Webinar Recap: Mastering Google Reviews for Your Laundromat

SLIDE 1: Opening

Good morning, everyone! Today, we're going to be talking about strategies for growth—specifically, how to attract customers organically to your business. Let's jump to the next slide.

SLIDE 2: About the Presenter

Now, you might be asking, "Why am I here? And who is this guy?" My name is Bryan Hartsock. I've worked for the last 15 years with small businesses. I've had my own business and even worked with companies like Angie's List and Home Advisor. My whole goal for the last 15 years has been to help businesses grow through organic and ad-based services. Today, I'm going to share a proven, cost-free marketing strategy that will help you drive real results.

Also, at the end of this presentation, I have three gifts for everyone. Everybody loves gifts, right? Who doesn't love some free stuff?

The first gift—probably my favorite—is a comprehensive list of all Google ranking factors. Let me explain what this means: it's the stuff that's actually important to Google. We all want to be at the top of search results, right? This is a list of what's most important and what Google actually cares about.

The second gift is an easy step-by-step video guide on optimizing your Google Business Profile.

Third is a weekly optimization checklist. Every single week, you can go check, check, check—"I did all the things for Google. I fed the beast." Hopefully, it'll help you out.

SLIDE 3: The Big Problem

What's the big problem that we all share? We all know what it is. We're all trying to get to the top of Google, right? What do we want? We want to be at the top. What don't we want? We don't want to be at the bottom. It's pretty simple.

When you do a search for "best laundromat" in your area, there's something called the three-pack or map pack. Let's not talk about the sponsored ads at the top—you want to be in this top three because 80% of people will click on a top-three result. They're not scrolling all the way down the list to click on someone down here.

So how do we get there? And what are the factors that help us do so?

SLIDE 4: No Silver Bullet

Now, I'm going to start with the bad news. There's no silver bullet. There's no one way to do it, unfortunately. The good news—though probably not super good news—is that small, simple things will get you there. It's more of a marathon rather than a sprint. Today, we're going to talk about arguably the most important part of it: reviews.

SLIDE 5: Why Reviews Matter

So why reviews? Approximately 96% of all customers read online reviews. Raise your hand if you've never read an online review. [Pause] I see one person—so he's part of that 4% they're talking about. Based on those 96% who read reviews, 88% of those people actually determine whether they're going to use that company based on their reviews. I see heads nodding, right? Everybody hops online, they hop on Google, they check it out, and they make that decision.

SLIDE 6: Expert Consensus

Local business SEO experts believe the same thing. Companies like Sterling Sky, White Spark, Local Falcon, and Ranking Academy—you probably don't know these companies, but these are all local SEO experts. These are businesses that specialize in helping local businesses optimize to rank high on Google.

Here's the key difference: these are not the people who do SEO for big corporations. There are two different types of SEO. There's national SEO, where companies want to rank for certain terms across the whole United States, but none of you care about that. You want to rank for your five-mile radius. That's all you care about. These experts help do exactly that.

SLIDE 7: Recent Expert Ranking

Darren Shaw, one of the leading local SEO experts, did a ranking three weeks ago about the most important factors for local business rankings. Guess what came in the S tier—the very top tier? Reviews.

SLIDE 8: Recent Success Story

Here's a recent win I'd like to share. I work in client success at Cents, and one of the things I like to share are wins because I help a lot of customers with reviews and marketing. Our client success team calls ourselves "fractional business partners" because we all have certain experience, and we like to bring those skill sets to our customers.

I had a win the other day where I talked to one of my customers and said, "Get reviews—get recent reviews." She sent me this text: "Got two new ones." I said, "Two reviews, I love it. Did you get three new orders today?" She replied, "Yes." These were pickup and delivery orders and wash and fold orders. She's a small business that's growing, and this works even with small businesses who aren't ranking super high organically yet.

SLIDE 9: The Ferrari Analogy

Analogy time, people! I love analogies. This is you—you're a laundromat owner, and you just got a brand new Ferrari. The same Ferrari that you might have seen at the Laundry CEO Forum. You just got your new Ferrari, and it's gorgeous. The technology is all there, the leather seats are beautiful. You hop in, press the button, and... it doesn't turn on. You get out and realize there's no gas in this car.

The reality is, it's the same with a laundromat. If you have the nicest laundromat in town with all the bells and whistles, but you're not putting gas in that car—meaning you're not getting reviews—you're not going to go very far.

SLIDE 10: Review Content Matters

Now let's talk about what really matters about reviews. You might be thinking, "Yeah, Brian, I get it—we want reviews. But what about reviews?"

The biggest, most important thing is the content inside the review. If you just have someone post a five-star review, that's good. But here's the thing: Google is smart. Have you guys ever heard of this thing called AI? Of course you have—everybody's heard about it at this point.

Google can now scan all the content in every single review, and they know exactly what each review says. So if you have a customer typing a review that says, "Oh my gosh, they're amazing. They do pickup and delivery service," Google knows this and will think, "Oh, they do pickup and delivery," and you can start ranking higher for pickup and delivery searches.

If you get every single person to leave a review that mentions "pickup and delivery," it'll help you rank higher for those terms. The content of the review is very important.

SLIDE 11: Pictures and Engagement

The other important factors:

Pictures: Please have your customers put pictures in reviews. This helps the system realize that this is an important review because there's something visual for people to look at. Instagram is all pictures and videos, right? Make sure people leave pictures because it's going to help you rank as well.

Likes: Your reviews can be liked now. Get people to like them—like them yourself. This is going to help you.

Respond to Reviews: Finally, respond to reviews. This shows Google that you're engaged and active.

SLIDE 12: Overall Review Rating

This one's really simple. If you're under a 4.5-star rating, you need to get more reviews. Get above 4.5 stars.

SLIDE 13: Overall Number of Reviews

One of the most important things you want to do is search your market and find all the laundromats around you. Figure out how many reviews they have. Are you 100 reviews short of the average? Is everybody at 250 and you're at 150? Catch up to them. This is also a huge ranking factor for Google.

SLIDE 14: Review Consistency - Most Important

People, this is the most important one. This is why it's at the top, and this is the core of everything: review consistency. What this means is really simple—are you and your team getting reviews every single week?

I call it "feeding the beast." The reality is that if you get, say, five to seven reviews every single week as a team, that's going to be huge for your business.

SLIDE 15: Case Study Introduction

Alright, let's bring up Sergey Nikiforov from Sun Beach Laundry. Everyone give him a round of applause. I'm going to brag about Sergey a little bit because there's a reason he's up here. He's a new owner—he's only been an owner for less than a year.

SLIDE 16: Sergey's Results

Here's what he's accomplished: In the last 90 days, he's gotten 57 reviews, and he's doubled his traffic year over year—117% increase since July of last year. He's absolutely crushing it.

INTERVIEW WITH SERGEY

Bryan: Sergey, when you first opened Sun Beach, what was the biggest challenge in getting customers to choose you over your competitors?

Sergey: We weren't online. We weren't active. When you searched for us, you wouldn't find us at all. The first thing I did was start listing us in directories—get on Yelp, update my Google Business Profile. Just get us out there. We didn't even have a website. Before I joined you guys, I spun up a quick website just to be out there like a real business. Those kinds of things gave us an initial boost, and then I started working more on reviews.

Bryan: I remember when we first connected and went over your growth. After having that first conversation about reviews, what got you motivated to say, "Hey, I'm going to go do this?"

Sergey: I use AI a lot—literally for everything. I started doing research on what would help with rankings and what to do. We were at about a third of the reviews that other laundromats in the area had. People were just passing us by. It kind of made me mad, to be honest, because we have a really good reputation locally in a small radius.

We have a geographic problem—we're on the beach, so we get half the radius that other laundromats get. I wanted to start reaching out to neighborhoods that were near us.

As a customer, I look at everything through a customer lens. Why am I going to choose this service? Reviews are something I look at, and I thought, "I really need to step up my game with reviews. I need to make us visible."

I started pushing our attendants. I'm not at the store at all, so I depend on my attendants for everything. I told them, "You guys have to get reviews. I'll give you this much money for this many reviews."

Like you mentioned before, keywords in reviews are huge. A lot of our loyal customers had never posted a review, but they had a rapport with the attendants. So I gave the attendants keywords that they should encourage customers to include: pickup and delivery, neighborhood names like Lighthouse Point and Pompano, laundry service—all these things that would help us rank for those keywords.

They were able to do it in a really short amount of time. We had a burst, then it trickled in, and now we're still getting a couple every week.

Bryan: Do you see a difference in terms of revenue and traffic?

Sergey: Oh, it's huge. When I first started doing the reviews in early July—July has historically been our worst month, and August is also pretty bad because we're seasonal—our July, for the first time ever, beat our June by about 20%.

I was like, "What? It works!" The impact was immediate. There were so many other things that came out of that too. Because of the keyword optimization I'd done, I've gotten other business opportunities and backlinks. Neighborhood publications reached out to me for features.

We went from a 4.6 rating with 70 reviews to a 4.8 rating with 131 reviews. I think we need about 25 more reviews to get to 4.9. We're going to be the highest-rated laundromat in the area.

I hear it from customers too. I get emails saying, "I'm a researcher. I looked through your reviews. I chose you because of the reviews." So it's working.

Bryan: When you respond to reviews, both positive and negative, what's your approach? How do you maintain professionalism while being authentic?

Sergey: Not going to lie, I use AI for it. I feed the reviews into AI and then adjust it so it doesn't sound robotic. Just responding is a good indicator for Google, but I don't think keywords in responses are a big ranking factor anymore.

We had a really old negative review. I replied saying, "Reach out to me. Let's see what we can do." The customer actually emailed me, and I'm still talking with her. I'm optimistic that if we get her back in, she'll change that review.

Bryan: Just a heads up—when you do get negative reviews, which is inevitable, if you have them reach out to you, they can always go back and update their review. I always suggest people do that and have a way for customers to contact them.

Bryan: Getting very specific and tactical, what's your process for getting reviews from customers?

Sergey: We use the texting feature. I have an older customer base who don't use computers much, so it's hard to get reviews from them through texts. But my demographic is changing because we've gotten more online presence, and I'm getting younger customers. So I am seeing traction from those texts.

As soon as an order is completed, I send them a text asking for a review if they enjoyed the service. I've gotten maybe five reviews from that—I don't know how long we've been running it, but it does work.

But really, the main thing is having your attendants ask for reviews. For me, that's been like a crazy high success rate. All our loyal customers have posted reviews.

Bryan: What surprised you most about the impact of focusing on online reviews?

Sergey: I had some commercial clients post reviews with a bunch of keywords for me. Literally a week after, I had a hotel reach out to me with an order that could completely transform my business. They had me put in a bid—we'll see if it goes through. I'm not even prepared to handle that much volume, honestly.

Like I said, we also had neighborhood feature articles come out, and that stuff is great for backlinks and your website.

SLIDE 17: How Cents Can Help - Accelerate

Thank you, Sergey. Now let me share how Cents can help with this process. We have three tools: one that's currently available called Accelerate, Reputation Management which is in beta, and a coming-soon tool called RAI Training.

Accelerate is an automated texting and email tool. You can set up campaigns to send out emails and texts automatically. You can really sit back, set it all up, and it'll automatically send review requests after every order is completed. It makes it simple so you can relax while it works. AI is integrated into it, and while it does other things, for this scenario, we're focusing on reviews.

SLIDE 18: Reputation Management

The next thing in beta right now is our Reputation Management tool. We've created the ability to have all your Google reviews and Yelp reviews aggregated in one spot inside of Cents. You can quickly see how you're performing and set up campaigns to get more reviews from there.

SLIDE 19: RAI Training

Here's a little secret—a lot of people from my team don't even know this is happening, so hopefully they're not watching. This is something I've developed myself, and we're going to put it on the Cents community.

This is called Review Acquisition Integration (RAI) Training. I'm taking the last 15 years of what I've learned in the small business industry and putting it into training focused on reviews.

What it will contain:

• Best practices and training for your attendants
• Printable templates (Canva-based) where you can insert your QR code and print them out
• Attendant review kits with items like lanyards with QR codes—I'll make it simple by providing links to order these on Amazon
• Review dispute training for handling fraudulent reviews or competitor interference
• The best free tools to use for review management and data analysis

It's all going to be part of Cents. It's free if you're already a Cents customer—doesn't matter if you have just one tool or the whole platform.

SLIDE 20: Partnership

We also have a partnership with Laundromat Boost. If you're thinking, "I don't want to touch any of this marketing stuff—I don't want to do any of it," and you're a Cents customer, you'll get a discount with them. On Monday, I'm actually interviewing Brett, their CEO, so feel free to connect with them and tell them I sent you.

SLIDE 21: Free Gifts

Remember those gifts I mentioned? If you want them, email me at bryan@trycents.com. Just put "free marketing gift" in the subject line along with your name, and I'll send you all three gifts.

SLIDE 22: Thank You

Thank you for coming! Give it up for Sergey one more time. If you have any questions, we're going to be here through Tuesday. Feel free to stop by, grab me, pick my brain, or just send me an email.

Q: When you like a review, does your name or email address show up anywhere?

A: Bryan: No, it doesn't. You're thinking about liking reviews as an owner? That's okay—like them. Google doesn't tell us their exact strategies, but from what I've seen, you want to like reviews and get other people to like them too. Get all your attendants to go in and like all the best reviews. If you have five attendants, make it their job to like every single review, or pick out the best ones with photos and lots of content and like those reviews so they go to the top.

Q: Is it going to help or hurt if I respond to negative reviews as the owner?

A: Bryan: Great question. From my experience, responding to negative reviews as an owner only helps. It lets people know that you're taking responsibility or at least addressing the issue. It's the PR side of review management. Use AI to help craft responses—I'm not great at writing either, so I use AI every day. Make sure to say something like, "Obviously, that's not our goal for you to have a bad experience. Feel free to reach out—we want to make it right."

Q: Should I like my own negative reviews if I'm responding to them?

A: Bryan: You can, but I wouldn't recommend it. I would just respond professionally and leave it alone. Don't have your staff like negative reviews either.

Q: What about getting rid of one-star reviews through services that claim they can remove them?

A: Bryan: There are companies that say they'll get rid of all your one-star reviews, and there are dispute tactics you can use. But Google doesn't really like that—they want authenticity. The best way to handle one-star reviews is to respond to them professionally and continue to get more and more positive reviews. In the RAI training, there will be information about legitimate dispute processes, but focus primarily on generating more positive reviews.

Q: How far back should I reply to old reviews?

A: Bryan: I would say yes, reply to them. There's no harm in it, and it helps Google know that you're engaged. When you do something on your Google Business Profile, it signals to Google that you're active, so I think it's a great idea.

Q: What's your preferred AI tool?

A: Bryan: That's going to be covered in the RAI training, but I'll give you one now. My preferred AI tool overall is Grok (G-R-O-K). I prefer that over ChatGPT.

Sergey: I'm a ChatGPT guy for research, Gemini for video generation, ChatGPT for image generation, but mostly ChatGPT. It's pretty good. I got the premium version—it's worth the 20 bucks.

Alright, well, we're going to wrap it up. Thank you guys for coming, and give Sergey one more round of applause. Thank you all!