Solar installers: your reviews are hurting you

▶ 0:00Solar installers, your reviews suck. Okay, today's going to be a bit of a rant. 86% of you said that out of all of the content types, you'd rather I just get on here and throw some shade and basically say what not to do as opposed to what to do. So we're going to start with that. Stop treating your reviews on your website as a checkbox exercise. Now, when I first decided that I wanted to specialize in helping solar installers with their marketing and demand generation, I did a bit of an exercise. I went through 100, 200 websites.

▶ 0:29Both in the UK, US, everywhere. And I basically assessed what I liked about them, what I didn't like about them. Out of those websites, there was maybe five that I actually thought, you know, someone has put a lot of care, time and attention into this website. I would say as high as 90% of them have a testimonial or reviews module, something like this, which is basically a wall of text with no avatar or image of the customer themselves, no reference to any sort of case study or project or gallery image no source of where the review came from so it could very easily just be typed into the website and overall they just look terrible and no one really believes them no one trusts them the whole point of reviews is that they're there to build social

▶ 1:16proof and trust and these do not fulfill that purpose so instead of treating this like oh yeah I've got reviews on my website tick done no they're not working they're not actually helping you and even the biggest companies like eon are doing this sometimes I mean granted they've got a trust pilot module higher up on the page which is much better but still there's so many improvements to be made so what is so bad about these reviews so first of all they could very easily be completely hand typed or made up and consumers are smart enough to know that secondly they don't link out to or reference the original source of the review so whenever you reference a google review or a trust pilot review especially you should be able to click that and go to the original source because

▶ 1:56then the visitor knows that you can't have tampered with that review whereas if you've just written it into the website you could very easily change a line you could remove a line you could also just choose which ones to show in the first place so it looks like you've got a wall of five star reviews when in reality half of them are one star and you've just excluded them from the site many of them don't actually feature customer names they're literally untraceable and you can't relate at all the ones that do feature customer names definitely don't feature a photo of the customer so if i'm looking at a review i'm reading it i want to be able to relate to that person's experience that's the whole point of a review it is someone basically giving in essence a referral for

▶ 2:32the quality of the work that you did or the value of your service if i can't relate to that person because i don't know their name i don't i can't see a picture of them so i can't bring any kind of similarities between myself and that person and there's no image of their home or the installation itself so i can't think oh well that home's quite similar to mine maybe i'd get a similar result how on earth if you've got something like this are you ever going to compete with our clients that have got something like this we call it the wall of love and each of these reviews feeds the avatar through from google or trust pilot it has the source that is clickable so you can go through to the original review and it has all of the video reviews that we collect for our customers as well

▶ 3:12weaved in throughout the page go onto infinite energies website go to their wall of love and just scroll through that page and tell me that you are not convinced entirely that infinite energy do fantastic work and that's the whole purpose of these video reviews and the reviews more generally and of course we can weave these throughout the site in loads of different ways this is a carousel that goes from right to left when you actually make an inquiry through the website you go to a thank you page you see even more social proof you're prompted to call up the business as opposed to just wait for a response and it's only a matter of time before this is actually mandatory so we're working with a client

▶ 3:46that's got an evps accreditation they've actually said to them that their old website the one before we came on board was not compliant with the accreditation because it didn't show the source of the original review and it has to show the source and ideally have a link through to that original review so that it can be proven so sooner or later mcs hike etc they're all going to be coming for you to do this anyway so why not actually get ahead of the crowd and do this first when it's a differentiator as opposed to a necessity if you want to get a copy of this document then go to the link that is somewhere in this post or the comment section and if you want the implementation of everything that we talk about

▶ 4:21in all of our content then go through that same link it's going to ask you some questions about your business residential commercial split how many installs a month if you're running ads currently what you're spending on those ads all of that good stuff so that we can identify if you're qualified to work with us at which point you can book a call with myself and we'll see what we can do thanks for your time and hope that was useful