The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Darren Tessitore, CEO of Thrive Review, How to Build Better SEO Rankings With Reviews

Episode Date: June 10, 2023

Darren Tessitore, CEO of Thrive Review, How to Build Better SEO Rankings With Reviews Thrivereviews.io

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times, because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. It's Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com. Welcome to the big show, my family and friends. We certainly appreciate you guys coming by. 14 years, 1,400 plus episodes.

Two to three new episodes coming at you daily. You better start keeping up. I'm keeping tabs on everyone. It's like a list that Santa Claus has where you check off who's good or bad. And I just go through the list and did all our audience members listen to this episode? So if you haven't, make sure you go back and listen to them because there's been some really brilliant guests. There's always brilliant guests on this show.

We have a rule that we don't allow brilliant guests on, just awful hosts like me. So there you go. Always refer to the show to your family, friends, and relatives. YouTube.com, 4Chest, Chris Foss. Goodreads.com, 4Chest, Chris Foss. LinkedIn and the big LinkedIn newsletter, the 130,000 LinkedIn group over there. And TikTok. We're trying christmas goodreads.com for chess christmas uh linkedin and the big linkedin newsletter the 130 000 linkedin group over there and tiktok we're trying to be cool

they were starting to post stuff over there on tiktok so come over there and help us with the gen zers they don't like old people evidently and smart uh serious entertainment but uh we're going to try and force a force uh the information on them so they can learn more stuff because they're pretty smart as it is. Anyway, guys, we have an amazing entrepreneur on the show. He's going to be talking to us about his entrepreneurial journey, things he's learned, his insights, and his company that he built, and all that good stuff. Today, we have Daniel Tessitore on the show with us today. He is a business consultant with over 20 plus years of helping businesses streamline process and increase productivity. Five years ago, he saw the need to help

the small local businesses stay alive. We need as much of those as we can, especially after COVID that was really hard on Main Street businesses. That is when he started mastering the art of helping local businesses get found. In 2019, he started Thrive Review. Thrive Review is a turnkey solution for local businesses that helps them reach the exact audience they need. Welcome to the show, Darren. How are you? I'm doing great. Thanks. Thanks for having me, Chris. Appreciate it. Thanks for coming. We certainly appreciate it as well. Give us your dot dot coms where we want people to find you on the interwebs uh thrive reviews dot io that's our website you can also go to darren tessitore.com to learn more about me specifically and my ventures i also do a lot of non-profit charity work and so my company's on

there and then a little bit about me and my non-profits on darrentestatory.com but thrivereviews.io that's the newest venture that i have it's been going since 2019 there you go uh so give us kind of an overview of it 30,000 overview of it and we'll get into your origin story and then get more in depth on the company sure so basically if you look at the way the world is working right now people are using their mobile devices to search for things, right? So most mobile devices are set up for local searching, meaning location services are turned on. So when you go on to your Google or your map or whatever web browser you're using, and you search for something, it's going to by default, find those local businesses near you. So what we've done is we've figured out a way of helping companies actually pop up in the top of those search rankings. So when someone types in chiropractor, dentist, veterinarian, hair salon, whatever it may be, you can actually pop up high in those rankings and get found. And there's a science to it. It's not that hard, but it is hard at the same time and it just

takes work and it takes you constantly being on top of it or having someone like us constantly be on top of it so today I can give you guys some really great tips that you can use to help you rank and then I can show you how we can do that for you if you need help there you go and then there's a lot you know with google and stuff a lot for you if you need help. There you go. And then there's a lot, you know, with Google and stuff, a lot of times when you're trying to rank, you know, half the time you go there now and there's like, it seems like five or six different ads on top of things. You're like, wait, this isn't the people I'm looking for.

Sometimes they're competitors trying to hack onto each other and stuff like that. So give us a little bit of your origin story. What got you into starting this and launching this? Or where do you feel the need for it? And what's some of your history of being an entrepreneur that got you down this road? Sure. Back in the day, I started out working in telecommunications, voice and data. Worked for some large providers.

And then found myself in a role of helping companies streamline their technology, helping them figure out what are the best solutions technologically for their businesses. And then about 20 years ago, I landed my first contract as a solopreneur, where I basically had a friend of mine who worked for a large manufacturing facility, asked me if I could help them streamline their factory with technology. And I went in there and I did my thing and I brought in a bunch of vendors and I connected a bunch of machines. And after about a year's worth of work, we increased productivity by about 68%. Wow.

Yeah. And my contract was based on increased productivity. So I charged them a monthly fee and then I charged them a percentage of profit growth. Oh, awesome. So when they grew like that, I said, crap, I don then I charged them a percentage of profit growth. Oh, awesome. So when they grew like that, I said, crap, I don't need to have a job anymore. So that's when I quit my job and just started doing it full time. And, you know, I've done two to three contracts a year. Sometimes one contract will last a few years.

But about five years ago, I started seeing that these small businesses all over the place were just struggling to get found struggling against the big-box stores weren't able to you know properly utilize technology because they're so busy trying to just keep their business running that old saying you're working in the business instead of on the business right yeah there you go so I figured well how do I I figured, well, how do I help this? How do I, how do I help these local businesses actually get found, but make it so that it's not hard for them to do? So I took on a couple of clients really just as like a pro bono thing, you know, helping local businesses that I knew that weren't really growing well. And, and I helped them and I figured out a bunch and I brought in a bunch of players and kind of just figured out, well, what is it that Google's looking for to rank you higher locally in the search engines?

And it constantly changes, but there is a tech to it. There's a science there. And that's when I decided, you know what, I'm going to go all in on this and I'm going to do Thrive Reviews. And we're going to come up with a way of making a simple turnkey solution for these small local businesses that isn't going to cost them thousands of dollars a month. You look at SEO and you're like search engine optimization. Okay, I can go get that for $2,000 a month. And some of these businesses are like, I don't have $2,000 a month for this. And it might take six months to work. And we don't know for sure, but give us six months at least and like

12 grand and i might not get anything out of this and you're just scratching their head so i wanted something affordable that worked but it kind of took care of everything for it for them and made it easy and that's what we did we created thrive reviews there you go so it's titled thrive reviews and from what i'm looking at uh your website, why are reviews important? Is this the secret sauce or one of the secret sauces to getting good rank in SEO? It's one of the key secret sauces to getting ranked locally. But one of the key things about that that not a lot of people realize is what you do with those reviews once you get them. How do you take them and share them properly and then how do you respond to those reviews that will help you rank higher one thing we discovered

early on is that Google likes people that use Google they're going to reward you for being active on their platform. And their simple platform that they created used to be Google Business Profiles. Now it was Google My Business. Now it's Google Business Profiles, which you can find at business.google.com. And you can literally go in there and find your business in the directory and then claim ownership of that business saying, this is my business. I own it. I control this profile. And then when you're in that profile, you can literally have this free website that over a

billion people a day are searching. So there's 1 billion searches a day on Google Maps. And Google Maps is where all these business profiles are. So when you have this profile set up properly, so you have good pictures, you have the right category, you have a really good description that explains you with keywords, and then you start getting lots of reviews from your happy customers, right? Now, once you get these reviews, you need to respond to those reviews and you need to respond to them fast, but also within a way that puts keywords in those responses. Because Google will search those responses and rank you higher. So we started out just really helping companies get

reviews. And then we quickly learned, look, there's a little bit more to this. We can make sure that profiles properly set up and categorized and the right images. And there's a couple of little nuances in there that you can do like your pictures for example when your pictures are uploaded make sure that they're properly what's called geo tag geo meaning geography so when you go in your iPhone and you look at a picture it will tell you where that picture was taken from well you can make sure that your pictures that are uploaded to Google are properly tagged for your location of your business. And that will

even help you rank higher, believe it or not. Oh, wow. That's just amazing. And there's a lot of work that goes into this. There's a lot of work. It can definitely take a lot of time and a lot of energy. And I've noticed that a lot of the small businesses will try and try and try and try and end up not really getting many results because they're not focusing on the key things that Google's looking for. Wow. Wow. That's crazy, man. The stuff that people can do to give an advance, and like you say, it makes it so that people who can't afford billions of dollars in SEOs and giant ad campaigns can take an edge up.

And so how does the process work? I noticed something here on the website about submitting your mailing list, et cetera, et cetera. So there's a couple of things. The first thing we do is we go in and we optimize your profile. So when you're optimizing a profile, what you really want to do is, one, make sure that you own it. Make sure you've claimed ownership of that profile, right? It's called claiming your profile. It's not that hard to do, but there is a process involved, and you have to follow the simple steps that Google wants to make sure that they know that you are the appropriate owner of that profile.

And it's in a way where not anyone can just claim any profile, obviously, right? They'll maybe mail you a letter with a five digit code, or they'll call your business with a code. Now they're texting the business with a code if you have a text number. So there's a lot you can do there. But the first step is claiming the business. Once you've done that, now what you need to do is you need to go and do some methodical research about what category your business should be in. Right. Now, let's say you're a chiropractor. OK, chiropractor, that's easy. Well, let's say you're a dentist. There's a bunch of different subcategories in dental. You could be a pediatric dentist. You could be just doing implants, just doing root canals. You could be a dental surgeon.

Well, you need to go and look and see what category you want your business to be in and what subcategories you want your business to be in. We help you with that. We help you do that research. We help you figure out the exact strategy for that. A lot of the time, it's not that complex because, you know, you're a chiropractor or you're an auto dealer that sells used cars, right? But sometimes there are different specifics that you need to figure out for your business. What is it that you need? What category should you be in?

So now that you've figured out your category, now you want to go and write a proper description. You want to make sure that how your business is described within those 750 characters that you're allowed to write, describe your business properly. Like who are we? What do we do? How do we do it? Why do we do it? But how do we put the right keywords in there?

So that's where you want to go and make sure you do some keyword research. And you'll come up with that keyword research when you're doing your category research, or at least we will anyway. So now you're going to throw those right keywords into your description. And now that you're done with your description, you're done with claiming the business, you're done with your category, now you want to add lots of really good quality photos. You don't want a photo that looks cheesy, dirty, crappy, hard to see.

You literally want nice photos. Well, it doesn't mean you have to go spend 10 grand on a photographer to come out and photo your business. But if you have an iPhone or a good Android, there's a really good quality camera on this sucker, right? I can take some good quality photos. So just take a minute, center them, make sure they look good. Take a bunch of good photos of the business, the front of the business, looking at it from the outside. So if someone drives by, they recognize it, especially if you're in like a weird place where you're around a corner or around the back or down the hallway, get some good pictures

so that people can easily recognize where you are. When they look at that profile on Google, they see that's where you are, right? Then you want to get all those photos uploaded. And there's another little thing that you want to do in Google Profile, which is turning on the messaging. There's an app in Google Business Profile that allows people to message you. And that message will come directly to your Google app or your Google Maps app. You want to make sure that's on, and you want to make sure you have somebody that's able to answer those messages fast.

The faster you answer those messages, the higher you're going to rank. Google is going to see you as being active and alert and right there using their app right now, and they're going to reward you for that, which is super, super simple. And then what you want to do is you want to make sure you're asking for reviews. Now, this is a really interesting part that we found. We did a lot of studies on this, and it's pretty simple to understand this, but people like to help people they like. So think about it.

You're in a restaurant. The waiter is super cool you're getting along great and that waiter comes up to and says hey so how was your service tonight everyone happy anything else i can do for you before i give you the check no i'm great you did great the food was good you're awesome thanks if that waiter were to turn to you and say chris do you mind helping me out? Can you leave a review for how we did tonight? What is your response going to be? Sure. Of course I can.

Oh, yeah. Now, what if they made it super complicated? It's a great go to Google, find us and leave a review. Okay, I'll do that later. And then you leave, you forget about it. It's gone. What if they just pulled out a QR code, right? And they were like, well, okay then, thank you so much.

Do you mind pointing your phone to this QR code and leaving me a review? There you go. And you whip out your phone, you point it, and it goes right to where you want them to leave a review, whether it's a review. And you can catch them at the best moment that they're hot on your product and your service. That's right.

So that's really part of the review asking process is determining where in the sales cycle are they happiest. I had a furniture store one time, and they were asking for reviews once the person made a purchase. They purchased the couch. Can you leave us a review? And people are like, yeah, sure, I'll leave you a review. Yeah, no problem.

But they weren't getting any reviews. Well, think about it. The guy's couch never arrived in the living room. He doesn't even know if he likes it yet. He sat on it in the store for 20 minutes, thinks he's going to like it. But he's not going to get it for four to six months, especially now. I know I ordered my couch. It was like six months.

A dining room table, it took us eight months to get, right? It is what it is. So what we did was we said, well, do you know when they get delivered their product? Does your software that you're using know that? They said, yeah, in QuickBooks, we had this little fulfillment button that it was fulfilled. I said, great. So once they click that fulfillment button, our software is going to know that you did that. And we're going to send them a text and an email and we're going to ask them to leave a review. And that's the point when you want to ask them to leave a review, when they're going to be most happy. So that's what we did. So we turned it on, and then they just started getting reviews.

And also is training the staff. We do a little process with the staff. We try to get as many people on whatever client's team involved who will be asking for reviews and we teach them how to properly ask for help right without sounding corny without being weird but just mr customer do you mind helping me out today and leaving us a review and also what we found is gamifying that creating some type of a way of rewarding your staff for getting reviews and it can be as simple as a $10 starbucks gift card or a $50 cash bonus whatever you want to do in your organization i recommend you ask your staff what they would like do a survey you get 10 guys that are going to ask for reviews, ask them what they would like if they got

a review. You might be surprised. They may be happy with a $5 gift card. They may want $100. You don't know what it's worth to them. And then you have to look at what it's worth to you and kind of work out a plan in your organization to do that. Our software will track who got the reviews so we can run a report every month. And the end of the month you get an email telling you exactly who asked for reviews or who got what number of reviews and then you can pay out your bonuses that way. Oh, really? That's pretty awesome.

That gives them an encouragement to do it and you can see who's doing it and then fire the people who are not. No, I'm just kidding. That's right. Or at least retrain them. Retrain them. I like that. Don't fire them yet. Give them the benefit of the doubt. Oh, I thought you kidding. That's right. Or at least retrain them. Retrain them. I like that. Yeah. Don't fire them yet. Give them the benefit of the doubt. Oh, I thought you meant that firing was the retraining.

It can be sometimes. It's a joke, but it's true. So that's what, you know, that's when, now that you're asking for your reviews, you're getting your reviews. Now what you want to do, which is super simple, is you want to properly and very fast respond to those reviews. So you need to have some process in place, someone within your organization that's either going to own the responding of the reviews or you turn it over to someone like Thrive Reviews where we will respond to all your Google reviews within 24 hours. And we also respond to the bad reviews, but we consult you first.

I had a client last month that was a driver educator. They have a school in Texas, and they had a person write this huge, scathing report about how horrible they were. Worst driver in school in the world. I hate him. I hate him. I hate him. I hate him. Just talking trash, right?

So first thing our girl Rachel did, the girl that was handling their account said okay well tell me about this person what happened why are they so pissed they said well we did a driving test with them and we failed them okay well why'd you fail them because they didn't pull over for an ambulance well like wait a second you mean they didn't pull over for an ambulance yep there's an ambulance coming behind them they didn't pull over the ambulance ambulance went around them. We had to fail them. I said, well, why did you have to fail them? Well, per Texas law, if you commit a moving violation during a driver test, it's an automatic failure. I said, all right, well, pull up the law. Give us a link to that law, and then we're going to write a review.

So we did. Steve, thanks so much for your review. We appreciate your feedback. We just want to let you know that per Texas law, if you commit a moving violation during a driving test, we have to fail you and you didn't pull over for an ambulance. So we had to fail you. Feel free to come back anytime and retake the test. And it literally took that one star review and turned it into a five star response because now you have this person who was talking trash really point out that they just didn't drive right and they didn't move over

for an ambulance so uh looks like we're getting some audience feedback here matthew fulton love it seo is very important uh he's got a lot of other great comments that have come in. But what app do you use now that the Google My Business app has been depreciated? Is your site a good replacement for that? So the Google My Business app is gone. It has been migrated over to Google Maps. So you can find the Google Maps, the Google Business profile within Google Maps. Our software does have a complete connectivity to all your google business profiles so you can completely manage them all from there if you have

to so if you have 20 locations a thousand locations one location doesn't matter you can go into our platform you can see your google profile and you can update it categorize it do all the things i was just talking about you can respond to reviews you can request reviews you can update it, categorize it, do all the things I was just talking about. You can respond to reviews. You can request reviews. You can post reviews on social media platforms. Yeah. There you go. There you go. Well, Matthew's loving everything you've been feeding us today.

And it's great. So what are some other things about your website that we've maybe missed or that you want to tease out that people can get a chance to go look at? Sure. One of the biggest things that I think we do differently than all of our competitors is how we personally respond to all of your reviews for you. Responding to reviews, we found, is one of the key things that will help rank you higher. And a lot of people don't notice that because they just don't do it and they don't have the time to do it so we have a team of us-based staff that are all based actually in here in Tampa Bay area and we will personally go in and respond to all your reviews with keywords oh wow yeah so that's another trick is putting the

keywords the key reviews you know think of it this way let's say I'm a chiropractor right and I'm servicing Clearwater, Florida, right? If I'm responding to a review, I would say something like, thank you so much for the great review of our chiropractic office in Clearwater, Florida. Right? Sounds a little corny, but it throws the word chiropractor and throws the word Clearwater, Florida right into that review. And then boom, Google's going to see that and help rank you higher.

Right? Another little thing you do need to know if you are a medical practice, you have to apply HIPAA rules. into that review and then boom google's going to see that and help rank you higher right another little thing you do need to know if you are a medical practice you have to apply HIPAA rules you can't you can't respond to a review violating HIPAA you can't say thank you so much for coming to our practice you were amazing to work on we had a great time extracting your tooth thanks thanks Bob Jones uh for coming by for that vasectomy we really appreciate it and uh make sure you come yeah yeah we're so glad we can help you with your hair bad yeah there you go there you go or if you're a law firm hey hey john thanks for hiring us to for that uh triple murder

that we got you off on even even though you really did it. Yeah, exactly. We all know you're guilty, buddy, but guess what? We all know you're guilty. That'd be bad. So I can see how important this is. Yes, it's very important. And there's also other review sites that maybe your company should be focusing on.

Google is very important, but it's not everything. Right. Like Apple now has its own maps platform. They've always had Apple Maps, but they used to use Yelp for all of their business listings. They have recently created their own Yelp like product where you can create a page. You can put pictures that are relevant to your business. You can post data. You can write a great description and you can create a page, you can put pictures that are relevant to your business, you can post data, you can write a great description, and you can also get reviews. They don't do a five-star rating system. They're just doing a thumb up and a thumb down, which I think is kind of lame, but it is what it is. I think we're all used to the five-star

rating system. I guess Apple doesn't want to hurt any feelings maybe i don't know does apple have feelings no i'm just kidding it's an apple joke they just put out their 3d whatever ar headset so i gotta throw some shade at them i noticed on your website that you have under the resources tab you have the thing to get how to get more reviews on Facebook, Google Yelp. Uh, let's see more Angie's list reviews. How's, uh, lawyers.com, fine law, uh,

home advisor and AVO. These are really important because one of my big beefs, especially on Yelp, because I use it to find good restaurants is I hate, and you mentioned this earlier. I hate when I go to look at a restaurant and they haven't even claimed the thing. And I honestly have found some that haven't been claimed because they have bad food reviews. So I'm like, ah, I think I see what's going on here.

They don't want to claim this because it's got bad reviews. And so it's kind of turned me into a thing where if I see that they haven't claimed it, I'm like, maybe they're afraid of their reviews. It's so true. And Yelp is a funny one. They'll reward you if you pay them. Ah, yeah, that's true. I've seen them rip reviews and just not even post them.

I have one client got like 20 Yelp reviews that never showed up. And I'm like,'m like wow showing up and like well you're not a client buddy you haven't paid as yeah it's a bit there's a whole big thing on that deal but i mean it's really important because uh if you don't claim your your business on there and sometimes the reviews are really good like people like this is great food and i'm like geez but you know and sometimes i just want to like see the menu so i can kind of figure out where the pricing is at and maybe some pictures of the food and it's like they haven't claimed it you're just like you're an idiot you just got money just rolling by i'm also noticing on your website uh a lot of the case studies that you have

of where you've helped companies pick up you know here's, 58 reviews for a law firm in 14 months, 108 reviews in 200 days. Restaurants, these are the most important, at least in my mind, because I eat a lot, you can tell. 15,901 new reviews in five months. Plumbing, you know, all sorts of different handiwork. So there's lots of different demos that you have where people can watch a demo and understand how you guys build this out and help clients definitely we are able to post reviews just to just about any review site that you can imagine wow and we're also integrated with over 3 000 apps so if you have your own application whether it be a crm or an enterprise resource planning software or medical planning software we can connect with that and automatically request reviews to your customers or patients or an enterprise resource planning software or a medical planning software,

we can connect with that and automatically request reviews to your customers or patients. So what we do is, like I was saying earlier, is we figure out when the best time to ask for the review is, and then we figure out what trigger points in the software we may be able to find to ask for those reviews. So whether it be like, for example, I was talking about QuickBooks earlier, they have a fulfillment tab at that furniture store. Once they hit that fulfillment button, that fires off a trigger to our software, which will automatically send a series of texts and emails asking them to leave a review. There you go. Right. And we can connect with just about any software that's imaginable. We also have a Zapier integration. So Zapier can just about any software that's imaginable. We also have a Zapier integration. So Zapier can just about connect to just about anything too. So yeah, it's, it's automation is important.

It's a key part of asking for reviews. Another thing too, is properly training your staff on when and how. Your staff needs to be engaged. They need to know that this is super important. We all read reviews. Every single one of us are going to read an online review somewhere at some point, probably within the next month. If you're not having your staff prioritize asking for those reviews, you are literally throwing money away because those happy customers will help you if you ask.

And the text and the email is not always enough. We get a million texts and emails, and I guarantee you that if you go and survey a lot of your friends right now, you'll see that they have a crap ton of unanswered texts. Right? You know, so you know those texts could just be getting missed. Five years ago, it wasn't like that. We all, text wasn't as popular as it is now, but now we're getting texts from everything. I'm getting texts all the time. I'm like,

how did you get my cell phone? I don't want a pair of shoes. Leave me alone. Right. But now, so you're seeing that more and more. So you have to try to figure out how do we make it so that we're different and we stand out? Well, you have to ask and you have to make that personal connection and you have to personally ask them to help you. And then you have to make it super easy for them to leave you that review. That's where that QR code comes in, right? We will build a landing page for you that directs them to exactly where to leave the reviews. So if we want them going to Facebook, if we want them going to Yelp, if we want them going to house, Google, you name it, we will put that on that landing page so

that when they click that button, it'll take them exactly to where they should leave the review. There you go. I noticed that I was going to talk about that here, the building the landing pages where it gives them instructions and they can leave reviews uh it uh it also helps filter uh bad reviews tell us how that works so what we have on our process is we have a way for them to contact you directly if they're not happy right so if they're unhappy with you they really just want to vent they want to communicate right so you don't want to stop them from being able to go to google but you want to also make it very because google doesn't like that they will penalize you for that um what you want

to do is you want to make it so it's very easy for them to contact you if they're unhappy and that's where we have a button on the landing page saying look if you're not happy let us know we will jump on this and now it's over to you or the client or whoever's managing that company to be able to have someone on that other end to handle that upset right because yeah they're unhappy well you need to handle it you need to do something about it and that's part of also answering the negative reviews if you turn if you answer that negative review properly you can turn that negative review into a potential happy customer later on. And that's where that whole process comes in of

handling the people that are unhappy, getting them to contact you directly, but then also properly handling those negative reviews so you can turn the one-star review into a five-star response. There you go. I mean, that's the greatest thing is if you can get feedback from a client and be like, hey, how can we fix this? Or maybe there's a misunderstanding. How can we make things better? Or, yeah, that server, we just fired him last night, so we kind of knew he was bad or something.

Exactly, right? We retrained him. We've retrained him out the back door. Out the back door. We back door we threw him right through the window no don't do that people uh but uh i've had a few employees that i want to do that too but uh when people steal from you it's not it's not pretty um you want to show them the door you want to show them the door definitely uh and then so you can help them start a campaign run a campaign to settle this up and do it and uh this will make all the difference in the world.

And reviews are so important. On Amazon, reviews are very important to me. I'm really good at reading the fake reviews and figuring out which ones are fake and which ones are real. There's a genuine, there's like whole services where you can buy fake reviews, I guess now. It's funny. I'll go on a podcast and see a podcast that has like 10 episodes, but like 300 reviews. And they're all this psychotic AI sort of bot reviews. And you're like, you bought these reviews, man.

Come on, man. You didn't earn this. And it's crazy all the stuff that's going out there. But yeah, the more genuine and the keyword thing, like you mentioned before, is really important as well. And I'll tell you something. If you're thinking about buying reviews, it's not worth it. There you go. It will come back and bite you.

Google will know and Google will completely penalize you and you'll start seeing no traffic at all yeah one thing i will recommend doing is understanding the google analytics behind your google business profile our software does have a great analytics package which shows you everything that's going on in it but you want to know like how many people are searching for me and when they find me what keywords are they using to find me? And then out of that, how many calls am I getting? How many visits? You can't really see visits, but you can see calls. You can see driving directions.

So that is technically a visit. So how many driving directions am I getting? So that alone will help you to see, hey, is this working? Is what I've put in place causing a difference? And you can see it pretty quickly. You know, the billion people a day searching Google Maps, there's people out there and they're looking, right? Well, are you getting found? And how are you getting found? What's working? What's not working, right? I mean, even stupid stuff that's really simple, like

with Yelp, they don't put in their business hours or something or they put in wrong business hours or it's something i the worst thing i do is hate going to a place but but uh and their their business is closed and you're like wait you changed business hours but you didn't update your yelp reviews it's so important people understand that you need to update their google search and all these different search mechanisms that are out there and make sure that data is up to date and it's you know i get the people running a business like a restaurant's really hard to run and takes a lot of work to put into it but you've got to you know make sure you're outside that business promoting it well because if not you can have the greatest restaurant in the world you could be michelin five star as far

as anyone would know but if michelin can't find it no one else can you're going to go out of business it doesn't matter how good your product is if people can't find it through marketing so true there's a thing called nap score it stands name address phone number right so there is a score that google uses to determine if your name address and phone number and hours of operation are the same across all the platforms on the Internet. And Google is constantly looking at like Yelp and Uber and YellowPages.com and SuperPages and Bing and all these other platforms to see if there's a synergy between them all. And if there's not, that's when you start ranking lower as well. So we do this thing in our software where we basically push your name, address, phone number, and hours of operation and description to over a hundred different platforms across the internet so that they are

all completely exactly the same. And by doing that, you're just going to handle it. That way, you as a business owner don't have to sit there and think about going through all those pages one by one and trying to do it. You can, and you can buy listing management services, they're called, which can cost anywhere from $100 to $300 a month. We include it in our monthly fee of our software. There you go. Well, this has been pretty insightful. People should go to your website, check it out. Give us your.io so people can find you on the interwebs. It's thrivereviews.io. There you go.

And I definitely love it. I'm going to be going through it myself and all that good stuff. So thank you very much, Darren, for coming on the show. We really appreciate it. Yeah, thanks for having me, man. I really appreciate it. And thanks for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com, 4Chess, Chris Foss, youtube.com, 4Chess, Chris Foss.

I think you have a new fan there, Darren. Matthew Fulton has been just writing in those comments on here, so he loves the thing that you fed us. Go to LinkedIn, YouTube, and TikTok. Thanks for tuning in, folks, and we'll see you guys next time. And that should have us out.