Scale Online Review Responses with Intelligent Automation

Responding quickly to reviews is not only good for your reputation but also great for your local SEO.

With review signals making up 17% of Google's local SEO ranking factors, multi-location businesses need to respond to reviews regularly to improve their visibility and strengthen consumer trust.

However, most businesses find it difficult to keep up with the many reviews they receive each month across various platforms like Google, Yelp, and Facebook.

It's not uncommon for multi-location businesses to de-prioritize responding to reviews - especially those that are neutral or have no text - because of the time and effort typically required, or the risk to their brand if the responder gets it wrong.

Why should you respond to ALL reviews?

About 90% of consumers read a review before interacting with a business, making reviews one of your strongest allies in impacting the decision-making process of your future customers. Quick, tailored responses to reviews build trust with prospects and loyalty with customers.

They also influence your ranking in search results.

Remember how we said review signals make up 17% of Google's local SEO ranking factors? Google's algorithm looks at things like the percentage of reviews you respond to, the speed at which you do it, and the diversity of those responses. If you respond to say, 85% of your reviews and your competitor responds to 95% of theirs, it could make the difference between you or them showing up in the 3-Pack.

What's more, no-text reviews - which are thought to make up 55% of all reviews, according to Uberall data - are also factored into Google's calculations.

So, the rule of thumb is to respond to ALL reviews—whether positive, neutral, negative, or no-text reviews.

Review Response Made Easy with Intelligent Automation

At Uberall, we saw a big opportunity to help our clients boost their visibility and build trust with customers, by helping them overcome common challenges in responding to reviews.

We set out to create a tool to help them respond to as many reviews as possible in as little time as possible, with guardrails to protect and strengthen their brand and reputation; Enter Reply Assistant

Reply Assistant combines clever automation, custom templates, and in-flow recommendations to make it effortless to post tailored replies to every review, for every location, across multiple platforms.

It consists of two parts: Response Library, a brand-approved collection of response templates that can be used again and again when replying to customer reviews; and Automated Responses, a rules-based system that automatically posts one of up to pre-saved twenty responses to no-text reviews.

Together, they make it quick and easy for businesses to transform their response rates overnight.

Build and Save Templates in Response Library

With Response Library, selected users can create and save response templates centrally for various review scenarios, such as customer complaints, product inquiries, contact info requests, or even follow-up responses. That means no more tedious and time-consuming manual copying and pasting from notepads.

Whether your business follows a centralized, decentralized, or hybrid model, having review response templates available for location managers can go a long way in protecting the brand identity and voice.

You can also attach tags to response templates to organize your templates and help those responding to reviews find the right templates at the right time. Moreover, you can also optimize responses for the best results on local SEO.

Automate Responses for No-Text Reviews

Remember we said that 55% of Google reviews have no text, but still count towards your response rate? These reviews are low-hanging fruit for businesses to easily lift their response rate. However, addressing each of these manually can become an arduous task.

When your customers only rate your business and don't leave a comment, there is no real human analysis needed to respond to a review. There are only a handful of possible responses that make sense for a no-comment review.

To help our clients get started, there are up to twenty templates to leverage for each no-comment, one-to-five star review, as well as custom fields, to personalize the response with the user's name, and the store location they visited, and how many stars they left.

The platform then intelligently rotates through the responses, so they aren't flagged as robotic or automated either by the reader or the search engines. By leveraging our automated review response solution for no-comment reviews, your team is freed up to focus more time on reviews with comments.

Check Out Reply Assistant

Reply Assistant is a major enhancement to the Uberall CoreX platform and part of our commitment to helping our clients build the best hybrid customer experience. Reach out to our team of experts using the link below to find out more about this solution.