Have you taken the time to gather customer reviews from your past customers? If not, it’s time to start doing so.
According to Bright Local, 82% of local consumers read online reviews. Only 53% of online users would consider businesses with less than 4 stars.
Reviews are powerfully influencing your Google rankings and conversions. Curious how it works? Here are some concepts.
Your chance of standing out on top search results lies in the number of good reviews you get from your customers and partners. Lesser reviews, lower rankings. If you have a good number of reviews and it’s more than what your competitors have, you are ahead of the game.
Reviews may contain keywords that may refer specifically to your brand name, products, or services. In addition, they will contain adjectives that speak of their experience. If you’re lucky, they will also post great pictures! Definitely, you’d aim to see positive experiences from your customers like “awesome”, “best”, “great”, and etc. But it is also a reality to see the not-so-good ones. These words are all captured by Google which influences your overall ranking.
Note that who reviews you carries a certain amount of influence which can affect the quality of the review and the purchase-decision-making of others.
Your organic reviews are not only confined to Google. In fact, it is one of the best practices to earn reviews (and even citations) from other websites. The more reviews you gain, the easier it is for your new or returning customers to make decisions on their purchase from you.
Just like contents on your web pages, your reviews should be fresh. Recent reviews (not less than 3 months) are considered relevant by new or returning customers. If you get the latest good reviews on a certain product for a number of times, this tells that your product or service is becoming people’s choice and is worthy to be recommended.
This is the first noticeable thing and greatly considered by your customers. Many move forward to reading the content of your reviews once they see 4 or 5-star ratings.
Now you know what you need to check on your customer reviews, you need to know where to get them and how to use them for greater optimization. Aside from direct reviews from your Google My Business Page, you can get more from third-party sites like Consumer Directories (e.g. Yelp, TripAdvisor, etc), Industry-Specific Reviews (blogs, featured articles like Top 10 lists), and Critic Reviews (can be also found in Google).
When customers are overwhelmingly satisfied by your product and service, they will automatically leave generous reviews about you even if you are not asking. However, this is not the case for all. According to Bright Local, 67% of customers are being asked to leave reviews in which 24% of them are being rewarded with discounts, gifts, or rebates in return.
So, if you don’t have any recent reviews yet, you may want to think of asking your current customer to give you some love by leaving you with reviews. If you can, be ready to give them some treats! Consider this as part of your customer retention too!
