John Caprine is the Internet Marketing Manager Senior at Scorpion. He is passionate about helping home services clients strategize and communicate in a way that aligns with their identity and cuts through the noise of the competition. By coming alongside his clients as a partner, he identifies what will generate calls for their business, how to improve their website to tell their business story, and ultimately generate revenue.

John explains that when your potential customers are looking for a home services provider like a plumber, electrician, or HVAC contractor, their decision is heavily influenced by the reputation of your business.

“Having an online reputation that is positive, responsive, is really important to the end user in the long run.”

Today, people are less likely to be searching based on loyalty to specific brands and businesses. They care about who will provide the best service, the amount and quality of your reviews, your prices, and the presentation of information about your services.

Your online reputation and reviews are crucial to shaping how your customers view your business. In addition, they can inform the success of your ads.

Local Services Ads (LSAs) are a new type of Google ad where you pay per lead, instead of pay per click. LSAs pull from your online presence, so the quality and amount of reviews you have can impact how often you show up in local searches. You can target your LSAs specifically to show up with keywords specific to your industry.

“How Google perceives where you show up in the organic search results and now impacts your Local Service Ads and where you show up in those is significant. It’s based on over 300 different factors… reviews, your online reputation, how many visits come to your website, how responsive you are to those reviews coming across. It plays a really large role in their reception of you.”

It’s important to know that sometimes your business will get a negative review.

John encourages all of his clients to respond quickly and professionally to negative reviews and also reach out personally to the upset customer. This not only resolves things with the person who left the negative review (and they may even remove it!) but also shows potential customers who you are as a business.

So how do you gather more reviews? The sincerity of a technician asking a client for their honest feedback is the most impactful, successful strategy.