Managing Google Reviews for Multi-Location Businesses: A Guide

It should be noted that 88% of customers read Google reviews to determine the status and quality of a local business before engaging with them. 

Thus, your business needs to maintain a good volume of reviews, especially if it is multi-location, as all these locations need to create an authentic and valuable image in the Google search rankings.

You can opt to buy Google reviews and create positive intrigue about your business among audiences of various locations.

It is uniquely challenging for multi-location businesses, as you need to maintain a standard tone for all these locations. Thus, we’ll look into all these problems in this blog and offer practical solutions.

Challenges of Managing Google Reviews for MultiLocation Businesses 

Several challenges are specific to a multi-location business when trying to gain and manage Google reviews. Let’s look at a few such issues,

• Difficulty in maintaining consistency across locations 

All the locations of your business will have their own team of administrators, workers, and sellers. Bringing in consistency among the approaches of all such teams can prove to be a significant challenge for your business. 

Hence, many times similar products or services would be reviewed with a drastic difference based on the type of interaction your clients receive at two different locations.

• The volume of reviews and the need for quick responses 

Managing reviews for a single location can also prove to be quite cumbersome if the business is performing well.  

Add more such locations and a huge clientele to this, and you can face a challenge in timely responding to all your reviews.

• Monitoring reviews for multiple branches 

The problem of managing bulk reviews does not just stop at responding to all of them but also trickles down to monitoring them continuously as well.

One needs both a variety of AI tools and a dedicated staff to deal with the magnitude of reviews coming in from various locations to make any sense of these reviews.

How to Manage Google Reviews for MultiLocation Businesses 

Don’t fret about the challenges mentioned above; rather, let’s look at how we can overcome them and manage reviews for multiple locations.

• Set Up Separate Google My Business Listings for Each Location 

By separating these business locations on Google My Business, you will be able to gain individualistic insights and management tools for each of your locations.

This will allow customers to leave location-specific reviews and avoid any confusion.

• Centralize Review Monitoring and Management 

By using review management software, you can centrally track reviews from all locations. With this technique, you can ensure that no review is disregarded and allocate relevant review to the accurate staff for their response.

• Train local managers to respond to reviews. 

To smoothly run a business in multiple locations and promptly respond to all reviews, train your local managers to be a part of the responding process. This will result in a specific and prompt response from your team in each location.

• Respond to reviews promptly and professionally. 

Emphasize responding within 24 to 48 hours to each of your managers from various locations and ask them to professionally handle any negative review. This will help in keeping your brand image intact across all the locations.

• Develop consistent brand guidelines for review responses. 

Issue guidelines and standard protocol on what is to be done while responding to a positive or negative review. By following these rules, your team can ensure consistency and generalization in the tone of your brand’s response.

• Highlight Positive Reviews for Each Location 

Use the social media accounts and website of your business to showcase positive reviews from different locations. This will be a testament to your quality products and services throughout the entire geographical span of your business.

• Use automation tools to track reviews across multiple locations. 

There are many tools available in the market that can streamline the reviews from all locations and set alerts for any new review. Through this method, you can efficiently organize and respond to all the reviews.

• Encourage Location Specific Reviews 

Try and encourage customers to leave reviews about a specific location, as this will convince the potential buyers to go and check out that particular location of your brand. Subsequently, you can gain more buyers and increase sales through such reviews.

How to Leverage Google Reviews to Improve Customer Experience 

Now, let us look at some techniques for leveraging your Google reviews to improve the customer experience.

• Identify patterns in feedback across locations. 

Pay attention to the advantages or complaints mentioned about a single location in any review and compare these elements to your other locations. This method will improve the overall level of service throughout multiple locations.

• Share insights with local teams. 

Conduct regular meetings with teams of different locations to share insights or trends observed in different areas. This will help in acquiring a variety of data and using it to enhance the overall performance of your business.

• Turn Negative Reviews Into Opportunities for Improvement 

It is impossible to not receive any negative reviews, but instead of getting discouraged, use them to enhance the services of other locations. 

By tackling it nicely in one location, you set a precedent for all other locations to follow.

Conclusion 

Managing multiple locations of a business and handling the reviews of all locations can come with unique challenges. From maintaining consistency in response to tackling the sheer volume of reviews, one can get easily overwhelmed.

However, through the ways to manage reviews, like setting up different Google Business profiles, teaching your local managers to respond to reviews, and sharing insights across locations, you can make it all work.

Additionally, you can get help from Buyreviewz for their reviewing services and accelerate the rate of your online growth.

By dealing with these challenges and leveraging Google reviews to transform negative reviews into positive opportunities, you can excel in your business even at multiple locations