You’ve got your Google Business profile set up, and it’s looking good! You’ve even gotten some reviews from clients who are so happy with your work, that their words practically glow in the dark.
Google is still the most powerful search engine for any real estate agent’s business. And Google Reviews (specifically the positive ones) add to your credibility with consumers.
But while it’s definitely important to keep those reviews coming in, it’s even more important to respond to them—not only to show appreciation to your clients but to maximize your visibility.
You could just keep it simple and write a quick, “Thank you for your comment, you were great, blah, blah, blah.” Or you could include SEO keywords that Google can use to make sure more of your target audience sees your profile and what you can do for them.
Here’s where an AI tool like ChatGPT or Jasper comes in. Both tools can get you started with a review that sounds both warm and professional.
And both know exactly what to do with SEO keywords.
After all, we love getting thoughtful reviews from clients we’ve enjoyed serving. Those always feel good to read. But sometimes, those good feelings can actually make it more difficult to write a response.
Sometimes, all you need are a few sentences you can then modify to make them sound more like you. Add a few things that ChatGPT probably wouldn’t say (because they haven’t had the experience you had with this client), and you have a response that’s SEO-friendly, and that communicates how grateful you are for the opportunity of serving that client.
These tools can save you tons of time—time you might otherwise spend agonizing over each sentence. They can also help you grow your business faster than ever.
Make your response searchable
We are big on packing our Google review responses with SEO keywords. Using ChatGPT or Jasper.ai, we craft responses using keywords like “the city of the transaction” “buy a home” “sell a home” and “first-time home buyer.”
You can use ChatGPT to research keywords, or you can use Google Keyword Planner or a paid service like Semrush for keyword analytics. Including such terms will help Google and other search engines to pick up on your response.
Review diversity, review recency, and review quantity are all signals that are taken into account by Google’s search algorithm.
Google wants you to respond to reviews
Look up Google Business, and you’ll find a few different pages where Google explicitly tells businesses to “reply to reviews to build customer trust.”
Put yourself in the reviewer’s place. They want you to know how much they appreciate the work you did for them and all the time and energy you invested in getting them the results they wanted.
They also want to know that you appreciate them—and the time they’re taking out of their day to leave this review telling the world how great you are.
Here are a few examples of review responses from our own Google Business profile. We bet you can’t tell what parts of each review were AI and which were from us. That’s some AI-human teamwork. Bye-bye, blank text field. AI at least gives you something to work with.
And if you’re asking the AI to include specific SEO keywords—or asking it to include keywords specific to the real estate industry—you’ll also have a response that helps Google present your profile to more of your intended audience.
Chat prompts to use
If you’re wondering just how to get ChatGPT or Jasper or any other AI copywriting tool to generate a response to a business review, try any of these:
- “Write an SEO-optimized response to this Google business review: “ [Paste text of review here].”
- “Write a response to this Google business review: “[Paste text of review here].” Include the following keywords: [add keywords, here—separated by commas].
For practice, you can even type in a review of your own for a business you’ve patronized recently and see what kind of response your AI tool of choice comes up with.
You can even add a note to “Use a tone that’s playful//maternal/professional or whatever comes to mind just to see what you get. And if the response is too long, you can always add the AI to “write it again but make it shorter.”
Writing responses to reviews will never be the same again. And that could be a good thing.
