Business owners may take reviews for granted, but that doesn’t make them any less important. They are so important, in fact, that most people trust online reviews just as much as they would trust a word-of-mouth recommendation from a friend or family member. Here are five reasons that reviews from websites such as Google Reviews and TripAdvisor can be so important for a business.
- Reviews Encourage More Click-Throughs
It’s not enough to appear high in search results. You need customers to actually click through your results. Having a few reviews to your name encourages people to click through and will generate more traffic for your website. All you need is a rating of three stars or above and you can look forward to more potential business.
Negative reviews can decrease click-through rates, of course, but there’s no denying the power of positivity.
- Use Customer Feedback to Improve Business Services
Reviews – both positive and negative – offer you the chance to improve your business and services. If you have been getting a lot of negative reviews then go through them. See what customers are complaining about and aim to resolve the issue. If reviews mention particular employees, for example, then you can dedicate resources to training them if need be. Reviews give you an outside look at your business and can show you things that you might have missed yourself.
- Reviews Boost Sales
One of the key benefits of reviews is that they encourage sales and can boost your bottom line. Most people have easy access to the internet, so that’s where they go to check for product reviews. Customers generally go through a stage where they are aware of what they want and the options they have. They make their ultimate decision based on reviews and opinions of those options. With a lot of positive reviews for your business to hand, they’ll be more incentivized to use you for their ultimate purchase. People want to buy products that other people have tried and had success with. It’s as simple as that.
- Reviews Boost SEO
Having good business reviews improves your ranking with organic search results. As the name of your brand is mentioned several times in reviews, it becomes more relevant for search engines and their results. Reviews are factored into the search engine algorithm as a form of unique content, which bots have an easier time crawling through and indexing. The more indexable a website is, the better it ranks in the results.
- Reviews Spread Brand Awareness
You can consider reviews to be a marketing tool because they encourage people to leave their own reviews. When someone leaves a review it encourages others to leave their own. By having reviews spread across different platforms, it puts your name all across the internet. More people will be aware of your brand and they help people to identify your brand as being trustworthy (or not, depending on the nature of the review). It helps if you display some of the best reviews on your website as testimonials to better spread this awareness.
Don’t Be Afraid to Ask
Lots of businesses understand the need for reviews, but they aren’t sure how to go about getting them. It could be as simple as just asking them for reviews. Satisfied customers will be more than happy to leave a review. They might just need a little prompting to do it first. You should be open and transparent towards feedback and respond as appropriate to get the very best out of business reviews.
