Reviews are supposed to be natural. They’re supposed to reflect the way customers experience your business (or any other), without being biased by the business owner.
Paying for reviews could get your business profile banned and delisted - and if customers think you’re paying for reviews, they won’t trust the good reviews you’ve gotten!
But what if you don’t pay for reviews; what if you just ask?
This question is more complicated than it seems on the surface. If you’re a regular StoragePug reader, you’ll know we want you to be asking for reviews all the time, from almost anyone, so of course you’re allowed to!
There are lots of rules that go along with the asking, though. And some platforms ban asking at all!
We’ll go over all the rules in this quick little guide so you don’t have to worry (or do the research) before you start up your review program.
How much influence should the business have on its reviews?
This is a thorny question and different platforms have come up with different answers.
Pug Pro Tip: In this blog, we’re talking about Google, Facebook, and Yelp.
These are the biggest places people might go to find reviews, but there are many many more. You only need to learn the rules for those if you’re actively trying to get reviews on them.
For the most part, you should focus on Google.
Your business will probably find some renters on Yelp and some on Facebook, but just going by the numbers Google is the big fish here. Your customers might go to Yelp or Facebook to check you out, but they’ll probably find you for the first time on Google.
Read more about how your customers find you!
If you prefer to go straight to the source, check out:
There are a few things that all three platforms agree on. They all ban businesses from paying for reviews, for example. But there are more rules than that.
All platforms ban:
Yelp specifically bans all of the above, plus:
Yelp wants the only reviews to come from people who had an experience that pushed them to leave a review.
We recommend that businesses always follow these guidelines, even if it’s tempting to pay for a few dozen reviews just to get you off the ground.
In self storage, we’re kind of small fish in a big pond here. Even if you’re a mid-sized operator with a dozen facilities, your resources are tiny compared to the big businesses splashing around in e-commerce.
E-commerce is currently worth $6.3 trillion dollars. That’s a lot of zeroes. And reviews play a huge hand in who gets what portion of that money.
That’s a huge incentive for huge companies to invest huge money in cheating the system. AND for the system to keep working, the review companies have to keep them from cheating.
Google and Facebook have very talented data scientists and coders making powerful algorithms to catch cheaters. These algorithms aren’t perfect. Lots of people get “caught” when they weren’t cheating at all.
The best thing you can do is follow the rules and pay attention to your profile to make sure you’re not getting penalized.
If one of these review sites decides you’re using fake reviews, there are several steps they could take to remedy the situation.
They might simply remove the reviews they don’t like - this is the most likely thing to happen if you get hit by review bots or spam.
Or, they could take down those reviews and prevent anyone else from leaving a review. This could hurt your business significantly over time, especially since reviews are a powerful SEO signal.
Worst case scenario, your profile gets removed - and if it’s Google that’s dinging your profile, you could be removed from Google search altogether.
Obviously, this is really, really bad. Don’t cheat on your Google Business Profile. The reward you get is not likely to be worth the risk of getting caught.
Yes, you can ask for reviews for your self storage facility - except on Yelp. Yelp doesn’t want you requesting reviews.
Asking is the best way to get reviews, too. The managers who see the most success getting reviews tend to ask for them face-to-face while the customer is in the office.
Whichever you decide to do, your business needs good reviews. The more often you can get them, the more you get, and the better they are, the more rentals you'll get.
For more information on why you should have a review program, how to get them, and other GBP related topics, check out these articles:
