Have You Ever Had An Online Customer Review Flagged Or Removed?

If your business is actively generating customer reviews, then you've probably come across an issue with a review site flagging or removing one or maybe a few of your customer reviews.  Most of the time 3rd Party Review Sites will not give you the specific reason why they decided not to flag or not approve a review.  Based on our experience working with these review sites, we have put together a quick checklist to help you avoid any issues in the future.  This checklist is useful for a number of review sites; such as Angie's List, Yelp, Google+, YP.com, HomeFinder, Merchant Circle, and more.

Checklist For Customer Review Submissions

1. Ask customers to submit reviews on their own computer, tablet, or smartphone.
2. Request reviews right after a job is completed, instead of asking for a bunch of reviews at a later date.
3. Ask customers to be detailed and completely honest.  What this means is you want to avoid generating a bunch of generic looking reviews like "Great Service A+!".  Generic looking reviews are more likely to get flagged by a review filter.
4. Do not ask for more than a few reviews per week.  Generating too many reviews at once can raise red flags as well.
5. Avoid having friends and family leave reviews if possible, even if they are a customer of yours.  3rd Party Review sites check IP Address's and can sometimes check email communication. 
6. Ask for reviews on multiple sites.  Overloading one company profile with reviews can raise red flags, try to balance it out.  For example, ask 3 customers to leave a review on Angie's List, then ask the next few to leave a review on Google+ or Yelp.
7. If possible, let your customer know not to copy and paste the same review to multiple sites.  Duplicate content is never a good thing.
8. Last but not least, NEVER SELF REVIEW ON ANY SITE.  This can result in account suspension and even possible account blocking.

Follow this checklist and you shouldn't have any issues with review filters in the future.  

Another great tip for collecting customer reviews is using Review Forms.  Leaving paper review forms behind for your customers will help you consistently generate new reviews for your company profile.  Here is a paper review form example.