When you search for a product or service that you can get locally you've most likely noticed the little side panel that pops up. These are Google My Business listings and they're the cornerstone of local SEO.

Good local SEO will make you stand out from the pack by placing you at the top of the results when someone makes a search for something they want to get locally.

You'll want to fill it out as completely as possible but the real value lies in the reviews that come in. These increase your SEO power, making you one of the three or four businesses that show up in the side panel before you get to the real search results.

It's a valuable position to put yourself in but you'll need two things: a good average rating and a lot of reviews to get there.

Soliciting reviews from customers is a good idea. You don't have to get overly complex, simply asking them to leave a review is often enough.

It's perfectly within Google's policies to ask your customers for reviews, they even suggest that you remind them to do so.

There are some limitations to this. For instance, if you're offering an incentive to your customers for good reviews and Google finds out you'll be in hot water.

Likewise the reviews are supposed to be real, you can't just have a bunch of people fill them in without ever having visited your business.

As long as you follow decent, ethical guidelines which Google suggests then you shouldn't have a problem with the reviews themselves. If your business is doing well and you're not offending customers on a regular basis then a higher star rating is easily accomplished.

On the other hand, there are a few areas where you may shoot yourself in the foot.

How you handle negative reviews is up to you. The only person who can quickly remove them is the reviewer themselves, which means that responding in a negative and overly harsh fashion will just make trouble.

Instead, the best practice is to offer to fix the problem and be polite about the affair no matter how scathing the review itself is.

Keep in mind that as your My Business page keeps growing you'll naturally get negative reviews. Some people are just hard to please but a couple of 1 or 2-star reviews in a flood of praise isn't going to hurt your average too much.

In the event of negative reviews, consider them a learning experience and don't obsess over them. Take a look at the complaint and as long as it's valid then you'll be able to see problems in your business that you might otherwise have ignored.

Positive reviews should also be responded to ASAP. Try not to boilerplate the message but at the very least you'll want to thank your customer for their kind review.

Trust us on this one: use a manager to handle complaints if you think you'll have trouble responding in a positive manner to negative reviews. It looks unprofessional at the least and in the worst cases they can even go viral.