Reviews summarize a customer’s experience with a product, service, or other online resources. They empower consumers because they guide consumer choices by making due diligence on businesses easier, preventing losses and bad experiences.
According to one survey, 81% of consumers begin their purchase journey by reading online reviews as part of their brand/product research. Consequently, one-stop-shop business solution companies like a1corp.com.sg offer customer service packages to help businesses respond appropriately to consumer reviews.
Are consumer reviews worth such attention? Yes. Below are the top reasons why you should pay attention to consumer reviews.
Customer Reviews Are A Ranking Factor For SEO
According to one survey report, 71% of small businesses have a website. The ever-growing number of businesses working to establish an online presence and sell their products makes Search engine optimization (SEO) more crucial for businesses than ever before.
SEO enhances your website’s content (copy, graphics, audio, software, self-help, self-service resources), navigability, and page speed to improve its discoverability. Search engine bots crawl through web pages and rank content according to relevant keywords; a higher ranking increases your organic discoverability against a set of keywords.
Besides on-page SEO, off-page and technical SEO elements also affect a website’s performance. The magnitude of work that goes into SEO is massive and often requires technical knowledge.
However, one study shows that consumer reviews are a significant ranking factor for SEO. According to the study, businesses with a high average number of reviews outperformed those with lower local listings review average.
So, how does this information help your business? Gathering customer reviews is the most straightforward SEO strategy to implement. All you need to do is ask consumers tactfully, and you shall receive reviews. Moreover, online marketing tools like email marketing makes it easy to reach multiple consumers at a go.
Second, as stated above, reviews affect local business listings. Therefore, consider creating business accounts on third-party review platforms like Google Business Profiles and encourage your consumers to leave reviews. Such reviews will improve your business’s ranking in local search listings, attracting more customers.
Reviews Improve Local Listings Ranking
While reviews are crucial to purchase decisions, most consumers skim through reviews rather than reading everything. Reading every review posted alongside a product, service, or brand will take you copious amounts of time.
Unless when researching specific product information, most consumers only view a listed product or brand’s star rating before deciding to read reviews. For some consumers, the star rating on a business’s profile or review platforms is enough to make a decision. According to one study, a high star rating on Google can improve a website’s click-through rates by up to 35%.
Moreover, search engine algorithms favor pages with higher star ratings over those with lower star ratings. However, the algorithm also considers review quantity; hence a business with five bad reviews and 95 positive ones will rank better than one with only five good reviews. Therefore, reviews affect star ratings and determine your visibility to local audiences.
They Allow You To Demonstrate Trustworthiness
Businesses expect positive reviews from consumers because such reviews position a brand as trustworthy. Moreover, some businesses pin their best reviews, giving such posts prominence on their social media pages and websites.
However, bad reviews will appear on your page now and then. A bad review lowers your star rating, inadvertently lowering your local listings ranking. Consequently, some businesses delete bad reviews to avoid tainting their brand image.
Deleting negative reviews is a temporary solution that will only validate the negative review. However, businesses that approach negative reviews proactively appear more authentic and genuine to consumers.
Therefore, consider reaching out to consumers who leave negative reviews, listen to them, apologize for negative experiences, and give recourse to a reasonable degree. Moreover, consumers who have their unpleasant experiences addressed often edit their reviews to credit the business or brand. Such displays of genuine concern and additional value help to build trust in the affected consumer, and the thousands of others reading the review thread. However, feel free to flag reviews containing false information.
Reviews Offer Insights Into Consumer Experiences
Customer reviews are a valuable source of consumer insights, helping businesses to improve their product or streamline their operational model. Consumers may generally give positive reviews but highlight areas of improvement within the same post. For example, they can say that they enjoyed a product but that it arrived somewhat late or they encountered a challenge during checkout.
Businesses that pay attention to consumer concerns and implement changes accordingly improve a consumer’s overall experience. Moreover, unlike online marketing insight tools, whereby you monitor consumer behavior and attempt to establish their motivations, consumer reviews take the guesswork out of analytics. They categorically communicate your consumers’ needs and the bottlenecks they face in the purchasing funnel.
Consumer Reviews Facilitate Customer Engagement
Customer engagement is crucial to strengthening the relationship with your target audience and building brand loyalty. It shows consumers that they mean more than fleeting transactions to your brand.
Moreover, engaging with consumers humanizes your brand, helping it appear relatable to potential consumers. Second, engagement promotes the creation of user-generated content, reducing your content creation burden.
Conclusion:
ustomer reviews are crucial to your business’s performance because more people trust them as much as they trust word-of-mouth recommendations. Therefore, every business with an online presence should create and implement a customer review generation strategy. Moreover, they should learn how to handle reviews to reap benefits from a high review volume.
Abhishek