So, you're trying to get your dispensary to rank at the top of Google search. One thing you can't overlook is the importance of reviews. Google wants you to have a ton of highquality, positive reviews, and they want you to be getting them often. So, don't take my word for it. I did some Google searches and we're going to hear the statistics from the horse's mouth itself. Google itself is saying 71% of consumers read online reviews before visiting a local business. Right? I know me personally, if I'm looking at restaurants in my area and I find an Italian restaurant with a thousand five-star reviews, everybody's happy, they're getting a ton of reviews often, I'm most likely to visit that place, right? I'm assuming that their service is good, their food is good, and they're very popular for a reason versus a competing Italian restaurant with 20 reviews and a two star rating. I'm most likely going to stay away from there.
So, of course, consumers take that into account. I'm sure you've done the same yourself with local searches. Uh, but Google takes into account as well, right? It's one of the primary factors that they look at when deciding if your business should rank over somebody else's. When somebody is searching a local intent search term. So again, don't just take my word for it. Let's take a look at what Google themselves is saying. So I did a quick Google search of importance of reviews on local SEO in the first sentence. Reviews are crucial for local SEO because they serve as a key ranking factor, build customer trust, and increase uh click-through rates.
Uh Google and other search engines use reviews as a significant signal for local search rankings. Of course, you're building trust, you're improving click-through rates, all the stuff that we already talked about, you know, having more authenticity, so on and so forth. But these are the four things that really matter. So, the first thing is Google wants you to have quantity, right? So, they want you to have a higher volume of reviews. Uh the more reviews you have, it can signal popularity to these search engines. The other thing is you can't just have quantity, but they need to be positive reviews, right? So, your average star rating is a key metric. Um, a higher rating can lead to a higher conversion rate as well. One study found a 44% higher conversion rate for businesses that increase their rating by just one star.
They also want recency. So, it's not enough to have a lot of reviews and to have a high rating, but they want fresh reviews as well. So, they're crucial for maintaining your local SEO presence. Um, you know, if you have a,000 fivestar reviews, but that happened 5 years ago and you haven't got a new one in the last 5 years, obviously that's going to be a problem. And then also the quality of reviews. So, if you could get photos and videos in your reviews, that can also make an impact on those search rankings. Okay, I think I proved my point as to why reviews are so important. Now, let's talk about how you yourself can get consistent, highquality reviews for your local dispensary.
You can use a software such as Revenue Kit. This is a software that I built specifically for this use case. The way it works is it integrates with your cannabis point of sale system and it will immediately text every single customer after they place their order and it'll ask and it'll encourage them to leave a positive review on your Google business profile as well as Yelp and other marketplaces. Your review portal is going to look something like this. You can customize it with your own colors, logo, branding, so on and so forth. This is where we initially capture those reviews from those customers.
And we'll give you other touch points as well. So, we'll automatically generate these full-size flyers with your branding and logo and colors. Uh, and you could print these out, put them by the cash register where customers could easily scan the QR code and leave a review. And we'll also provide these half-size flyers for you. So, you could print these out. There's smaller flyers that you could put in with every order as well. So, they're getting at the register ask for review. They have the uh QR code that they could scan. They have it in their bag. They're getting automated text messages. You know, we have all these different touch points to make sure that we get as many customers to leave a review as possible, right?
So, the importance of that can't be overstated. That's it for this video. I hope you learned something new. Please leave a comment if you have any questions, comments, or concerns. And until the next time, I'll see you guys later. Peace.
