Your online reviews count so encourage your clients to review you

It’s no secret that online reviews can be significant, but just how significant are they? Firstly, ask yourself, when buying a new product or booking a hotel do you check the reviews before any purchase? And if you couldn’t find any reviews or they reflect in a negative way you’d be hesitant to make this purchase or booking.

Why is it important?

It’s a well-known fact that word of mouth is one of the best marketing tools that money can’t buy. In this case, your reviews are that word of mouth. Reviews are now plastered across nearly every platform, therefore it is quite common for today’s potential consumers to look at reviews across all platforms to try and gain a better sense of your brand before any purchases.

In consideration to BrightLocal statistics, 90% of consumers read online reviews and 88% trust online reviews. So really if you’re ignoring this marketing opportunity, according to Forbes you’re actually alienating a large majority of your buying population, just by depriving them of information they want to help make their buying decisions. For potential consumers, being able to see your businesses’ reviews presents great brand validation and gives customers the reassurance and incentive to try your products or services.

Benefits

Reviews give consumers more trust and more incentive to make purchases. Online reviews act like a personal recommendation and can help to build your reputation and customer base, solidifying what you’re saying about your business and pushing them over the fence try you out. Furthermore, with the implementation of customer reviews on your site it can have a positive effect on organic search rankings. Google has taken notice of the dependency shoppers place on reviews, and they have now ranked the reviewed sites more favourably.

How to encourage reviews

You want to make it easy for customers to leave reviews, so it’s worth considering to include an obvious and user friendly form within your website for consumers to utilise. On top of this, acquire reviews through Google My Business and your Facebook page by asking clients to review you. However be careful, customers simply writing a review is an acceptable practice, but asking for a review with a specific angle or agenda is wrong and something you should always avoid, along with buying reviews!

By now you should have a brief understanding as to the importance of reviews. If you need help optimizing your site for reviews, speak to the team at Matter.