Imagine you’re in a new city.

You’re hungry, and you need a place to eat.  You decide to walk down the road to see what you find.

You see two restaurants that look pretty much identical and serve the same type of food. Both restaurants have an almost similar line of people waiting to get in.

Now, which one is better?

If you’re like most people, you’ll take your cell phone out, open the food app and check the ratings for both restaurants.

Without any prior knowledge of either restaurant, you would assume the restaurant with a higher rating and more reviews is better.

Or at least more popular and more likely to want to dine there.

The way online reviews influence your decision-making when choosing a restaurant is no different from the way your customers will be influenced when trying to select from two pest control companies.

Thus, you need to collect reviews if you want to stand out from competitors within the search listings –  or even if you want to convince a potential client that you’re the right option for them.

You can collect customer reviews from multiple places, such as:

• Business website
• Citation listings (example: Yelp, Foursquare, etc.)
• Google Business Profile
• Social media profiles (example: Facebook)

Here is an example of a local customer review online:

It’s because of all these reasons mentioned you need to take the collection of reviews seriously.

What Matters When Collecting Reviews

If you feel intimidated by your competitors because they have a lot of positive reviews, it’s essential to realize that review quantity isn’t that big of an issue.

That’s because Google gives more priority to ‘review velocity’ over ‘review quantity.’

Note: Velocity essentially relates to the number of reviews within a given time period.

Suppose your small pest control business gets ten reviews in the last 30 days but only has a total of 20 reviews. On the other hand, a competitor gathered five reviews in the past 30 days but has a total of 100 hundred reviews.

Provided you have an optimized Google Business Profile, there’s a good chance that Google will still rank you higher than the company with more ‘total’ reviews than you.

Here’s an example:

Still, it outranks the other business because of a well-optimized and updated GMB profile and a potentially greater level of review velocity.

Your average review total will also have a big impact on how well you rank.

You could have one hundred reviews, and you might’ve collected 50 of them in the past month. But if the average of these reviews is three stars,’ it’s not going to do your business any favors.

How to Get More Reviews

So, you now understand the importance of gathering more reviews; you need to figure out how you can actually get them.

Now, you might think that providing a good service is enough. But unfortunately, just because you provide a good service doesn’t mean customers will leave a review.

There are many reasons for this, but it often comes down to the – 

• The customer not knowing that they can even give you a review
• The customer doesn’t know where they can leave a review

As a pest control business owner, you don’t want this to happen.

Thus, you need to go the extra mile and make the review process easy by explaining, in immense detail, how they can leave a review.

Here’s an example of how you can do that:

Sending your customers an email asking them to provide a review is perhaps the easiest way to get this done.

Here are a few sample email templates you can use…

Template 1: (The simple one)

Hi [Customer’s First Name],

Thanks for choosing [your business name]. It was a pleasure serving you with [service type/name].

I wanted to reach out personally and ask about your overall experience.

Feedback from an amazing customer like YOU helps others to feel confident about choosing [your business name] and will really help us grow.

We want to get better every single day, and your feedback helps us accomplish that. Could you please leave us your valuable feedback? It only takes a minute or two.

Add your feedback here [link]

Thank you for your trust and support. I would really appreciate it.

[Your name]

[Your business name]

P.S.–Please find the attached file. It will assist you with the feedback process.

Template 2: (The detailed one)

Hi [Customer’s First Name],

Thanks for choosing [your business name]. It was a pleasure serving you with [service type/name].

I wanted to reach out personally and ask about your overall experience.

Feedback from an amazing customer like YOU helps others to feel confident about choosing [your business name] and will really help us grow.

We want to get better every single day, and your feedback helps us accomplish that. Could you please leave us your valuable feedback? I would really appreciate it if you could add your experience with our technicians and turnaround time.

It only takes a minute or two. Add your feedback here [link]

Thanks for your trust and help. I would really appreciate it.

[Your name]

[Your business name]

P.S.- Please find the attached file. It will assist you with the feedback process.

Template 3: (The follow-up email)

Hi [Customer’s First Name],

I just wanted to follow up on my previous email about your experience with [your company name]

Now that you’ve had a few days to experience the result, we’d love to know what you think.

Please click [this link] to share your feedback about [service offered].

Feedback from amazing customers like YOU help others to feel confident about choosing [your business name] and will really help us grow.

[Your name]

[Your business name]

P.S.- Please find the attached file. It will assist you with the feedback process.

The perfect time to ask for a review is when you’ve completed a transaction.

If you can consistently ask your customers for reviews, it won’t be long before you’re able to gather more reviews than your competitors.

Note: Make sure you don’t offer an incentive for people to leave a review.

Doing so is often against the terms of service, and taking this step could lead to you losing a lot of reviews or even being banned from a review platform.