The Importance of Online Reviews

Word of mouth, social proof, or in other words – popularity – has always been a key success in business. Today that involves online reviews.  

Today’s consumers depend on online reviews the way your parents depended on a friend’s recommendation. According to Moz, 67% of consumers are influenced by positive reviews.  

A study in 2014 found that 88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. The study also found that 72% of consumers say that positive reviews improve the trustworthiness of a local business. Based on this information, it’s obvious positive reviews can bring customers to your business ready and willing to buy.  

How Online Reviews Help Your Business  

Making positive information about your business available online isn’t the only benefit of reviews. Here are ways reviews are crucial to your business’ success.  

Reviews Can Increase Sales

With the internet readily available for everyone to use, people usually flock to sites that offer complete reviews before they buy a product. Often called as touch points, many customers go through the stage where they’re fully aware of the options available for them in the market and are often at the verge of their purchase decisions. With the help of reviews, they often decide as to which brands or products to go for. Seeing many positive reviews about your brand often leads to an increase in sales.  

To help nurture and promote such an environment, having your company focus on great product and equality great service will result in a great experience and gather in more positive reviews. This makes sense because they would want to know how good the product is from someone who has bought it first hand before they buy it themselves. Having a good review on your product will boost up your conversion rates which will translate to more sales. The better reviews your products have, the more likely you will have customers who are interested in buying your products.  

Reviews Can Build Your Credibility

Aside from sales; your business also needs credibility in order to sustain long-term growth. Even if you have a lot of customers in the first quarter, your company needs credibility and integrity to sustain those customers. Many online reviews can help build up your credibility because people will see nothing but positive words about your brand.  

Now, an issue here would be what if you have a bad review. The question here would be whether that bad review will affect your credibility or not. This is the reason why you’ll need a lot of good reviews. Once the good reviews have already built up your credibility, one or two bad reviews aren’t really going to hurt you that bad because you have already established credibility. However, this does not mean that you should just ignore the bad review. It is recommended that you address the problem right away so that you can show the public that your company does have good customer service and treasures its clients.  

Reviews Can Improve Search Engine Optimization

Good reviews help your business rank, especially with organic search results. Since your brand will be mentioned quite a lot in reviews, your brand will become more relevant in the search engine results. Reviews will be considered by the search engine as unique content already and unique content has more crawlability to the search engine bots. When the content becomes more indexable, then it will gain a better ranking in the search engines.  

Reviews Can Drive Traffic To Your Website

Reviews can help bring your customers to your website. If a reader is reading a review of your product and is now interested to buy it, the next step would be to look for where they can buy your product. There are some product or service review websites that would link the product or service review directly to the main site. This is to allow interested parties to go directly to the product or service providers’ website so that the readers don’t have to search for them anymore. 

Reviews Can Help You Spread Your Brand

Reviews can also be used as a marketing tool in the sense that it can encourage the creation of even more reviews. Think of it as a viral type of thing where one review will lead to many more people leaving reviews. When a lot of people write reviews on different platforms, then your brand name will inevitably spread. With your brand name spreading in a good way, you will be getting free marketing from your satisfied customers. This will not only build awareness of your products or services but loyalty as well since your reviews will show that your brand has good credibility.  

Reviews, since they come from the sentiments of the customer, will play a big role in whether your brand will be recognized as trustworthy and reliable or not. It also helps if your brand would appear in credible websites that post reviews. To get started, your business should have your own website to help showcase the reviews and testimonials from your customers. Furthermore, becoming proactive in monitoring the sentiments about your brand on social media is just as equally important.  

Ask For Online Reviews

As a business, it does pay to make sure that you showcase your good reviews. The best way to get good reviews is to simply make sure that your product is good and that your customer service is equally good. Your satisfied customers will help spread the word about the experience they’ve had from your brand. If they don’t do so right away, feel free to ask them for a review. Many customers are willing to review your product, especially if they’ve had a positive experience. Being transparent and open to feedback allows your business to improve and flourish as you will have direct feedback from people who care about your brand. Showing you care about your customers will help them develop the trust and loyalty that many companies and brands are vying for.