Online Reviews – Agent Reputation

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

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.

Realtor reviews from Yelp and Facebook now showing up in Google Business pages

We ran across an exciting addition to the Google Business Page boxes that appear in the upper right of Google page one search results for for businesses that have created or claimed their Google business page. You have heard me say, “If the largest search engine in the world has a review system, you should probably pay attention to it”. This is why we promote the use of Google reviews as a primary source of your online reviews. Based on the image below, you will see in addition to the Google reviews, you will see Facebook and Yelp reviews are showing up in the Google business box section called “Reviews from the web”.

From a perspective of the importance of having online reviews, the fact Google has added Yelp and Facebook reviews to their business box is quite telling. From what we can tell, the reviews are being automatically pulled and placed in the Google business box and is not a direct feed based upon some official data pipeline between Yelp, Facebook, Google and others. Here is a short video I did explaining it.

In a prior blog post where I wrote about stats that came directly from Google regarding the fact 49% of your prospects want to trust you along with this latest addition of Yelp and Facebook reviews shows me now it’s more important then ever to take control of your online reviews. Please reach out to us for a free demo on how we can manage all of this for you.

Google says 49% of real estate consumers look for trust

In other posts I have written about the importance having a well rounded positive online reputation. Having a great online reputation increases the ROI of your marketing dollars.

Yesterday while I was attending the Real Estate Mastermind Summit, Tom Ferry was the speaker and he told us he was asked to attend an event at Google wherein the movers and shakers of real estate marketing came together to discuss strategies. Tom put up the following slide:

Google, using stats and surveys, determined what was most important to the consumer when selecting a real estate agent. It’s hard to see in my photo, but TRUST was number one at 49%. In second place was EXPERIENCE at 15% and so on down the list. TRUST represented half within this study.

So how do you get trust? Obviously direct referrals from their friends communicates THEY trust you. Some trust may come into play after meeting you. In 2014, Placester and T3Experts conducted research regarding online reviews. They found 85% of consumers use online reviews to evaluate local businesses and professionals. They also found 90% trusted peer recommendations like online reviews 6.5 times more then traditional advertising. The percentages of consumers looking to online reviews for Realtors is growing each year.

Your online snapshot is everything. Agent Reputation gives you the tools you need to get reviews where they count. Google, Yelp and Facebook

CJ Hays @area51testpilot

How To Earn Clients With A 5 Star Online Reputation

Your online reputation is made up by everything people are saying about you, or what they’re not saying. Potential listing or buying clients will determine who they will choose to represent them based on what they can find out about you online. You can control how you will appear and earn more clients by learning how to create a 5 star online rating for your business.

85% of consumers use the internet for research before making a decision. – Yelp

When you do a search online for your name, or company name, what do you find? When a listing client can’t find much information about you, where do you think they feel their listing will show up online? Both buyers and sellers want to see what other people are saying about you on sites they trust, like Google, Yelp, and Facebook.

The power to create a lead generating online reputation is literally at your fingertips. Treat every current and future client like a new potential 5 star review! Earn positive reviews from clients in order to show potential clients that you are the agent to trust.

Many of our clients tell us that by increasing their online reputation, they are generating 3-5 times the amount of leads from the dollars they’re spending on marketing. Clients have also told us that they have a higher conversion ratio of the leads they’re buying, because their reviews are so easy to find on trusted sites like Google.

Realtor Marketing Ideas

Own Your Website and Domain

If you are using your corporate/brokerage website platform, you generally don’t have much control over SEO, content, and other important factors when it comes to getting your website ranked favorably on Google. Even if you aren’t ready for your own real estate website design, you may consider purchasing domains that ought to belong to you or your business. This keeps them out of the hands of someone that may use it in a way that will hurt your online reputation, or demand that you pay an absurdly high price to get it back.

Earn Positive Reviews on Trusted Sites

One of the best marketing tips for real estate agents is building and marketing a 5 star online reputation. Start off with exceptional customer service, and have a system in place to allow you to capture feedback from every client. An effective reputation marketing strategy involves using a system that includes:

Gathering feedback from new, current, and past clients
A system to address client concerns before they become negative reviews
An easy way for clients to leave feedback
An easy way to get your feedback posted to trusted review websites like Google, Yelp, and Facebook
Continuous monitoring of client reviews that are posted about you online

Create and Manage Your Business Information Online

Surveys show that half of local searches are for business information such as address, phone, and hours. Search engines like Google pull this information from many sources across the internet, and most are from business listings. Some listings you may have created yourself, and some are created automatically by sites like Yelp, Merchant Circle, and more. It is very important for all your business listings to have consistent and accurate information. Inaccurate or missing information from your listings can be very damaging. Search engines can detect inconsistent information across your business listings, and search engines do not like to give inaccurate information. This can result in lower search results, rankings, and leads.

Do you want to see how you show up on local directories? Get a free business listing scan here.

Take Control of Your Online Reputation

When you take into consideration the amount of extra leads you can generate by having a superior presence and reputation than your nearest competitors online, building a 5 star reputation should be a number one priority!

For more tips, or to schedule an online demo of our services, visit us at www.agentreputation.net

Thoughts on Inman News Article re Online Agent Ratings

On August 6th, Inman News published an article called, “Online agent ratings may be inflated, but they’re still valuable”, written by Teke Wiggin, Technology Writer for Inman. The article seems to be focused on Zillow reviews. I will go point by point.

“Realtors have become restaurants” is the name of my seminar, so when I saw the opening paragraph of the article stating that consumers were using third party review systems for restaurants, hotels, and product purchases, I was pleased to anticipate the body of the article.

YES, consumers are using third party review systems like Yelp, Trip Advisor and the like to look at the credibility of vendors or products. However, while a foodie may use the Yelp app via their phone to look for a quality restaurant, the majority of consumers are first using the search engines to look for (Google) the name of the business, business professional or product. Consumers are Googling Realtors.

What do they see on page one of the search? Do they see gold stars? Do they see only Zillow? Do they see a Realtor’s Yelp account? Does the Realtor have a Google business page? Do they have Google ratings? Seriously, when a consumer Googles a real estate agent, they had better see multiple review systems in place. Having reviews across multiple platforms increases the credibility of the business professional.

A statement is made in the article that online agent ratings may be inflated. What does this mean? The article seems to tie this statement to the fact that Realtors are only asking the really happy consumers to leave reviews, thus skewing the online rating of the agent. Yes, if you as an agent are guiding ONLY your happy consumers to leave you positive reviews on Zillow or elsewhere, then a consumer may not be seeing an accurate representation of your integrity and professionalism. With that said, most consumers won’t realize this.

Another statement reads, “The reason why negative reviews are few and far between may be because many people who aren’t thrilled with an agent’s performance don’t feel the need to broadcast their disappointment”. I totally disagree. You have heard variations of actions consumers will take depending on their satisfaction with a product or service. They might tell a few people if they’re happy, but they will tell the whole world online if they are really upset!

The question is whether or not the agent is tech savvy enough to have third-party review technologies in place, other than Zillow or an internal survey based system. Yelp can be a little intimidating for agents that don’t know how to use it correctly. You can embrace Yelp to your advantage. I have clients getting 10 solid leads a week from Yelp, but that is for another day.

Google Business is also a huge factor. It is safe to assume that if the largest search engine in the world has a review system, you should probably pay attention to it.

When I had first read the headline that “agent ratings may be inflated”, I thought the article had to do with the fact Zillow reviews can be gamed. And in fact, there are methods to game almost every review system with the exception of Yelp. As a former Fraud Examiner and having worked many online fraud cases, a number of odd agent reviews were brought to my attention which I investigated. I saw review numbers that did not add up.

I know, for instance, when we load a client’s customer list into our CRM, which sends out an email asking them to click on a link to leave an online review, we will get a 25% return. That 25% does not come easy. There is an entire trickle system in place to get the customers to leave their online reviews. I then compare the percentages I am aware of to numbers that seem excessive. When I see rating numbers that are equal to or even exceeding the known transactions of an agent, the red lights go off. I know how it is done.

If you are a Zillow client and you focus on Zillow for your lead generation, then by all means focus on your Zillow reviews, as you will stand out within their marketing system. Same goes for Trulia and Realtor.com. But please open or claim your Google and Yelp pages. I may not click on your website or Zillow, Trulia or Realtor.com page to see your reviews.

The Google 7-Pack is now a 3-Pack

About a year and a half ago, the 7-pack for residential Realtors in the US was removed from Google. It still existed for commercial Realtors and for some reason, residential Realtors in Canada. The 7-pack was a tool provided by Google when searching for businesses. You search for a business type and a map would show up in the upper right side of the screen, tied to 7 businesses marked from A through G. You would have to have a Google Business page, formerly known as Google Places, combined with some SEO, a website and hopefully some Google reviews. I personally think the 7-pack was removed to harm SEO for residential Realtors in the US. Six weeks ago the 7-Pack for residential Realtors came back. This was awesome as many of our clients who, via our process were located at the top of the seven-pack.

Yesterday I was demoing our reputation marketing services to a luxury agent in California when I noticed there were only three businesses located on page one of Google where there should have been seven. I had incorrectly assumed because the community was so small, I was only seeing three.

Today this article comes up online called, “Google Local Shakeup: 3-Pack Only, 7-Pack Removed; Addresses & Phone Numbers Gone“, by Jennifer Slegg. Wow, as I was basking in the fact the 7-pack came back, it is now the 3 business “Snack Pack”. You can read the article for the details.

An organic marketing target seven spaces wide would be better but three, but this is enough for us. These business listings are organic in nature and we have a plan that works. Call Us.

Internal vs External Online Reviews for Realtors

“Realtors have become restaurants”. This means consumers are Googling realtors like they would a restaurant, looking for their online ratings and reputation. People want to go to major directories that they trust and rely on everyday for reviews about products or services before they buy. What your prospect sees in the first 5 to 10 seconds in the search engines is EVERYTHING.

Things have changed for realtors online. Back in the day (not long ago), realtors, teams and brokerages dominated the organic search results. Most of the consumer property searches were taking place on realtor or team websites. Now they are using Zillow, Realtor.com, Redfin and Trulia for their searches. Even longer ago, the consumer was spending more time on your website reading your content. Today they are looking for houses. They want to see that you have testimonials, but the majority are not actually reading them in detail. In fact, when I was in the real estate website business, we would always have a testimonial page that had a two sentence snippet with a button that said “read more”. Nobody ever clicked on the read more link because they just want to know you have testimonials.

We know realtor reviews are important. We knew this over a year ago when Sean McCrory launched Agent Reputation. Many clients later, the subject is coming up more and more at real estate technology events and national franchise meetings. Reviews were discussed at the T3 Summit and T3 experts released a report on realtor reviews. Placester published an infographic from survey results. I agree with most of the results, and I get the fact that when you are paying Zillow for marketing, it is wise to have as many Zillow reviews as you can get.

I have also heard, “Regain control from 3rd-party review sites”. It has been suggested to use an internal survey system to create internal ratings and reviews that people can see when they go to a realtor’s website. I love surveys to help the agents learn how to better serve their clients. We have surveys, but that is not the focus of this post. Some of the “teachers” out there are promoting INTERNAL reviews because everyone is scared of BAD reviews. They are scared that somebody might go sideways on Google or Yelp. That is OK, providing you have enough GOOD reviews. Having no reviews can be just as bad as negative reviews. People want to see reviews on a major directory that they trust, before making a buying decision. Surveys have shown that if you do not have at least 6-10 positive reviews, many potential clients will not trust your service.

A very high percentage of your prospects, especially listing prospects, are Googling you. What they see in the first 5 to 10 seconds, on page 1 of the search results, is everything. There should be 5 gold stars everywhere and not just the review systems provided by the likes of Zillow and other real estate vendors. It is pretty safe to assume if the largest search engine in the world has a review system, you should be paying attention to it. All realtors should have verified Google business pages so that you have an opportunity to get on the Google 7 Pack (that just came back for residential realtors).

Most agents know they need to focus on agent online reviews. However, as an agent, you need a method to facilitate getting the third-party reviews. We do that.

Let’s get back to the subject matter. If I just want to Google you, how am I seeing your internal reviews? Do I have to assume they are on your website and then go to your website and then click on a link to see them? What if you don’t have a website or are using the free site your franchise or broker is providing you? What the search engines see is more important than your INTERNAL system.

If you have one, how really satisfied are you with your reputation vendor? Are they facilitating your reviews out to the third party sites like Google Reviews and Yelp? Are you in the Google 7 Pack? Call us for a free testimonial commercial.