I’ve had a few clients ask me about this recently so thought I’d write a post about how to link to Google reviews.

But first, why are Google Reviews so important?

In a recent blog post (SEO: HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR GOOGLE RANKING), I described SEO as “getting Google to like you”. Google dominates the Search Engine field with over 90% of us using it for our searching needs (we even use “Google” as a verb now!).

So we know that Google is king and it’s important that it displays lots of information about our company. This often the first impression potential customer’s have of you. And what could be better than a load of positive reviews from your customers?

However, Google doesn’t always make things easy (have you noticed?!).

If you want to encourage your customers to leave you a Google review, how do I send them there? Often we do this over email, how do I send a link to Google reviews?

Of course, you could just ask the customer to Google your company name and click to leave a review in the business listing. Not complicated by any means but it seems like a bit of hassle (especially compared to just clicking a button form an email).

If you don’t make leaving reviews (or anything for that matter!) as easy as possible for your customers, there will always be those that will put it off until later. Then life gets in the way and, before long, leaving a review for that nice company is a distant memory.

Ok, I think I’ve made my point clear.

Reviews on Google, good. Making your customer jump through hoops to leave one, bad.

So, here’s the solution…

You can link Google Reviews for your company but you have to build this link yourself by finding your Google Place ID. Why Google hides this away is beyond me!

1. Visit https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/examples/places-placeid-finder

2. Type your business name (as it appears on Google) into the search box on the map. You may need to also put in a partial address to get it to show:

3. Click on your company name and a box will pop-up with your Place ID (it’s a jumble of letters and numbers – highlighted yellow in example below):

4. Take this code and combine it with the link to Google reviews (see options below).

To view existing reviews with button to write a review:

https://search.google.com/local/reviews?placeid=[PLACE ID GOES HERE]

To go straight to leaving a review:

https://search.google.com/local/writereview?placeid=[PLACE ID GOES HERE]

Still can’t find your Google Place ID?

Remember I said that Google don’t like to make things easy? Well, not only do they make you jump through a lot of hoops to find your Place ID, sometimes the Place ID Finder doesn’t work!

via GIPHY

Basically, it’s a little temperamental.

I discovered this when I tried to find a client’s Place ID and they just simply wouldn’t come up in the search. I tried everything I could think of but eventually gave up for the day. But when I came back and typed in their company name the next day, it worked first time!

So, you can either just keep trying until it works (who’s got time for that?!) or you can follow these slightly more complex steps to find your Place ID (it looks scarier than it is, promise!).

1. Google your company name so your business listing displays on the right hand side (if you don’t have a business listing then you haven’t registered your company address yet. And that’s a whole different kettle of fish!)

2. Right click on ‘Write a review’ and click ‘Inspect’ or ‘Inspect Element’ (screenshot below is from a Mac, other devices may look slightly different):

3. A panel will appear, either at the bottom of your screen or on the side, with lots of coding in (again, the screenshot below is from a Mac, yours may look slightly different).

4. Now you need to find data-pid= among this code. This may feel a little daunting but, don’t worry, you can’t do any harm from just scrolling through. I didn’t need to scroll at all, it was displayed just a few lines above the highlighted line in the panel (again, the screenshot below is from a Mac, yours may look slightly different):

5. Your Google Place ID is the random numbers and letters between the two speech marks after data-pid=. Highlight and copy this and combine with the link to Google reviews below.

To view existing reviews with button to leave a review:

https://search.google.com/local/reviews?placeid=[PLACE ID GOES HERE]

To go straight to leaving a review:

https://search.google.com/local/writereview?placeid=[PLACE ID GOES HERE]

While we’re on the subject!

If this blog post has been helpful, how about testing it out by clicking the direct link to Ghost Digital’s Google Reviews below and leaving some positive thoughts 🙂

https://search.google.com/local/reviews?placeid=ChIJAQBwRoVSdEgRnZfGcfjCbp0