Online Reviews for your Roofing Business

by Kaili Spear.

With all the different ways to push your business online, you may be asking where to even start and how to do it.

Online reviews are a great way to get your roofing company a good boost, but first, we need to understand some basic things.

Why do I care about online reviews?

Have you ever researched a product before buying it? Did reading the reviews help you make a decision? People tend to research before they buy, and that means people research before they hire. Having online reviews not only makes it easier for people to find you when they research, but it also creates more confidence in new customers to choose your business.

It also gives a chance to interact with your customers. Try to respond to people that leave a review. If it’s a good one you can thank them and people see that you respond. If it’s a poor review it gives you the chance to fix it and worst case it allows potential customers see that you tried to resolve it.

What’s the difference between review sites?

There are a lot of review sites, we’ll only be covering major ones in this article but don’t ignore local sites or review services.

• Yelp- Yelp is a website and app that is dedicated to reviewing businesses. They get the most traffic for review searches. Anyone can review. If someone local is searching for your business and you have Yelp reviews, you can bet that will be one of the first results they’ll see.
• Google -Google Reviews will pop up when people search for your business or when people are searching for companies similar to yours (e.g. best roofing company austin tx). It’s similar to Yelp where people can review, upload images, and check for hours but it’s not a dedicated review site. Plus side about Google Reviews, the more you have the higher your local SEO will be.
• Facebook - Facebook has become a searching tool for a lot of people. It’s also a place where friends ask their friends for recommendations. If you have a Facebook Page that gives people the option to tag your company. Having reviews there gives potential customers the info they need to just check you out and not feel like they have to check other places, especially if another customer recommended you to them.
• Angie’s List - Users have to have an account to leave a review here, so there tends to be more confident in the reviews that people leave. There also aren’t anonymous reviews so people know if the review is left by someone that works at your company. Don’t feel pressured to advertise on this site though, unless the majority of your customers have come to you based on the reviews on that site specifically.

Which review sites should I focus on?

Start with what you know. If you personally only check out Yelp Reviews, ask your customers to leave a review on Yelp. If your company has a great Facebook page ask your customers to leave a review on Facebook. When you’re happy with the amount of reviews on one site or you have a great automatic system in place, then branch out into one of the others.

Cool, now what?

Now you have a better idea of what online reviews are and how your company can benefit from them. You also have an idea of what review sites you want to focus on. So now what? This is where JobNimbus comes in. One of the many features is the ability to send automatic emails out to your customers, so at the end of the job, you can automatically have an email sent to ask for a review.

Check out this article to find out how to do that. If you’re still not sure what to link, think about what you’re currently using. Do you have a Facebook account? Link to that. Do you have a Yelp account? Link to that. Don’t feel pressure to try a new site right off the bat, do that when you’re comfortable with the setup and where your reviews are at on sites you’re already using.

If you haven’t already set up your automatic review feature, do that today. If you don’t have JobNimbus yet start your demo and try it out.

Editor’s note: This article first appeared on the JobNimbus blog and can be viewed here.

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