Can Exchanging Reviews With Other Lawyers Help You Get More Clients
The question:
Do you recommend exchanging reviews with other lawyers?
My answer:
Yes and no, so you’ve got to be really careful with this. I actually saw somebody posting in the lawyer marketing Facebook group a few weeks ago. They were saying let’s get a thread going where we all exchange reviews with one another.
Be careful about review exchanges
I think that it’s okay if you’re in the same city because you got to remember Google looks at a lot of different things and one of the things that they look at is IP address locations.
They know that if you’re a law firm that works locally, like a family lawyer or a DUI attorney, the majority of your clients are going to be local to the area that you’re in.
If you start getting a lot of reviews from all over the country then it’s pretty obvious that they’re not real. One thing that will happen is that the reviews will start getting flagged and they’ll start getting deleted. In a worst case scenario, your Google My Business profile could actually get shut down.
Focus on trading reviews locally
If you’re talking about actually trading reviews with other attorneys in your city, I don’t have a problem with that. A lot of times you can do that with attorneys. You can also do it with family members and with friends. In fact, you can do with anybody even if they’re not clients.
How to word the reviews
Just don’t have anyone lie about what you did for them. They could say something like Bill Smith is a great attorney. If I was ever arrested for DUI in wherever you live, he’s the first person I would call. They don’t have to say he represented me or stuff like that but it’s still a good character review.
That is how I would exchange reviews. Just make sure that the attorneys that you’re exchanging reviews with are local to your area. That’s because you don’t want to get dinged for having reviews that are coming from all over the place. It’s just not a good idea and it could put your Google My Business profile in jeopardy.
