I have been freelancing off and on for about 9 years now, SEO and Google are always things that come up in every project I take on. I have never claimed to be a search engine guru, a growth hacker or a search ninja, I usually do a list of small things and pitch a few strategies depending on the industry and my clients needs. I have had some success and some failure but out of all the projects I have done only one involved 3-4 cases of wine and ended up with my client on page one after 60 day.
The Client
Around 2015 I got a client referral from a previous client for a couple who were looking at opening a high end salon in downtown Tacoma, Washington. The couple wanted everything, a logo, branding, stationery, website and marketing the whole package and preferred to stick to one person to handle it all.
After a short trip to Seattle, a few drinks and a killer presentation I won the project and got to work.
Competing in Local SEO
Fast forward about 13 months and we are done with everything and the site has been launched for a few months. Having used 95% of our hours on the essentials like branding and web development, the client did not have much room for online marketing and search engine optimization. The competition for local SEO was pretty rough with about 10 other salons within 2 miles of Downtown Tacoma. All these salons had a relatively healthy backlink profile that would have taken 6-12 months to compete with.
By this time it was around 2016 and Google was just starting to introduce nearby map results into their search algorithm which was very much under utilized. I saw this as the quickest way for us to hit first page for dozens of the clients top search terms but we would stll need to amas lots of natural reviews in order to do this.
Hacking Google Reviews with free wine
After a lengthy discussion with the client about local search, how it works and the new local review functionality an idea came to mind that was a little unorthodox. I asked the client
“Would you be willing to buy a few boxes of wine? I think I have an idea”
Thank god some of my clients are open to my crazy ideas because it would be incredibly easy to brush them off as completely insane. The pitch was that the client would make a “Spinning” prize wheel, a smaller less cool version of the one on Wheel of Fortune. On the wheel they would include “5% Off, 10% Off and Free Wine!”, it was agreed on that the salons primary demographic would love free wine. The idea was that every client got an opportunity to spin the wine wheel after leaving a Google review, the 5% and 10% coupons were great to get returning customers and the bottle of wine pushed people to actually do the review right then and there before spinning.
The outcome
Having some experience in marketing focused around giveaways I knew this would work but I did not expect it to work so well. Within 2 months the client had 90% of their first time customers leaving reviews which resulted in them having 72 4-5 star reviews in the first 60 days of the campaign. This jumped them to the top 3 hair salons being displayed in the local results for a dozen of our target keywords.
The client just recently opened a second location and is implementing the same strategy.
