In case you haven’t been paying attention, it is important for you to get reviews on Google. It doesn’t matter your area of practice or service, you simply need to be requesting and capturing more reviews for your business. No other area is this more important than in one niche that we specialize in which is lawyer marketing. I want to quickly show you why it is so important to start getting positive reviews online.

Before we start, we randomly chose a city in Maryland and started looking for DUI lawyers. We do not have any clients in this particular city, and have no affiliation with the company we found. We just are simply sharing an example so you can see the importance of getting this aspect of your business correct.

It All Starts With A Google Search For DUI Lawyer “City”

We started our investigation on our mobile phone. I use an iPhone, and started looking for Ellicott City DUI Lawyer. Here is the result I see on my phone…

You can see my search at the top, and then even on mobile, you can see how Google pays their bills displaying three paid advertisers at the top of the page. If we go a little further, we can see the Maps listing which is what we want to focus on in this post. Here we have a list of four attorneys that are listed in the maps portion on a mobile device. You will see that the top position has a little green “Ad” next to it, which means this particular law firm is paying to have their business listed at the top of the results.

What I really want you to pay attention to is the listings below, with the star ratings. Do you see how the Willis Law Firm has no stars or reviews next to their name? Again, no affiliation, just using this for example purposes. Although they are showing up in the maps, they are missing a key component that will help them rank in our next exercise.

This Is What We Want You To Understand

Once I clicked on the little Top Rated Icon, it removed every single attorney in the area that has less than 4 stars on Google. Our example law firm Willis Law Firm completely disappeared from the search results. See below.

As you can see, the search results changed, an our example attorney completely disappeared. This particular law firm doesn’t have any bad reviews, they just don’t have any which caused them to disappear from the search results. You may be wondering if this will impact business for this particular lawyer, and the easy answer is Yes! If you focus your lawyer marketing efforts on getting into the top 3 results of Maps, and then miss a key component in conversions, you are going to miss out on a ton of new business.

It Started on Mobile And Transitioned To Desktop Maps

Around March we started noticing this on mobile search results, now we are seeing it happen all the time on desktop results. Take this same search on desktop, and look at the icon above the results – Rating – that allows you to search by ratings. Our example attorney is showing in our initial results, but disappears when we sort by ratings.

Here are the results with a 4.0 Star Rating Or Higher

So What Does All Of This Mean To You?

Ok, there are a lot of images on this post, and I did my best to try and show why ratings are so important. The bottom line is you need to have at least one 4 Star review or higher to show up in the highest rated results. We recommend having a minimum of 5 for several reasons. There are numerous benefits associated with 5, and it will help future proof your business for expected changes in Google.

You can start reaching out to past clients today and asking them for reviews on Google. Encourage those you have worked with to write a few things about you and the service you provide. If you are able to capture just two a month, you will be at five in no time and you will show up in the search results the vast majority of the time. If you want to have someone else handle the heavy lifting, we are happy to help. A large portion of our business model involves online marketing for DUI attorneys and criminal lawyers, so we would love to analyze your site and explain exactly what we can do for you.