Deciding in which hotel to spend your next vacation is often no longer easy due to the many alternatives. Google is therefore the first point of contact for most travelers when it comes to finding a hotel. In addition to price and location, reviews are also playing an increasingly decisive role for many users.
That's why Google reviews are so important for your hotel these days
The importance of good Google reviews for potential hotel guests
In a study by market research firm Nielsen, it was found that the opinions of other customers in particular play a major role when deciding for or against a brand, product or service. This also applies when deciding which hotel you want to stay in. Good reviews on Google can therefore be a decisive factor for the success of your hotel.
So if you only have a few or a few bad reviews, it can be difficult to convince prospects to book at your hotel. Especially when there are enough other alternatives available to the interested party.
Negative reviews and incorrect handling of them can also have a significant influence on decisions.
That's why good Google reviews are so important when it comes to your hotel's online visibility
In general, the higher your hotel appears in Google search results, the better. Because the higher up your hotel appears, the higher is the probability that your hotel will be found and booked accordingly.
In addition to the location of the hotel, Google reviews are one of the main factors that Google uses when determining the order of the Google My Business profile in search results. Google looks at both the number of reviews and the rating.
Okay, now you know why Google reviews are so important for your hotel. But what do you do if you only have a few or even a few bad reviews?
In the next section, you will learn how to get more positive reviews and how to properly deal with negative reviews.
Get more good reviews for your hotel — how does that work?
Before we answer this question, you should first be aware of the following:
- 85 percent of consumers don't trust reviews that are older than three months. (Source: Brightlocal)
- Around 40% of people only look at reviews from the last two weeks.
What can we learn from this information? It is therefore not enough to have many good reviews, but they must also be as up-to-date as possible. So how can you set up a process that allows you to easily and sustainably receive reviews via Google?
Overall, you should make it as easy as possible for your guests to rate you. One option would be to give your guests an incentive to leave a review. This could be in the form of a discount or a small gift. However, it is important that you grant the gift regardless of a positive review, otherwise it would be forbidden to “collect” reviews in this way.
The best way to solve this is with so-called “QR codes”, which can be presented, for example, as stickers or by a small display. There are a number of providers online for this purpose who specialize in such displays as Scan2get or Empfehlio. Alternatively, you can get such a QR code using this QR Code Generators also create it yourself.
Another way to get more good reviews for your hotel is to actively ask satisfied guests for a review. Ideally, you'll combine the various strategies.
How to properly deal with bad reviews.
If you've ever looked at your Google reviews, you've probably noticed that not every review is perfect. In fact, it is quite normal for a bad review to pop up from time to time. But how should you proceed in this case? And what do you do if you suddenly get a whole bunch of bad reviews?
There's no perfect way to deal with bad reviews, but there are a few things you should definitely do to improve the situation.
First, you can try to find out the reason for the bad review. Is the evaluation comprehensible and constructive? Is it something you can change? If so, you should use the review to improve the experience for guests in your hotel. In any case, what you should do is respond to the negative review in an answer. Show genuine interest in the visitor's feedback. At the same time, you can use this answer to straighten things out and describe your point of view. Nothing is worse for potential prospects than a bad review that just stands in the room. Because then the assessment appears to be justified.
In more drastic cases:
If you think that a particular review is doing you a lot of harm and that it is not true or that it is a fake review, you can also consider having a law firm delete it. On the Internet, you can already find package offers starting at 89€ for deleting a review.
Conclusion:
Google reviews are important in many ways. They can help potential guests decide for or against a hotel. In addition, they can also help your hotel move higher up in search results. The reviews can therefore directly contribute to attracting more guests. In addition, Google reviews can also help you get feedback from guests and thus continuously improve the quality of your hotel.
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