CJ Hays – Agent Reputation

Do you have full control of your WordPress real estate website?

I was reading posts today on the Lab Coat Agents Facebook group and came across a discussion about real estate website designers. One company had mentioned their sites were WordPress. So if I buy their website, and if I was already familiar with WordPress then I would assume the dashboard would be a typical WP dashboard and I would have full Admin access. You would think so, right?

With that said, on many occasions when we have replaced websites built on the WP platform, we will transfer their entire blogging history with images, publish dates and the previously indexed content including the indexed URLs. We will also make sure their plugins remain intact. This way, when we launch their new website, though within a new theme, their history will be in the same URL location with the same publish date, thus not starting all over for their SEO. We ran into some specific occurrences where the client stated they had a WP site but when we signed into their dashboard, it looked nothing like a WordPress dashboard.

While your website may have been built using .php WordPress technology, your web developer may have created an entirely different dashboard interface. A typical WordPress dashboard looks like this:

If your dashboard does not look anything like this, your web developer built a custom interface and this could cause future issues. One huge issue would be content migrations to a new WordPress real estate website if you choose to leave them. We had one client that had over 600 prior blog posts since 2012 and once we got in to the backend, we were at a loss. We had no way to zip up the folder and transfer to the new site. The client had to pay for many hours of work to have her posts manually recreated. Our backup plan would have been to FTP into her site and transfer the files, but the prior web developer would not give us FTP access. Probably because her website was being hosted in a multi-site shared server system which would also mean you don’t own the actual container(website).

Another issue would be the inability to place cool WordPress plugins on your website or maybe embedded technology or script. We run into this regularly when we place our Reputation Marketing technology on our client’s websites. They THINK they have full WP permissions, but again, when we sign in, we don’t see the dashboard. At that point we end up working with their soon to be prior web development company to get them to manually place our code into our clients real estate website.

WordPress web developers regularly create custom site management portals for a good number of reasons. Maybe they have combined the portal to not only manage the site but also give their clients CRM access. Or maybe they have a WIX style drag and drop design feature. Some devs will not give their clients full WP access so that the client does not destroy their own website, which I have seen happen. That reminds me. You may see a typical WordPress dashboard on your website when you sign in, but you may not have full admin permissions. You will know this if you only see a handful of feature tabs on the left hand side and no access to the USER tab.

I am not saying custom interfaces are bad. They can serve a purpose. Most WP developers can build custom dashboards for their client’s specific needs But if you are thinking of buying or renting a WordPress real estate website, don’t just assume you will have typical WordPress access much less full admin access to your website.

Be very careful how you approach your clients for Yelp reviews

So I am on Facebook a few days ago and a local businessman puts out a boosted/sponsored post asking everyone to leave him Yelp reviews. Not only did he pay for a FaceBook ad to solicit these reviews, but he offered a reward of free services if they did so. Yelp’s recommendation software is designed to highlight reviews from people inspired to share their experiences with the community. Yelp wants its ACTIVE Yelpers to organically feel motivated to leave a review.

I had commented on his post that he can’t offer rewards for reviews and that only ACTIVE Yelpers who actually did business at his establishment would show up as a published review. He responded that as long as the member of Yelp had at least two reviews it would count. Not true at all.

Active Yelpers have the Yelp app on their phone. They check in from businesses. They have a profile picture. They write reviews. They have friends. They participate in the Yelp community.

Yelp has a gate keeper of sorts. If somebody signs up for Yelp, leaves a review a few minutes later and is never heard from again, that review will go what I call, “Under the line”. It will be a non-recommended review. In this case, the business has over 50 reviews under the line. When you look at these non-recommended Yelp reviews you will see two things. Most of the reviewers have only written one review and some reviews all came in on the same day which usually points to the business asking others through a blast to leave a review.

If you embrace Yelp, not try to GAME Yelp and provide the best service you can, you will have a great online presence. With that said, don’t forget your Google Business Page. It is safe to say if the largest search engine in the world as a review system, you should probably pay attention to it.

Case Study – Getting Negative Reviews Removed From Former Team Members

We built a website and provided reputation marketing services for a high-end luxury real estate brokerage in California. They reached out to us a month ago because a person or persons were leaving negative 1-star reviews on Google and Yelp.

Up until May of this year, the brokerage had stellar reviews across the board on Zillow, Yelp, Facebook and Google. Then in May, they started getting 1-star reviews. All of the reviews came from obvious new accounts with no prior history. This was an attack on the brokerage and the broker to harm their online reputation. These reviews started the day after an agent was terminated from their brokerage. Coincidence? I can’t say.

Though I was made aware of who the alleged attacker was, there was no direct proof as to who was leaving the negative reviews, I then started a process to get these reviews removed.

Yelp

Yelp has an algorithm, a “gatekeeper” of sorts. Yelp knows when somebody signs up, leaves a review moments later and is never heard from again. When new accounts leave reviews, good or bad, most will wind up under the line in an area called “Non-recommended reviews”. This is why you should not solicit Yelp reviews from non-Yelpers. They are also paying attention to “clustering”. When you have many reviews coming in over a short period of time, especially from non-Yelpers, they will most likely wind up under the line as well. Yelp wants Yelpers to be organically motivated to leave reviews. If you send a blast out to your prior clients asking for reviews, the algorithm will pick up on it.

Our client received a number of negative Yelp reviews. It was obvious they were all non-Yelper new accounts. Only one review each. Luckily they all wound up under the line which does not affect the average, but you can flag them for reconsideration. Generally this needs to come from a personal active Yelp account. When you flag a review, as a Realtor you will have three choices as you can see in this screenshot:

You might think we would have used, “It was posted by a competitor or ex-employee”. However you have to be able to prove it was THAT person. Instead we flagged as, “It does not describe a personal consumer experience.” In the notes, use the following language:

“This rating does not reflect a consumer experience with our company. This individual is not known to anybody from our company. It has been posted by an individual who is trying to manipulate our ratings for the worse.”

Sometimes you might receive a review for your parent brokerage. Or maybe you represent the bank and the debtor goes “scorched earth” even though you never had contact with them. “Wrong Business” is self explanatory. If it is the disgruntled debtor, go with “consumer experience” and explain that you represented the bank. It usually takes 1 or 2 weeks for a response. All of the reviews we flagged for this client were removed. Upon success, you will get an e mail that reads(redacted):

Hello,

We’re writing to let you know that we’ve evaluated Mark J.’s review of YOUR BUSINESS that you recently reported. After assessing the review carefully against our Content Guidelines, we agree that this review should be removed. We rely on community engagement to help keep Yelp useful. Thanks so much for taking the time to bring this matter to our attention! For further information on using Yelp, please find answers to frequently asked questions in our Support Center (http://www.yelp-support.com). – The Yelp Support Team

Google

Our client had eight negative Google reviews posted since May. None of the reviews communicated an actual business experience. They were all personal attacks and name calling. They all came from Google+ accounts that had no prior activity. We went so far as to do searches on all the account names. One was a professional tennis player. One was a name that had no record in the USA. They all appeared bogus. Two of the reviews were left within minutes of each other and contained the same language. A sophomoric attempt at best.

The Google flagging process is a bit more complex.

In this order:

Leave a response like the one above: “This rating does not reflect a consumer experience with our company. This individual is not known to anybody from our company. It has been posted by an individual who is trying to manipulate our ratings for the worse.” You can add additional details. Be as factual as possible but not long winded

Start the flagging process by signing into your Google Business account. Click on the reviews tab on the left. Next to each review you will see three dots. Click on the three dots and you will see “Flag as inappropriate”. Then you will see this and hit continue.

Next you will see this:

Click on “This post contains conflicts of interest” and be sure to put in your e mail address. I chose this option after hours of research into the Google policies and procedures of what constitutes a violation which might lead to a review investigation. You just completed phase 1

Wait 48 hours and sign back into your Google business account. On the bottom of the left sidebar you will see “Support”. Click there and you will see this. Click on “Customer Reviews and photos”

Next click on “Manage customer reviews”.

Then “Need more help”

Then e mail support. You will have 1000 characters to clearly communicate your case. With this client I communicated that it looked like they were all new accounts, and that the names did not line up. The content had been duplicated and this had probably come from the same IP address in that market.

Google states it could take up to three weeks for them to investigate the case. If you do not hear from Google or see the fake reviews removed from your Google Business page, then go through the same process to request a callback.

In this case, we had resolution within a week. 6 of the 8 reviews were removed and 2 are still pending their investigation.

This post is specifically about fake reviews from prior employees or associates. Clients or prospects you have never had contact with. They are not in your database. You don’t know who they are. If the negative review is from a prior contact, you need to deal with it. First, one on one to resolve their issue. Secondly, if un-resolvable, then leave a response to their review which you can do on most review platforms. Be honest. Be nice. Maybe go into some details. You need to show intent on resolving any issues and the humble pride you take with your online reputation.

I noticed this alleged agent had four 5-star reviews on Zillow. Funny thing was, this agent was showing no completed transactions as far as I could tell. The only property he was representing was his parents house. I signed into my Zillow account last week and flagged each review as “Appears Fake”. I then wrote a short note on each flag suggesting Zillow audit the agent’s account. As of this morning, two of his reviews have been removed. Some might think I am taking this too far, however I am very protective of my agents and review fraud is fraud. An agent with fake reviews has no integrity in my book.

Not to go off subject too much, but we had another client 2 years ago that held the number one position in Yelp for their market. Suddenly out of nowhere, a competing brokerage was about to overtake them with the number of reviews. There were twice as many reviews as there were lifetime transactions. I started analyzing the reviews. They all came from one ethnic community of Yelpers throughout the United States. I also noticed the syntax of the content of the reviews was similar. In fact two of the same adjectives were used throughout many of the reviews. Most of the reviews did not communicate experiential consumer contact. They were just endorsements. There was enough circumstantial evidence that I used the same flag I spoke of earlier, “It doesn’t describe a personal consumer experience”. Yelp reviewed their account and over 18 reviews were removed for violating Yelp’s terms and conditions. Again, fraud is fraud.

In closing:

1) DON’T PANIC if you receive a negative review from somebody you have never had contact with. There is a process in place to deal with it. The process is not always 100% successful, but it works of you communicate in such a way that your false review flag lines up with that review system’s policies on flagging. You need to write like a lawyer. I have a distinct advantage because I am a former fraud investigator and worked for law firms for a number of years in the late 90’s and early 2000’s.

2) Do not fear online review systems. Embrace them. Be proactive in collecting online reviews from your prior clients and your new clients when they are doing the happy dance at the end of the transaction.

3) We have a system in place that can manage this for you. AgentReputation.net

Historical Content Retention(HCR) With Real Estate Websites You Own

Many of you know my stand on website ownership vs renting your real estate website. It all boils down to owning your online assets and the SEO value of your Historical Content Retention(HCR).

Blogging needs to be a real estate agents best friend. In a perfect world, you are blogging on a WordPress website you OWN at least twice a week, if not every day. As long as you stay with WordPress, you can always upgrade to new sites and the content you created will will stay intact with any images, videos, dates and the URL it was indexed on.

As a real estate agent actively blogging, if you are renting your website that has a blog and you choose to buy a new real estate website, you may end up throwing away the historical SEO value of your prior active blogging. And in fact, every time you change websites, the search engines have to re-index your new site and this can lead to essentially starting over with a blank slate in the search engines.

I was with one of the first companies that brought WordPress to real estate. Ease of content creation, maintenance, SEO attractiveness and blogging was and still are strong points with having a WordPress real estate website. Then about 4 years ago, new companies started offering cheap monthly rental websites with blogging technology. So many of you created pages and pages of content over a period of years and at the moment you choose to go with another site, you are told there is no easy way to import your prior content into your new site.

But you thought your website was built in WordPress and you just purchased a WordPress website. The site may have been built with the same base php technology, but if your dashboard does not look like this, you are out of luck.

So if you buy a WordPress real estate website and you want to bring over your months or years of content from a site that does not have this backend, you will have to manually reenter your posts. Your valuable history will be gone. All of this content including the images will have to be re-indexed. Not a good scenario.

All I am asking you to do is think about where your content is being posted. Do you have full control of that asset? Is your content exportable if you change site providers? Will your historical content retention be up to date?

Don’t get me wrong. I am not trying to talk you out of your amazing PPC or Paid Leadgen website. All of these leads you are paying for have to go through that vendor’s online process, some of which are off the hook. I am just advising you to think about placing your unique personal content within a technology you own and control.

GLVAR changes their mind on allowing MLS Feeds to Zillow and Listhub

My prior post spoke of the fact the Greater Las Vegas Association of Realtors had chosen to cut off their MLS feeds to Zillow and Listhub. This evidently caused quite the backlash from agents, teams and smaller brokerages in the Las Vegas/Henderson real estate market.

A press release(Below) from GLVAR stated after hearing concerns this month from many of its members, they have reconsidered and will now continue to share the MLS data to Zillow and Listhub as they explore other options.

Local agents and brokers communicated to the MLS that removing Zillow and Listhub from the feeds could create a hardship and would detract from the way they did business. I know all of my Las Vegas clients were really upset there was a potential that their listings would not show up on Zillow. Many of them get asked on their listing appointments if their listings would be on Zillow, Realtor and many of the home search networks out there.

No matter what side of the fence you are on about MLS data feeds and Zillow, you have to give GLVAR credit for listening to it members and having the guts to change their mind. Who knows what the future holds in this ever evolving real estate industry.

Press release dated November 15th 2018

GLVAR is going to end automatic syndication with Zillow and Listhub in January

Update 11/16/2018

GLVAR changes their mind on allowing MLS Feeds to Zillow and Listhub

I read a Facebook post today that the Greater Las Vegas Association of REALTORS®(GLVAR) was going to cease syndicating to Zillow and Listhub on in January of 2019. They evidently did the same thing with Realtor.com a year ago. Here is a Video from GLVAR discussing syndication.

Update: 11/10/2018

There WAS a video here, the same YouTube video shared within the Inman News article, but it looks like GLVAR took it off of YouTube or made it private. Why would that be? My personal opinion is it clearly communicated a greater alliance to the big brokers and not what might be best for the home sellers.

Personally? I don’t buy it. The consumer comes first. I look at it this way. If I am a Realtor® and take a listing in the Las Vegas/Henderson area, I want that listing broadcast to the world. I want that house to sell as quickly as possible to serve my client. If that sale is the result of some Realtor® getting a lead from Zillow, I would not care where the sale came from. The seller wants to sell their home as quickly as possible. The seller doesn’t care about the politics. They don’t care whether the agents or brokers like Zillow or not. They just want their house sold.

Consumers looking to buy a house want to jump online and start searching whether they have retained a buyers agent or not. Based upon research I conducted online:

How many visitors does Zillow have each month: 188 million (8/26/18)

Percentage of us homes that have been viewed on Zillow: 80% (5/19/18)

Number of homes on Zillow updated by users: 80 Million (8/26/18)

Number of U.S. homes listed in the Zillow database: 110 Million homes (8/26/18)

It’s safe to say that Zillow is a dominant home search engine and any consumer or Realtor® would want their home showing up in their search results.

Now, just as stated in the Inman article that posted today, the response from Zillow is spot on. If a small broker wants their listings to be in the search results, they may have to spend tens of thousands of dollars for a custom API to do so. I think there is probably some truth that the big money brokers want to get in the way of the small brokerages.

What if you are an agent with a small brokerage and on the listing appointment the client asks if their property is going to be on Zillow? When you tell them no, what effect will that have on getting the listing?

Full disclosure. I am not a Realtor®. I do however, act as the marketing coordinator for a number of teams throughout the U.S., including a very successful team in Las Vegas. I will need to find out if my team’s brokerage plans on feeding to Zillow. If not, how will this effect my client?

CJ Hays, Marketing Emancipator for Agent Reputation

These opinions are my own.

Twitter – Facebook – ActiveRain

Site Load Time Review Sites Cannot Quantify Real Estate Websites

There are a number of websites that ask you to type in your URL, wherein they will scrub your website looking for errors that may effect your SEO including load speed and other processes running within your website. Many of these sites hope and pray they find negative results so they can sell you their SEO services. Others are just there to help.

Some of these sites are simple like Website Grader that will point out a few generic things with no actionable items. And of course they need your e mail address for the purposes of pushing the SEO services of HubSpot. Then you have other systems like GtMetrix that are over the top GeekSpeak and the layperson Realtor does know what the results mean.

These website review systems can be fairly accurate for 99.9% of the businesses in the world. However, this does not hold true for real estate websites that contain IDX’s, MLS feeds and many third-party lead capture technologies running on the homepage of your website. I will offer my observations in as simple terms as possible without getting too geeky.

A website is a container. Most business websites contain fairly basic pages. Mostly text, images, inventory, e commerce pages, about us, blogs, contact. Maybe a few have pop up newsletter sign ins. They will load quickly and have above average SEO scores. Then at the other end of the spectrum you have NEWS websites that are so third-party advertising heavy, they take days to load and are very intrusive with pop up ads, video ads and will even hijack your browser. They could care less about their horrible SEO scores. Somewhere in the middle would be real estate websites.

Most Realtor websites give the consumer the ability to search for homes. This search is taking place via any number of IDX, RETS and other database technologies that are providing MLS data in a consumer-friendly format, specifically to convert the user into a lead. This is “live” data coming from third parties. The IDX may be feeding data, but most of the time the images of the homes are being fed directly by your MLS. Since this data is called to your website from third parties, while your base website load time may be fast, it can be slowed down by technologies these testing services are not taking into account.

One issue are MLS’s that do not provide thumbnails of their image feeds. The images are coming in at full size (even if they look like thumbnails). GLVAR and over half the MLS’s in the US are not providing thumbnail images. The website is having to resize the larger images which causes speed test issues, since all these tests recommend loading images at exactly the right size for the space. An example would be having featured listings on your homepage. The more featured listings you have, even if in a carousel, all those images have to load. Or maybe you have an interactive map that shows active listings. The images and data of the properties within that map may have to load. The MLS image feed to your site is usually the slowest loading element.

We have been seeing a trend of Realtors asking for huge slideshows or videos to run at the top of their sites. Those are all large media files that have to load. Social media share functions, newsletter sign ups, what’s my home worth pop-ups and others can slow down a real estate website.

There are always things you can do or hire somebody to do to optimize your website. But you have to take into consideration you have a real estate website with an IDX. You cannot compare your speed results to non-real estate websites. You need to compare your results to the Zillow’s of the world and other real estate websites that are in your market. You would be surprised at just how jacked up their websites are.

I mentioned WebSite Grader above. It was used on a real estate website and their system pointed out three things

- Page Speed: It said the site took 10 seconds to load. They had a statement that read, “Best-in-class websites should load in 3 seconds. Any slower and visitors will abandon your site, reducing conversions and sales”. OMG, sounds really scary! Rarely does a real estate website load in 3 seconds that has an IDX and let me introduce you to a concept related to this. Does the site take 10 seconds to load or does it “feel” like it took 10 seconds to load? Case in point. A visitor shows up on your website. You have a video at the top, 6 featured listings and a live listings map combined with any other data, images and pop ups on your homepage. Are they looking at a blank page because it is taking 10 seconds before they see anything? Or are they seeing a complete load though there are still some data calls going on in the background? You may have a few background load issues but if the consumer is seeing everything on your homepage within a few seconds, they are certainly not bouncing as the review system would suggest.

- Page Requests: They state, “The more HTTP requests your website makes, the slower it becomes.” Every property you feature on your homepage is a request. The data is a request. The image is a request. The resizing request on the large images is a request. Maps are a request. Properties within the map are requests. There are social share requests. In the background you may have Facebook, Google and Adwerx pixel requests. Then you have Google analytics, which is a request. As a Realtor, unless you don’t want an IDX on your homepage, you will have more requests then the average business.
- Page Size: They state, “The heavier the site page, the slower the load. For optimal performance, try to keep page size below 3MB.” 3 MB’s? Are you kidding me? Basically a blank page made up of mostly text and a couple of images…on a real estate website? If you want this kind of speed, remove the IDX from your homepage along with any videos, slideshows and other background processes.
- Mobile Speed: If your website mobile speed is near 100% all is well with the world since more people are hitting you from mobile then desktop.

Two take-a-ways:

At the end of the day, you need to find a balance between trying to increase your “site” speed versus the “user experience” speed.

Website review systems do not take into account the conversion elements within real estate websites. You have to compare apples to apples when representing yourself online in your specific market.

Agent Reputation is starting a new season with a new marketing platform

Last night we launched our new online marketing platform for the real estate industry which you can access from our homepage.

First and foremost, I have to thank Jim Marks, the former owner of Virtual Results, for hiring me as his marketing director in 2011. Though I had quite a bit of marketing experience under my belt, this was the start of my journey into the real estate industry. I became a “road scholar” traveling with Jim on all of his speaking engagements at Xplode, PNC Mortgage and Inman Events including the original Agent Reboot.

I was fortunate to learn from Jim and also from many of the real estate marketing influencers you all know today. So I have to give a shout out to: Jay Thompson, Chris Smith, Matt Fagioli, Tom Ferry, Joe Sesso, Bob Stewart, Steve Pacinelli, Anu Kumar, Bodilyn Jolly, Molly McKinley, Dale Chumbley and Eric Stegiman.

In 2014, Sean McCrory, the founder of Agent Reputation, saw the need to help real estate agents, teams and brokerages in obtaining and publishing positive reviews. Our Reputation Marketing system has been very successful with a 90+% retention rate over the past five years. Just over three years ago, clients asked us to find them a web design option. We found nothing that would meet their needs as we would recommend, so we opened our own shop.

We started out quietly. Not ringing our own bell too much with our sites. Never self promoting in the various social media groups. We wanted to analyze statistics, consumer experience and conversion. As we developed we were getting referrals from some of the top coaching and marketing businesses in the industry. Our referral business was so large, we never had to spend a dime on advertising.

As we evolved through technologies we developed, marketing and technology companies approached us to integrate their products into our websites. So a huge shout out to IDX Broker, eMerge, IMAX CRM and Displet.

We build semi-custom real estate websites our clients own outright. All of our sites include an IDX, Reputation Marketing, a CRM, an email marketing system and content marketing. We are offering an online marketing solution second to none in the real estate industry.

Please spend a few moments checking out our website.

CJ Hays comments on discussions about Yelp and other review systems

I was on the Lab Coat Agents Facebook page today and came across a post regarding why a 5-Star Yelp review wound up under the line. I then read all of the responses up till now and many of them were accurate while others were errant and others were just hateful opinions. I decided to write up a post to share with the group.

1) Yelp wants ACTIVE Yelpers to be organically motivated to leave reviews. This is why you never send out a blast to the multitudes asking for Yelp reviews because their “Gate Keeper” algorithm will see a cluster of reviews coming in within a short period of time, which tells them you sent out a blast. They don’t like that. It’s not to say you can’t ask people for Yelp reviews one on one, but they have to be ACTIVE Yelpers.

2) Yelp knows when new consumer accounts are created. It knows 5 minutes later a Yelp review was left from a new account, never to be heard from again. This is also to protect you from haters, consumers you never did business with or ex-employees. In fact I wrote an article on how to get these types of reviews removed here.

3) You can’t game the system. Just getting friends and leaving 20 reviews, if done over a short period of time will not qualify that person as an active Yelper. Too much, too soon. And do you think asking your client to jump through a bunch of hoops just so that their review will be on top respects their time? An active Yelper not only has a profile image and friends, but they need the Yelp app on their phone. They need a history of checking in from businesses like restaurants and leaving reviews over a period of time. Once Yelp sees a credible history, that review they placed under the line may be moved to the active section. I am an active Yelper.

4) The Yelp conspiracy is a nothingburger. There were a number of over zealous sales people back in the day that would lead you to believe if you did not buy their advertising, your good reviews would be pushed down. That was never company policy. Some still try the pitch from time to time but you need to call their bluff and report them. The FTC investigated and took no action. And there are ways to get bad Yelp reviews removed as noted in an article I pointed out above.

5) You can hate Yelp but you really need to embrace Yelp. Sure you can choose not to establish a Yelp page for your business and focus on other review systems, but it can also be a major source for leads. I know many agents that get leads regularly from Yelp. And if you acquire a good amount of Yelp reviews, that is the time to advertise. And, Yelp uses the gold star system which helps in making your online reviews look more rounded.

6) Claim your Yelp or Google account. If you have not established a Yelp business page or Google business page, sometimes they create them on their own from business license databases. I am not a fan of this at all because people can still leave reviews on unclaimed business pages. You can always get them removed but it is better to claim them, add accurate information and be proactive to get 5 star reviews.

7) Google is great. It is safe to assume if the largest search engine in the world has a review system, you should probably pay attention to it. Make sure people write out a full review and not just leave a star rating. The more experiential content the better. Same goes with Yelp. They rate the reviews on experiential content and the amount of words used. If you do not have a Google business page, go here to create one. This places you in the Google business directory and you could wind up in the “three pack” on page one of Google for Realtor search results.

8) Google has a gate keeper as well. If the individual signs up for Google+ just to leave you a review and is never heard from again, the review might get ghosted or moved down the list. Organics is important.

9) Facebook has a gold star system that will show up in the search results. Just about everybody has a Facebook account and it is usually active on their phone or computer. Facebook is always the fallback if your clients are not Yelpers or Google members. In addition, it’s harder to leave fake reviews on Facebook.

10) If you are a Zillow Premier Agent and/or buying leads and you don’t have a competitive amount of Zillow reviews for your market, you are not the shiny penny.

11) Be proactive. I know of agents that prep the buyer/seller for future reviews in the beginning of their relationships. As in, (paraphrasing), “when we get this done I am going to ask you to leave me some online reviews” and then asking again while the client is doing the happy dance at the conclusion of the transaction.

That’s pretty much it. I figured it would be easier to write in a post vs just going on for days in a Facebook reply. Thanks for your time.

CJ Hays

Yelp DOES protect businesses from non-consumer experience review attacks

Do you remember last year when that dentist from Minnesota killed the lion in Africa? I was curious as to if the public would go to the Yelp page for his business and trash him. They did just that. I followed his reviews for a week and the one-star reviews just piled up. Other then manually flagging these reviews because the review “… doesn’t describe a personal consumer experience”, I was curious if Yelp was going to step in and filter the “attack” reviews. For the past year if a business owner made the news for being horrible, the same thing usually happened.

Locally, the El Sombrero Mexican Bistro in Las Vegas was under fire because Donald Trump paid them a visit. I only ran across this due to a story in the Las Vegas Review Journal yesterday written by Colton Lochhead, featuring the headline, “Las Vegas restaurant still cookin’ despite Hispanic community stir from Trump visit“.

So once again, in conducting research for our reputation marketing business, I went to the Yelp Page for the El Sombrero Mexican Bistro to see if the political attack reviews were hot and heavy. I was surprised to the the following pop up window:

I had never seen a notification like this from Yelp ever. I was pleasantly surprised to see Yelp proactively protecting the online integrity of a small business from non-consumer reviews. Once you click “Got it, thanks!” and you are taken to the page this statement is in the header:

Living in Las Vegas and as a “Foodie”, I love going out to family owned, small, off the strip restaurants. I am also an active Yelper. Locally and when I travel, I rely on Yelp for trying new places. When the general public starts attacking a business due to politics it skews the online review process of whether the El Sombrero Mexican Bistro is a great place to eat.

FOOD not Politics

With that said, if you are a Yelper and ever see a post that does not represent an actual consumer experience, you can flag the review like I did here:

If you are a small business owner, whether a presidential candidate visits you or not, you should always be aware of your online reputation.