Online Reputation Management for Lawn, Landscape, and Outdoor Living Businesses: What It Is and Why It’s Critical
—
The Content Team,
HALSTEAD.
Originally published on December 7, 2015. Updated on February 3, 2023.
Table of Contents Click Here to Show
Nearly 90% of consumers read online reviews to determine the quality of a local business before contacting them. Online reviews are the modern word-of-mouth referrals, with 79% of review readers considering them as good as recommendations from friends and family. These impressive stats show the impact online reviews have on consumers' purchasing decisions, demonstrating why top lawn, landscape, and outdoor living businesses take online reputation management seriously.
Your green industry business may have a fantastic website with helpful content, the right calls to action, and a stunning digital portfolio of your outdoor living projects. Still, if your reviews aren’t good, you’ll lose.
Defining Online Reputation Management for Outdoor Living Businesses
Strategic online reputation management helps ensure you win the job by providing the social proof consumers want. Online reputation management helps influence people's perception of your work, your values, your team, and how you do business.
While online reputation management seems similar to public relations, they differ. PR is more public-facing and relationship-based, and online reputation management has a technical and content-oriented approach. Both help shape people’s opinions, but their strategies are different.
Your online reputation affects the quality and quantity of your leads and, ultimately, your revenue. With the use of , content marketing, and social media, online reputation management ensures the online image of your business is positive. A large part of this effort is collecting and responding to online reviews, primarily on two platforms: Google and Facebook.
The Best Platforms for Outdoor Living Businesses to Collect Customer Reviews
There are many platforms where customers can submit reviews, including Houzz, Yelp, Angi, Better Business Bureau, and more. However, Google and Facebook are the platforms where customer reviews are most impactful and should be where you request customers to review your business.
Google Reviews
More consumers use Google to evaluate local businesses than ever before, with the percentage of reviews increasing by nearly 20% in 2021. 71% of all online reviews are written on Google, so it’s not surprising that it’s the most popular platform where consumers read customer reviews, as all Google reviews are public.
Authenticity is a factor for Google reviews, and studies indicate that Google is one of the top sources of fake reviews, according to consumers. Google does not verify if a reviewer is a customer, so your responses to all reviews are critical. Even so, Google is still one of the most influential customer review sites.
The Google reviews feature is integrated with Google My Business and Maps and displays beneath your business name. The Google Map Pack is a prominent section for local search results and generally displays above organic search results. The number one spot in this section has the highest click-through-rate (CTR) of all listings. Because of this, Google Map Pack is one of the best local SEO strategies to drive traffic.
Google reviews are especially important for lawn, landscape, and outdoor living businesses because they help boost local search rankings. The factors influencing local SEO include the numerical rating, keywords in reviews, and the number of reviews. Higher rankings mean more clicks, web traffic, calls, and revenue.
Facebook Reviews and Recommendations
With 70% of American adults using Facebook, no other social media platform can compare with its vast audience reach. Regarding homebuyers, millennials have the highest share of any generation. Combined with the fact that 84% of millennials are on Facebook and are more likely than any other generation to want to entertain outside, these stats demonstrate why Facebook is an excellent place for outdoor living contractors to collect customer reviews to reach this growing target customer base.
In addition to the 5-star rating and review system, Facebook has an integrated Recommendations feature where anyone can select yes or no for whether they recommend your business. The overall ratings for your business are calculated using the ratings, reviews, and Recommendations. Only Recommendations that are shared publicly are included in the overall rating.
Facebook does not verify whether users are customers, which explains why only 7% of consumers say they’re “not at all” suspicious of reviews on Facebook. However, the ability to click to view a reviewer's profile allows users to trace authenticity by viewing their location and history.
How Green Industry Firms Benefit From Online Reputation Management
Whether a prospect hires your firm or your competitor for their comprehensive outdoor living project is impacted by your online reputation, including your customer reviews. Even the negative reviews help you demonstrate how you resolve customer concerns with transparency and accountability—a quality that helps you build credibility, authority, and trust with consumers.
Customer reviews are content. While a strategic content marketing plan may include a resourceful blog, high-quality landing pages, and social media posts, you can use reviews similarly.
At HALSTEAD, we’ve found that some of the best-performing ads are Google Ads or Facebook Ads that highlight customer reviews or testimonials. Displaying customer testimonials on your website helps reinforce for your prospect that they are making the right decision by choosing your company—something significant for high-end outdoor spaces with a high dollar amount.
A study by Northwestern University found that conversions increased by 380% for higher-priced sales when customer reviews were displayed. While your sales team may have excellent sales techniques, online customer reviews confirm with the prospect that everything your sales representative said is true and not simply a sales ploy. They can see that local customers are pleased with their new outdoor kitchen or paver patio results.
Google reviews have SEO value that helps your business rank higher on the search engine results pages (SERPs). This ensures potential local prospects see your Google My Business profile and helps solidify your local map listing.
From a non-technical standpoint, insightful feedback lets you know what your customers are looking for. You find out what your landscape company is doing right and how you can improve, which is valuable information that can help you grow. Both positive and negative reviews are required for you to gain insight. Still, there are psychological reasons that make the balance of both types of reviews essential in attracting prospects to your business.
Why Outdoor Living Businesses Benefit From Both Positive and Negative Customer Reviews
As a landscape business owner, a negative review may feel personal, but an occasional negative review can benefit your business. Google explicitly states that having a mix of positive and negative reviews is more trustworthy than having all positive reviews, confirming what countless studies have indicated. Prospects tend to forgive negative reviews if there is a higher percentage of reviews from happy customers, but not all reviews are equal.
Google and prospects are skeptical of inauthentic reviews. If there is an unnatural number of positive reviews in proportion to negative reviews, Google itself may not deem the business trustworthy—resulting in a lower SERP ranking. A study showed that companies with only 5-star ratings were perceived as inauthentic and “too good to be true.” Conversion likelihood peaks when ratings are between 4 to 4.7 stars and decreases as ratings approach five stars.
A couple of excellent reviews won’t serve you well, and neither will a large number of reviews if they are anonymous and can’t be traced back to a real person. Having the right balance of negative and positive reviews requires you to gather reviews consistently, tactfully address negative reviews, and follow best practices.
Online Reputation Management Best Practices for Outdoor Living Businesses
The first thing most customers do when researching a business, especially a business in the service industry, is read online customer reviews. Only after they’ve verified the company is reputable do they visit the business website to continue their research and proceed through the customer journey. Ensuring there are recent reviews is helpful.
Requesting Online Reviews From Your Customers
Collecting a steady flow of customer reviews is much more effective than getting 20 in a month and then not getting any for the next six months. Since the customers who are most likely to review your business unprompted will usually provide a negative review, soliciting reviews is essential in achieving the right balance of positive and negative reviews.
Studies have shown that when a customer reviews a business on their own, they are often affected by social influence bias and will adjust their opinions closer to the group norm of the reviews currently posted. To prevent this influence, HALSTEAD recommends inviting customers to submit a review by directly asking your customer to review your business.
Many of the landscape professionals we work with send emails or texts requesting reviews or include links in their email signatures where customers can submit a review. Be specific about the platform you want the customers to review you on, primarily Google and Facebook.
Encourage your customers to include photos of their new poolscape, beautifully maintained landscaping, or new paver walkway—to help increase the authenticity of their reviews. When there is proof that a reviewer is a “verified buyer,” the probability of conversion increases by 15%.
One caveat is to only request reviews from satisfied customers and not from customers who had complaints at some point in the project, no matter how minor the complaint was or if you resolved it. This guideline applies even if you went above and beyond to rectify the situation. While you can’t control how your customers review your business, you can choose who you invite to do so with your business’s best interest in mind.
Monitoring Online Customer Reviews
You risk a missed opportunity without an effective way to monitor your online customer reviews. Keep track of where your reviews are coming from and use a tool that helps you track reviews across multiple sites to identify trends. Automating the review collection process helps ensure that the process is done successfully and consistently.
Clients using our online reputation management service can monitor their online presence through numerous platforms in one convenient dashboard accessible via an app, allowing them to monitor their online customer reviews while on a job site or in their truck. They can also respond to customer reviews and messages and set up an automated system to request customer reviews. With your busy schedule, the easier you make this process, the more likely
you’ll do it.
Developing an Online Reputation Management System
Leading landscape companies have an online reputation management system and a designated person overseeing it, so this integral aspect of their online presence is monitored and handled. Make collecting reviews a regular part of your business practice by including it in a project checklist, to be done after a final walkthrough or a month after a new maintenance contract starts, for example. The process for responding to reviews should be just as streamlined.
Responding to Online Customer Reviews
57% of people say that they would be “not very” or “not at all” likely to choose a business that doesn’t respond to their customer reviews at all, while nearly 9 out of 10 people say they would be “highly” or “fairly” likely to choose a business that responds to all of its online reviews. These stats indicate that responding to all customer reviews (positive and negative) is the clear choice for business owners who want to increase revenue.
30% of consumers admit to reversing negative reviews once they’ve received a response to their concern. Knowing that your landscape company’s customer service skills are on public display, be mindful of the words you use in your response. Keep the tone of your message on brand, and when concerns are valid, share how you are changing and improving your business to address them. This practice shows that you are open to feedback and care about your customers, often helping diffuse difficult situations.
-
CONSIDER THE SEO VALUE OF YOUR RESPONSE
While online customer reviews impact SEO, your responses to the reviews do too. Google suggests that responding to reviews will help maximize your visibility on SERPs. Since search engines index Google Reviews, prospects may find a review of your business before they see your business.
Lawn, landscape, and outdoor living business owners who are successful with online reputation management use this as an opportunity to include relevant keywords in their responses. While you should personalize your response to show a real person is responding, don’t regurgitate their complaint back to them. Instead, use words with positive connotations to offset the negative while still acknowledging their concern.
-
CUSTOMER REVIEW RESPONSE EXAMPLE
In this scenario, a customer expresses unhappiness with how your snow management team cleared their driveway at their home within an HOA. They stated that the driver left three feet of snow in front of their driveway and that the representative was rude.
Your response could look like this, “Hello Bill, thank you for taking the time to review us. However, we are sorry to learn about your concerns with snow removal at your home. We work hard to exceed customer expectations by providing meticulous snow management services, so we would like the opportunity to discuss this matter with you. Please email us at [email address] so we can learn more. Take care.”
Note that nowhere in the response do you use words indicating you are responsible for what the customer has described, but you have also addressed their concern and expressed your intention to make things right. You’ve described your company’s high standards, demonstrated excellent customer service, and used words like “concerns” and “this matter” rather than adding words that could reflect upon the negative aspect of the review (the complaint) and could potentially harm your SEO efforts. In addition, you’ve used powerful SEO words such as “snow removal” and “snow management services” that can help your business be found in Google searches.
-
TAKE IT OFFLINE
Taking the conversation offline is the goal so that your back and forth with the customer are not on full display. Provide an email address or a phone number where the customer can reach you, or let the customer know you will reach out if you already have their contact information and know who they are.
Promptly responding to customer reviews, especially negative ones, is essential. When you reply within 24 hours, you have a greater chance of influencing the customer’s opinion, which could lead to them editing their negative review to a more positive one. More than 50% of customers expect a response within a week. Taking too long to respond can do more harm than good, so use this opportunity to build trust for your company—no matter what platform the customer leaves a review on.