Link to your Google business review page
You did the right thing — added your business to Google+ / Google Maps / Google My Business (yes, it can get confusing). More importantly, your business can now be found on the maps. You search for it and it’s there. Great! However, for whatever reason (probably the reason why Google+ has never taken off) Google makes things so complicated and confusing, that finding your own business to edit, or more importantly to share with others it almost impossible.
Your customer is really happy with your service and wants to write a review. What link do you send them? You, of course, can tell the customer to go on Google Maps, type in your business name, find it, click on it, scroll to Reviews and write a review. Suddenly the positive experience they had is beginning to diminish, and it’s not even your fault.
Let’s take us (Shtudio) as an example. Say, we decided to send someone a direct link to our page. Going via Google+ turns out to be useless, it’s super unfriendly even for technically-minded people like us. Even though, we have an excellent direct link to our G+ page, google.com/+shtudio. Ironic, right?
Hey Google, where is our Review button?
Next option is to provide the customer with a Google Maps link, which actually does have Reviews on it. How do we get one? We go on Google Maps, we search for ourselves and share the link. Here it is (not a joke):
You can’t shorten this either, it will no longer work. Unless you use a URL shortener website, this is what you have to send to your clients. It’s just looks wrong. URL shorteners often look like SPAM. You lose either way.
However, we found a temporary solution:
Google Business Review Direct Link Generator
We only say it’s “temporary”, because we hope that someone at Google fixes this. It’s simply frustrating. So here is what we suggest. You need a Review Link Generator. It’s a third party website that helps you create direct Google links that are short(er) and easier to share. That’s right, the guys from Grade Us took it upon themselves to “fix” Google Review links. And here how it works at the end of which, you’ll get a direct google review link.
Step 1
Put in your business name and postcode. Sometimes you may need to try a few variations here, for us “Shtudio” showed US results, “Shtudio design” found us.
Step 2
Obvious choice – pick you business.
Step 3
Here we have a few options. We went for the Open in Maps option as it seemed to work best on both Desktop and Mobile devices.
And here it, is a (not so short) Google Reviews direct link that we can actually send to clients.
Google — please take note. And if anyone out there has another solution for this, ideally directly via Google — please share.