The power of online reviews can’t be overstated — online reviews can influence your business’ ranking on search engine results, shape customer trust, and drive purchasing decisions and brand reputation. While negative reviews can significantly impact the perception that potential buyers have of your business, positive reviews can exponentially boost sales.
Unfortunately, the influence of online reviews has led some third-party services and businesses to buy, sell, and manipulate fake reviews, leading to an erosion of consumer trust and unfair competition. The truth is that buying positive reviews can backfire, damaging your reputation and putting your business at serious financial and legal risk.
To avoid costly fines, legal trouble, and broken customer trust, this article will guide you through ways to legally boost your reviews, while steering clear of the pitfalls of fake or misleading reviews.
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No, you can’t legally pay for Google reviews. Paid reviews are misleading and don’t give an accurate or genuine account of your business.
First, aside from being unethical, paying for reviews is against Google’s policies. Google believes customer reviews must be authentic and uncoerced. Google’s stance is that when businesses pay for reviews, they generate disingenuous experiences that promote false engagement with your company.
On top of policies made by platforms like Google and Yelp, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) recently ruled that paying for reviews is an illegal and deceptive process subject to penalties, fines, and even legal action.
Next, we’ll dive deeper into the FTC’s new rule and explore how your business can navigate these new changes to stay compliant and ethical.
While it’s always been illegal for businesses to buy fake reviews, the FTC’s new ruling makes it illegal to incentivize customers to leave a review expressing a particular sentiment, either positive or negative.
The new rule was enacted in August of 2024 in response to a pervasive fake review issue made worse by the widespread availability of generative AI tools. In an effort to protect consumers and well-intentioned businesses, the FTC’s new rule will help identify and remove fake or misleading reviews and penalize businesses that aren’t acting ethically.
The rule explicitly bans the following review-related actions:
Among other detrimental risks, businesses that participate in fake online reviews, whether they’re generating the reviews themselves or hiring a third-party service to do it for them, could be fined up to $51,744.
The new FTC rule doesn’t just outlaw paying for misleading or fake reviews. To avoid FTC inquiries, fines, or other penalties, steer clear of the following practices to keep your business’ review process ethical and compliant.
Don’t ask employees, family, or friends for reviews unless they explicitly disclose their connection to your business and that you’ve asked them for a review.
Some platforms, such as Google, Yelp, the Better Business Bureau, and Amazon, explicitly prohibit reviews from people with a direct connection to the seller, regardless of whether the connection is disclosed in the review.
Don’t ask for reviews from people who haven’t actually used your service or product, and avoid only asking for reviews from customers who you think will leave a positive review. Make sure everyone who has used your business has ample opportunities to leave a review.
Certain platforms, such as Trustpilot, allow you to offer discounts or loyalty points to customers in exchange for a review, under the condition that the review discloses the incentive and isn’t conditional upon the customer leaving a review expressing a particular sentiment (i.e. positive or negative).
There are certain SEO and reputation management companies that businesses can hire to boost their reviews and ratings. Before hiring a company like this, make sure you know how they’re getting these results.
Some companies write fake positive reviews for your business to get quick results. Remember, your business can still be held responsible for what the third-party service does on your behalf.
Some review platforms and comparison websites may not be as honest behind the scenes as they seem upfront. Certain review platforms have been found to offer higher rankings and better placement to companies for a fee, creating unfair competition.
Make sure the review platforms and comparison sites you use clearly disclose any kind of commercial relationships they may have with you or other competitors.
While it may seem like a tempting shortcut to success, buying Google reviews carries significant risks for your business that outweigh the potential benefits. The process opens your business up to hefty fines, damage to your reputation, legal repercussions, and more.
Making sure you and your employees understand the risks of buying reviews can help to keep your business compliant and ethical. A few key risks of buying reviews include:
There’s no denying the importance of having a lot of positive Google reviews for your business. Let’s dive into a few legal and ethical ways to get more reviews and boost your business’ visibility.
Provide ample links to your Google Profile by linking review requests throughout your workflows. Consider points throughout the customer experience that would be an ideal time to collect reviews.
Once you’ve identified those moments, such as via email once a support ticket is closed or on the check-out screen once a customer makes a purchase, provide a link to your Google Reviews page.
Requesting reviews via SMS is a great way to get customers to take action and fill out a review, especially for businesses in the service industry who meet with customers in the field.
Pro tip: Choose an SMS provider like Textedly that lets you collect, manage, and monitor online reviews from one platform.
Asking in person can be an excellent way to reinforce the value of reviews and explain their importance to your customers. If they’ve appreciated your service or product, it’s likely that they’ll be happy to leave a review if they know it benefits your business.
Plus, when you ask immediately after providing great service, customers are much more likely to leave a review as the experience is still fresh in their minds.
The best thing you can do to make sure you get reviews from your customers, aside from providing exceptional service, is to make it simple to leave reviews.
Using QR codes or clickable links that route the customer directly to your review profile can simplify access and increase the number of people willing to complete reviews. Plus, it’s also useful to include simple, instructional steps to ensure all customers know how to navigate to the review page.
Email and social media review campaigns are excellent strategies to use if you’re looking to boost the number of reviews on your Google profile.
Emails are a more direct, targeted way to ask customers for feedback, especially if the request emails are personalized, concise, and have a clear action item linked at the end.
Using social media is a less direct but still effective way to reach customers for reviews. Consider making public posts requesting reviews as well as stories or reels. You can also pin review requests to your profile, include links in your bio, highlight current reviews on your page, and run ads or boost posts asking for customer feedback.
It’s not always enough to simply ask for a review or feedback once. Customers are busy, just like you, and sometimes it takes a little prompting to get the results you want.
Sending polite follow-up messages, via email, SMS, or through other communication channels can dramatically boost your volume of reviews. Plus, a follow up demonstrates to customers that you care about their opinion and want to hear about their experience.
Also, oftentimes the customers that leave reviews have very extreme experiences – either positive or negative – and the customers that have seamless interactions with your business forget to leave reviews. Follow-up requests are a great way to capitalize on the satisfied but silent customers.
First, make sure your staff fully appreciate the importance of reviews and the part they play in the overall success of the business. Explain that reviews influence customer trust, search engine rankings, and overall reputation. You can even provide your team with real-life examples of businesses that gained success from a significant number of positive reviews.
Prepare your staff to ask for feedback at the right moments in order to capitalize on customer satisfaction. Customer-facing staff should ask for reviews:
It may also be useful to role-play typical scenarios in which staff should ask for reviews to help them become more comfortable with the feedback request process.
Small incentives are legal if you aren’t swaying the review either way. For example, you could use the following message to incentivize customers to leave reviews:
We value your feedback, whether it’s positive or negative! If you’re willing to leave us a review, we’ll send you a code for 10% off your next purchase.
Think of legal incentives as a thank you for the time spent writing the review instead of an incentive to influence the content of the review.
Other options include offering loyalty points, raffle entry, gift cards or other special offers for customers that leave reviews regardless of what kind of sentiment they express.
Responding to Google reviews is an effective way to get more reviews. Replying to both positive and negative reviews can motivate others to leave reviews as well, signaling to customers that your business values feedback and actively engages with your audience.
In addition to encouraging others to leave reviews, responding also:
Finding the right timing to request reviews is crucial to ensure you actually receive the feedback and the experience is fresh enough in your customer’s mind to be authentic and thorough.
Consider this: Sending your review request during business hours means your message might get missed if your customer has a busy inbox or hectic workload. Alternatively, sending review requests over the weekend might mean your request is put off until the work week and then forgotten.
To find the right timing for your audience base, you should:
Pro tip: Utilizing automation tools is an excellent way to ensure your review request is sent in a timely, relevant manner. You can schedule review requests to automatically be sent after specific events, such as once a transaction is concluded or a service ticket is closed.
Textedly is more than just an SMS platform. It’s the go-to reputation management tool for handling Google Reviews, with features like automated review requests and the ability to reply directly to customer Google reviews from Textedly’s user-friendly platform.
Ready to streamline feedback, strengthen your brand reputation, and capture five-star ratings? Start collecting reviews in minutes with Textedly’s free trial.