Hey everybody, Peter Brissette here, digital marketing dude. Welcome to the Monthly Marketing Message. I wanted to talk to you this month a little bit about Google reviews, and in particular, most of our clients are in some healthcare-related industry. And I wanted to highlight some of the really important stats that are out there from a recent study put together by a company called Bright Local that manages and researches online reviews for local businesses.
I’m going to share my screen with you here, so that we can take a look at some of this information. Let’s take a look here. All right, the first slide here that I’m gonna talk about is the percentage of businesses with reviews in terms of volume of reviews.
At the top end of this are bars, restaurants, and hotels. They really dominate the online review space. But, at the other end of this, and kind of in the middle, is where I really want to focus. So, when you start talking healthcare-related businesses, you can see dentists here are at about 84 percent in terms of volume, compared to other businesses.
Health and fitness, which would be any kind of fitness space, is at 75 percent, and then medical in general is at 73. And for those of you that are senior living industry, assisted living, memory care, et cetera, only at about 70 percent.
So, the ones that are below that are, you know, real estate, landscaping, construction, marketing companies, and accountants. So, there’s a couple things that this tells me in terms of the volume is that, if you work at this and you’re in health and fitness and medical, senior living, that you can actually really outshine your competition because in general, there’s not as many in terms of the volume of reviews that are being left out there.
Again, this is by industry in terms of the average number of reviews. Again, senior living, the average number of reviews is only five. That’s incredibly low. And not surprising. So, it’s difficult to get a volume of reviews in that space. But again, this means there’s opportunity. If you work hard at this, you can do well.
Again, health and fitness averages only 20. So, if you’re in that range or below that range, you’ve got some work to do, to really improve that and see that grow. That average rating by industry, so this is interesting. Unfortunately, for senior living, the average rating is only 4.05. I think that’s large, in part, because as an industry, senior living does not work very hard on asking for reviews and getting the good reviews.
What can happen often is the only reviews that are out there are negative reviews. So, there is work to be done, in particularly, in the senior living space. Medical in general averages 4.2. And health and fitness, actually, has pretty good overall ratings in that space, and doing pretty good on that.
So, how does that affect your rankings online? That’s really the key question here. So, on average, when you’re looking at all reviews, if you have a 4.47 average or higher, you likely are gonna be able to rank from one to three. So, that’s in the top three results, in particular for your Google reviews, Google My Business page.
So, that’s pretty significant. And then, if you realize that, well, if I’m only less than four and a half, 4.46 to 4.45, that’s not much difference. That’s .01 difference, can drop you from four to six, or seven to 10. And not, and kick you out of that top one to three ranking.
So, your overall average does matter in terms of how you are going to rank in the search results.
Three tips for you. First of all, check your reviews. If you’re not checking and looking at your reviews, please do that. If you need help with that and you don’t have our review in marketing service, talk to us about it so that you can stay on top of that.
Secondly, I would check and see how many reviews does your close competition have. So, those folks that are five to ten miles around you, what are their reviews? How many do they have? And what’s their overall rating? That becomes your goal. Then, you know what you’re looking for, and what you’re trying to accomplish in your reviews.
And number three, ask for reviews. If you have a conversation with your clients, and they give you positive feedback, immediately ask them to leave a review, and ask them to leave it on Google first, so that you can get your Google reviews up, so that you can help improve your search rankings.
All right, so, those are your tips for this month and your Monthly Marketing Message. Hope you found those useful. Please like, comment, and share on this video. Let others know if you know business owners who could get some good use out of this video, please let them know. And we wish you a fantastic month.
Thanks to Bright Local for the research they did on this topic.