Tips and Best Practices: Yelp & Google Reviews
Ratings and reviews can heavily impact purchasing decisions, and positive reviews help to create trust in local businesses.
How Can I Find my Community's Rating?
Chatmeter is a great resource that aggregates all online feedback and reviews for each community. Click here to read more about monitoring reviews on Chatmeter.
Best Practices for Receiving Yelp & Google Reviews
Verbally ASK for reviews. A simple request to happy residents and prospects can lead to an increase in overall ratings.
- For Yelp, tell residents to “check in” before posting a review. This will let Yelp know that they are legitimate resident, which will make their review less likely to be filtered from results.
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Have your maintenance team carry door hangers after completing a service request to encourage residents to leave a Yelp or Google review. This approach has proven to be successful across the Essex portfolio.
- Reach out to marketing@essex.com if you are in need of collateral.
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Have your team include Yelp and/or Google icons in their email signature so that residents and prospects may easily leave feedback.
- Reach out to marketing@essex.com for the most recent logos.
Avoid the Following
- Never provide incentives (i.e. gift cards, prizes, contests) in exchange for reviews. This is against Yelp’s policy, which can lead to negative repercussions.
- Never write your own reviews or ask friends, family, or other employees to write positive reviews.
- Never make residents or prospects feel pressured into leaving reviews.
- Do not ask for reviews via email or other electronic communication.
February 8, 2022
Last updated:
February 08, 2022