There’s no denying that online reviews have a direct impact on your business. Regardless if your shopping for a new car, looking for a real estate agent or need a plumber. Everyone checks reviews.
Having reviews is a powerful way of building trust in your company and services. And yet, it’s the one major factor that is often overlooked by small business owners.
You could have a hundred Zillow or Facebook reviews and that’s all good. However, stop to consider this.
Where do most searches begin? On Google of course!
Google is the an ocean of search results and still the main search engine in the world. Although other sites like Zillow and Facebook have their own audiences, they are still ponds or lakes in comparison to Google. Ignoring this fact, is hurting your business.
In this example, we're going to search for accountants in Athens, GA.
On average, the value per client for a CPA is $500. Since most clients use the same CPA for years, lets say they stay with a CPA for 5 years. That makes each client's lifetime value $2500.
Whenever you search for a service based industry, Google is going to recommend businesses. The way they do that is by showing what's called a "3 Pack" because usually it contains just 3 businesses. Sometimes there is a fourth option if there is ad that shows up here as well.
According to most studies (Bright Local) 52% of search result clicks go through this 3 Pack. So a little more than half of anybody searching for this service will choose one of these options.
Using a free SurferSEO Chrome extension we can see that this specific search term generates 50 searches a month. That's called your search volume.
If you think back to when we went over life time value, we said that the lifetime value of accountants in this area is around $2,500.
So with that, lets do some basic math.
This search term is searched for 50x per month which is a little over 600 x per year.
A little more than have the clicks go through the 3 Pack
So that's 312 clicks per year. And the lifetime value of each client is potentially $2500 thereby each search is potentially worth $2,500. The reason we say that is because it's a pretty safe bet to say that if someone is searching for an accounting in Athens, GA is likely looking for an accountant in Athens, GA right? So anybody searching is a potential client.
That means there is a potential annual search volume of $780,000. Now, that's just in the 3 Pack.
Don't let that mislead you because we are not inferring that every single search is going to become a client. Some people may search more than once per month. There are a lot of caveats to this but we're just saying that at maximum there's $780K of value annually on the table here for this search term. So with these assumptions let's move forward. Let me ask you a basic question.
Who Would You Pick First?
If you were only going to call just one of these three, who would you pick?
We interviewed 100 people and asked them the say question. So when we asked about 100 people, these are the results that we got.
- More than 90% chose Smart Accounting Solutions.
So then we asked," Why? Why would they pick them?" Well, chances are likely they picked them for the same reason that you did. They have 27 reviews and the next closest competitor has one. The other option doesn't have any reviews, including the ad.
Clearly this means that 90% of online searches would also likely choose Smart Accounting Solutions giving them the lion share of potential new clients.
A little research reveals that K Shea has been in business in 2009. So they've been in business for at least a decade.
If they've had 100 clients per year, over 10 years, thats 1,000 clients. Some years were less and others may have been more. But overall, we think it's probably a safe bet to say they've had at least 1,000 clients.
So with that, let's do some more math.
The software solution that we use and provide can send invitations via email or text. We think that K Shea CPA likely has 1K clients. Now, a 3.5% response rate is EXTREMELY conservative. Sometimes we see it up in the 20's, which makes 3.5 extremely low. So at 3.5% I'm very confident that we can hit that all day long.
Ok, 3.5% of 1K clients = 35 NEW reviews. What would 35 new positive reviews be worth to K Shea CPA?
Looking back at the 3 Pack and remembering why 90% would choose the Smart Accounting Solutions. What would happen if K Shea now had 37 reviews. Now it's not nearly as lop sided when it was 27 to 1. The majority is now more likely to go to K Shea CPA with 37 reviews.
So, one last little bit of math. Let's assume they'd now pull in 56% of the clicks.
56% of that original $780K of volume that we talked about, is almost $437K dollars. This is the starting pool of opportunity they have. So if we did the math on their original value through that 3 pack which was just over $31K a year.
You can tell that they are now over $405K better off of starting opportunity. Does that mean they are going to make $405K more this year? Obviously not, but what it means is that they are now pulling from a larger opportunity dollars. They are pulling from a much larger pool of dollars now.
Using our software, they can probably accomplish this in just a few short months. Check out our reviews page.
We understand that asking for and collecting online reviews isn’t always easy or comfortable. You’ve got enough on your plate rather than chasing up clients for a review. Fortunately, Real Leads Finder Pro makes this process painless.
Using the Real Leads Finder Pro system, you can easily set up an automated workflow that runs continuously behind the scenes, reminding past clients to leave you a review. Like a friendly tap on the shoulder every day or so. You choose how often.
All of your reviews will be displayed in your dashboard along with all of your text messages, emails, contacts, FB messages and LinkedIN messages too. Everything funneled into one place so you won’t have to go searching from place to place for them.
We Help Real Estate Professionals Start Generating A Consistent Flow Of Leads For Their Real Estate Business. We Help You Leverage Your Website, Facebook, Google, And 2-Way Text Communication To Convert More Leads Into Closed Deals.
Can I integrate these leads right into my own CRM?
Yes! We integrate with Zapier which allows pretty much any software on the Internet to connect to any other software on the Internet. So if you use any of the main CRM's in the real estate space, then more than likely we can integrate with it. Or You Can Always Just Use Our CRM As Well🙂
Do I have to have my own website?
Nope. With our simple lead generation system you can easily create Lead Pages that are pre-built for you to make things easier with your lead generation. If you do have a website, great! You can easily tie in the domain you use for your website to your landing pages. And if you have a WordPress site, we can tie into that and dramatically speed up your loading time while also providing added protection from hackers in the background. Your access to your WP site remains the same.
Are There Any Additional Costs?
Nope! If you'd like to run Facebook ads, then we recommend budgeting at minimum of $10/day for your advertising budget. Using Real Leads Finder Pro system, there's no limit to the number of ways you can set up organic lead generations so you don't have to rely on paying for your leads going forward.
