Welcome to the first instalment of the Conscious blog trilogy on online reviews for law firms; two further instalments will be made available over the coming days so stay tuned.
The proliferation of online consumer review sites like Trustpilot and Yelp means that your clients have a number of options when choosing to leave a written review of your services. There are also a number of specialist legal online review/comparison sites to consider such as: legallybetter.co.uk and http://icomparesolicitors.co.uk. Monitoring and responding to reviews across a multitude of online sites can be a thankless task at the best of times, luckily as with most things, Google appears to have come up with an answer.
Google announced just a couple of weeks ago that it is to begin rolling out a free review monitoring module, known simply as “Reviews”, as part of its Google Places for Business offering. The new review monitoring module is built in to the new Places for Business dashboard; fear not if you can’t see this yet, Google is periodically updating Places dashboards (ours is still yet to be updated).
The review tool promises to alert businesses when reviews are posted across the web, allowing that business to respond directly to comments. Provided the tool functions well, it offers a great new opportunity to manage your law firm’s online reputation. If you are keen to learn more about the new Google review tool then take a look at the following article which I found to be very useful.
We will be keeping a close eye on the new tool over the next few months, if you are a law firm using the review tool I would be interested to hear some of your early impressions and as ever if you have any questions please do get in touch.
Part two released on Tuesday focuses on the reasons why law firms can ill afford to ignore online reviews and online reputation management.