In this 4-minute read:
- Why you should claim your Google listing first
- Claiming your online business listings correlates with more revenue
- Responding to Google reviews is associated with increased revenue
- Why reviews on Google are more valuable than other review sites
A BrandMuscle report from a couple years back found that only 44% of Google my Business listings had been claimed. In the digital era, when online presence is of paramount importance for any business—including small, local shops—this is a travesty.
Claiming your online listings is the very first step in every coherent small business marketing plan. Why? Because your customers are leaving you online reviews, whether you want them or not—and whether you’ve claimed your listings or not.
Attract more customers and keep them loyal with reputation management software. Learn more, plus get free reputation monitoring and customer insights when you sign up for Womply Free!
Google, Yelp, and other online review sites will automatically create a profile for your business and collate all reviews there, even if you have never logged on to the site—in fact, even if you don’t own a computer.
So, until you officially claim your Google listing (which is free and relatively easy to do), you are giving 100% control over what people say about your business to strangers on the internet.
However, if the above reason isn’t enough of a motivation to get you to claim your Google listing, Womply’s data scientists just released a new report on the impact of reviews on small business revenue… and the results are pretty dramatic.
Let’s have a look at 3 statistics that show you should claim your Google My Business profile:
1. Claiming 3 or more online business listings correlates with a 78% jump in revenue
That’s right, claiming your online listings isn’t just a good idea… it can mean a lot of money.
In Womply’s examination of over 200,000 American small businesses, those that didn’t claim any of their online business listings earned 24% less in annual revenue than the average business.
On the other hand, businesses that claimed 3 or more of their online listings earned 36% more annual revenue than the average business, and a whopping 78% more revenue than businesses that claimed none of their listings.
As you can see from the revenue chart above, we’re not talking peanuts here. Claim those listings!
Learn how in our free step-by-step guides:
- How to claim your Google Business listing
- How to claim your Yelp business listing
- How to claim your business listing on TripAdvisor
2. Businesses that respond to reviews earn up to 49% more revenue… and you can’t respond until you claim your Google listing
Surprisingly, among businesses in Womply’s study, 75% don’t respond to any online reviews. You don’t want to be that business.
Our data shows that businesses that respond to reviews at least 25% of the time earn 35% more annual revenue than average, and 49% more revenue than those who don’t respond to any of their reviews.
And, you guessed it… you can’t respond to your Google reviews until you officially claim your Google business listing.
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- 25 free listing sites every small business should be on
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3. Google listings are more “valuable” than Yelp or Facebook
As we discussed above, you should claim all your online business listings. But if you had to choose only one, it should be Google.
Womply’s study underlines how important claiming your Google listing is. In terms of its correlation to increased sales, Google is the most important of any single review site.
As you can see, study businesses who claim their Google listing average 10% more in annual revenue than the typical business. However, those who don’t claim their Google listing average 24% less in annual revenue.
In addition, an above average number of reviews on Google correlates more strongly with increased revenue than on other sites.
Once again, we see that Google is the most important site to claim when looking at annual revenue compared to average number of reviews. Businesses in the study with more than the average number of reviews on Google brought in 51% more in annual revenue.
There’s certainly a lot of nuance behind these numbers, but it’s clear that small businesses benefit from getting legitimate and honest reviews from as many real customers as possible.
Small business owners should definitely to work toward getting a healthy number of reviews on Google (and responding to those reviews, as discussed above—which you can’t do until you claim your profile).
Don’t leave money on the table. Claim your Google listing!
Save time and do more with reputation management software
Online review management is vital for all businesses today, but it can take a lot of time… time that many small business owners simply don’t have.
Reputation management software can be a huge benefit here. Womply’s software gathers and collates all your online reviews from all the popular sites in one place with one login.
You can read and reply to all your reviews, set up auto replies if you so choose, and even email your customers with promotions, reminders, thank yous, and other messages to build loyalty and keep them coming back to spend with you.
Learn more, plus get free reputation monitoring and customer insights when you sign up for Womply Free!