The Importance of Senior Care Business Reviews in 2018

Remember when word-of-mouth was the best advertising money couldn’t buy? It’s still true, only now word-of-mouth takes the form of online reviews that can reach hundreds or thousands of prospective customers.

Not convinced that pixels can take the place of a personal recommendation? Seven out of 10 consumers check online reviews before they decide where to spend their money and 85% consider recommendations from people they know and online reviews to be equally trustworthy.

Senior Care Business Reviews Online

How can you find out where your business is reviewed, get more reviews, and use that feedback to grow your business? We’ve got you covered.

There are dozens of review sites today. Some review all kinds of businesses, while others are more specialized. For now, we’ll focus on some of the most popular general review sites where your business should have a presence to reach consumers:

1. Facebook: A business page on Facebook can include reviews along with contact information, photos, posts and video tours.
2. Google: Whenever someone Googles “senior communities near me,” Google will serve up a map with local results, including Google reviews, reviews from other sites (including SeniorAdvisor.com), contact information, photos and more. Does a search for your business turn up this kind of information? If not, we’ll show you how to change that below by claiming your Google “My Business” listing.
3. SeniorAdvisor.com: We’re tooting our own horn because SeniorAdvisor.com has more than 100,000 client and family reviews of senior care businesses across North America, making it a natural first stop for families exploring their options. Nearly all reviews on the site have been verified by a SeniorAdvisor.com staffer, and every year the team analyzes the reviews to find and feature the best-rated senior care businesses.
4. Yelp: Yelp is a user review site that covers all types of businesses, with a focus on helping people find things nearby. Like Google, it encourages business owners to claim and manage their listings.

If you maintain a presence for your business on these sites, you can reach most people who are looking for senior care services.

How to Claim Your Senior Care Business Profiles

The first step in managing reviews from your clients is to claim the listings where those reviews appear. Here’s how:

Facebook offers a guide for setting up your business page on their platform. Google also has detailed instructions for claiming your Google “My Business” listing on your desktop computer or your phone. Yelp’s “Claiming Your Business” page walks you through their process as well. For each platform, have your business logo and photos ready to upload.

To claim your SeniorAdvisor.com business profile, click “Log In” on the upper right side of the homepage. On the next page, in the “Not a Member” column, click the “Get Access” button. You’ll see a pop-up window with a link at the bottom for community managers to sign up. Click on that link and enter your information. Then go to your business profile, click on the blue “Claim This Profile” link, and a request will go to SeniorAdvisor.com. Within two business days, you should get an email letting you know your request has been approved. After that, all you have to do is sign into the site to use the community management tools on your business page to edit your profile, respond to current reviews, and invite clients to add reviews of their own.

How to Respond to Customer Reviews

Once you’ve claimed or created your business profiles, it’s time to respond to any reviews that clients have already left. Here are SeniorAdvisor.com’s recommended three steps for responding to customer reviews:

1. Thank each reviewer for their feedback, whether it’s positive or not. Your reviewers devoted some of their time to giving you feedback, so show them you appreciate it. If their review is negative, you may also want to apologize for their bad experience.
2. Try to acknowledge their concerns. You can thank positive reviewers for pointing out a great thing about your community and then reiterate why it’s so great. For negative reviewers, acknowledge their experience and explain how you plan to fix the issue — or how you’ve already corrected it.
3. Remember to invite the reviewer back, if appropriate. If you have an upcoming event, you can invite positive reviewers to join you. This is a good way to catch the eye of prospective customers who are reading your reviews because they’re considering your community for themselves or a family member. You can also invite negative reviewers back to see how you’ve used their feedback to correct the issue they mentioned.

Here are two fictional example reviews, one positive and one negative. You see how the sample responses follow the 3-step process.

Negative Example Review:

Positive Example Review:

Reading and responding to customer reviews gets easier and faster with practice, so make it a regular part of your work schedule. Responding in a timely way shows that you’re keeping an eye on your customers’ experiences, and it can help you spot any changes in quality of service as soon as they arise.

One easy way to keep track of what people are saying about your business is to set up Google alerts for the name of your company. On the Google Alerts page, enter your brand or business name in quotes into the “Create an alert about” box. Hit enter, and then you can click “show options” to set your preferences for how often you want updates, the sources you want to use and their locations and where Google should email your alerts. Then click the “Create Alert” button and you’re done.

How to Request Customer Reviews for Your Senior Care Business

Whether you already have plenty of reviews or none yet, you’ll want more as your company and customer base grow. It’s important to know the right way to ask for reviews to get as many customers as possible to participate and to stay on the right side of review-request rules.

• On your Facebook page, you can ask customers to use the Reviews link on the left side of the page to give you a review.
• Google “My Business” lets you create a link in your listing that customers can use to leave reviews.
• SeniorAdvisor.com makes it easy to ask for reviews by offering partner businesses tools to request reviews via email, create printable flyers to share with clients and prospects, and customize prepaid review postcards your customers can use.
• Yelp is unique in penalizing businesses that ask customers for reviews. Instead, include Yelp’s badges on your marketing materials and put a “Find Us on Yelp” sign where customers can see it.

On any review platform it’s not considered ethical to offer incentives to customers in exchange for reviews and Google discourages businesses from setting up kiosks in your businesses for customers to post reviews. Instead, let customers know you’d love their feedback and tell them where they can post their reviews.

How to Use Reviews to Promote Your Business

Good reviews can help your business when prospective customers see them, but you don’t have to wait for people to seek out your reviews. You can bring the reviews to them and get even more marketing mileage out of your positive feedback.

Add Trust to Your Website

Seeing that someone else had an experience with your business and wrote about it online builds a sense of legitimacy. When potential customers see your review banner or widget, they will feel they can trust your business and be more open to doing business with from you. When a current customer sees your good reviews, they feel confident they made the right choice. You can also use your review banner and its link in your business email signature and in posts on your Facebook page.

SeniorAdvisor.com gives you two ways to add trust symbols to your business website. You can add a reviews banner that visitors can click to see your SeniorAdvisor.com reviews. You can also add a reviews widget that will update with your positive 4- and 5-star reviews.

Promote Your Reviews

You can reach a broader audience by creating promotions for other social media platforms based on your reviews. For example, you can set up a YouTube channel for your business with links to your website and other social media profiles, as SeniorAdvisor.com partner company Comfort Keepers does. When you earn your 10^th or 100^th 5-star customer review, you can celebrate that milestone and promote your business with a video that features the things reviewers love about your business. (You can also reach prospective customers with video tours of your community and interviews with your employees and clients.) Viewers can’t leave the same types of reviews on YouTube videos that they can on other review platforms, but they can leave comments and give each video a thumbs-up or thumbs-down.

The Quick List of Review Management Tips for Your Senior Care Business

There’s a lot of information to sort through here, so we’ve distilled all these recommendations into a checklist. Use it to get your review program up and running, and your business will get better at delighting clients, new customers and drawing reliable employees:

1. Claim your business profiles on these sites: Facebook, Glassdoor, Google, Indeed, SeniorAdvisor.com, Yelp.
2. Monitor reviews and other media mentions by setting up Google Alerts.
3. Use the 3-step process to reply to reviews.
4. Request reviews from customers.
5. Use your reviews on your profiles and site.
6. Promote your reviews on other platforms.
7. Study similar business reviews.

Casey Kelly-Barton

Casey Kelly-Barton is an Austin-based freelance writer whose childhood was made awesome by her grandmothers, great-grandmother, great-aunts and -uncles, and their friends.