For many attorneys, there’s a struggle to get your clients to leave you reviews, whereas other law firms have an easy time getting reviews. To be honest with you, it’s not even that easy for anyone, because a lot of times people will say they’ll leave you a review, and they just don’t do it.
There’s are also circumstances when you’re in an industry where people don’t want to leave reviews. For example, if you’re a criminal defense lawyer, people don’t necessarily want to go on Google and thank their criminal defense lawyer for getting that pesky DUI charge dropped.
Getting Character Reviews For Google
One thing that I tell my clients is that if you’re having trouble getting people to leave you reviews, you should consider character reviews on Google. This is a gray area because Google doesn’t necessarily require client reviews. In short, if you can’t get people to leave you reviews, it doesn’t mean that you cannot get reviews.
Sometimes we tell our clients to do character reviews, which means that you can go to someone you trust and get them to leave you review that says something along the lines of, “John Smith is extremely knowledgeable in family law, and if I ever needed a divorce, he would be the guy I’d call” or, “Bill Johnson is extremely knowledgeable, he knows the law, he cares about his clients, if I got a DUI, he’s the first person I would call.”
None of this info is incorrect, but it’s an easy way for you to build up your reviews. If there’s one law firm that has 20 reviews and you only have five reviews, the law firm with 20 reviews is usually going to get the phone call. So, you’ve got a figure out a way to get as many five-star reviews as possible.
Will Google Penalize You For Character Reviews?
If you call Google and ask them if this is allowed, they’ll probably say no, but if you use it sparingly to get some reviews in times when you can’t get reviews, it works well.
We’ve never had a client have an issue with it, and I don’t it’s possible because it would require Google to go manually read all of these reviews and it just isn’t possible.
If you guys have any questions or know any other tricks, feel free to reach out.