (if the sites allow this).
HOUZZ
(D) in the screenshot above. Houzz is another site that focuses on design and remodeling for residential homeowners, but obviously landscapers are also covered by Houzz. Claim your listing and monitor your ratings.
Facebook is shown as (E) in the screenshot above. Facebook reviews and recommendations (star ratings) show right in the search results. Claim your Facebook business page and respond to any reviews and recommendations as they arrive.
Other Locations
You can also look for these review websites when you search for your company:
- bbb.org – this is very important as reviews here are trusted even more than Google reviews.
- referrallist.com
- thumbtack.com
- Yellowpages.com
- houzz.com
Conduct a search for your business to see what sites show up. Claim your listing and monitor all reviews for your business, and respond to reviewers when you can.
Local Services Ads Reviews
Note that if your landscaping business uses Local Services Ads, Google will send them reviews via the Local Services Ads platform – making it a simple method to collect reviews. The reviews are available only for Local Services Ads.
Google Business Profile reviews will still need to be collected separately.
