Reviews have the ability to improve your website positioning in search engines, help the user decide to click pages and facilitate the sale of products or services . Therefore, online reviews are so critical to your link building or SEO on-page , among others.
An extract with the average of your scores and the total number of votes in the Google search results will appear, allowing the user to know the opinion of your customers about your business or a particular service or product. These snippets of reviews are available for local businesses, movies, books, music and other products and you can see them both organic results list and the record of Google My Business or Google Maps of the company in question.
From here, we will see how they affect reviews the decisions of today ‘s consumers, where you add them to your web positioning strategy, how to get them and how to manage to influence positively in the online reputation of your company. We started!
Let ‘s start with a damning fact: 90% of consumers stated that their purchasing decisions are influenced by online reviews or reviews from other users . So if your business does not already have a strategy to manage your online reputation and get good valuations, be clear that you can be losing many opportunities.
Before getting into specifics on how they use online consumers the reviews and how they impact their decision making, it is important to understand where they fit in the buying cycle of products or services.
Usually, when a user views the reviews, usually clear the product you need and is immersed in the process of selecting a business that meets your needs.
But how many consumers actually pay attention to the reviews? Approximately 85% of consumers say read online reviews. Being a bit more accurate, how many consult reviews before making a decision? Fortunately, there is also an answer to this question. The 67% of consumers read an average of 6 reviews before forming an opinion about a particular business.
This helps to understand from a consumer perspective how important the reviews to help guide their purchasing decisions for good or ill .
A consumer level, the reviews or reviews of other users are an invaluable source of reputation, thus acting as influencer of purchase decisions and are key to increasing sales of your business.
And we must not forget the principle of perception related to social proof , by which seek the support, endorsement of others to make decisions and trust what others tell us, even without knowing those people.
Search engines take into account the reviews for a very simple reason, so do consumers. They are responsible for providing the right people to help them make decisions about their future purchases information. The faster you can do, more consumers will turn to them again and again.
According to MOZ , online reviews account for 10% of how Google and other search engines decide to classify organic results . An assessment may not have a noticeable effect on your ranking in the short term, but over time and increased positive feedback from your customers, your ranking will increase significantly.
Reviews attract more visitors to your web, which makes your click through rate ( CTR ) increases. If the opinions of your customers are good, it is more likely that the user decides to go to your page to find out more about your business. An increase in CTR can increase conversions . And with a higher CTR and conversions, your ranking in Google also will benefit.
It is not always possible for a brand producing tons of new content, especially if this content is produced specifically for SEO purposes, but the search engines want to see activity on your site, so what is it that your brand can do to offer it ? Collect content generated by the user!
The consumer – generated content is a way to promote your site and your social media with unique content and effortless. This type of content shows that your site is valuable to clients that you serve. It also creates conversations between customers themselves.
The websites are optimized for search engines through a system of basic attributes such as keywords , titles , backlinks and internal links .
When it comes to reviews, customers who put them work for you as creators of links and keywords, so your SEO structure grows without you having to do anything.
In contrast to the elements highly competitive search keywords are specific long tail phrases with low competition search that are much easier to classify. The problem here is knowing what keywords are beneficial for your business.
Fortunately, when looking at the actual customer feedback and their writing, you can get an idea of what to use as your site keywords phrases. This also helps to optimize your brand message in social networks to use terms that your customers want to hear.
The social media optimization ( SMO ) is a form of optimization that deals specifically with social platforms. The user – generated content such as reviews help the SEO through SMO, as it often brings social activities : likes, comments or creating common threads as hashtags that point to your brand.
The social SEO relies heavily on user – generated content.
The algorithms of search engines automated using spiders that track customer product reviews and testimonials to evaluate a website.
In addition, human teams known as quality assessors evaluated manually search the reputation of a site, looking for aspects such as experience, authority and confidence, all of which are obtained through excellent customer content.
The content written by your customers provides credibility to your site in the eyes of Google robots and his team.
Therefore, you must be a vital part of any strategy for local SEO because the reviews and ratings can make it easier to emphasize the results of search engines.
Many people have the misconception that the bad reviews hurt your website rankings. Actually, you are not penalized in terms of SEO. Google knows that nobody is perfect, and that even the best sites can get negative reviews. Maybe even someone of competition has left a bad rating on your site to try to diminish your reputation online.
Reviewers team Google takes into account the aggregate of your reviews more than just a negative assessment. So that Google does not penalize sites that receive negative reviews if there is more content confirming its reputation.
As I mentioned at the beginning, it is important to have a strategic plan to manage the different reviews you receive your website. You can start including these three basic actions:
The vast majority of them will not say no, and if they have given good service. Remind the end of each purchase or passing through your space reviews, or reviews to discuss their personal experience.
Whether positive or negative, do not leave any unanswered. It is important to show near and to show users that their opinions actually taken into account and valued. Appreciates the comment and fail to indicate the service for which you obtained the review. So your prospects will clear the area in which they excel. If the reviews are negative, you treat them with courtesy and respect and try to offer solutions.
If any of valuations does not meet policy reviews Google, let them know. Google lets you mark them as inadequate if they are spam, add information not permitted, disrespected. But beware! You should not make all the negative reviews as inadequate.
More and more users and potential customers take into account the opinions of other consumers when buying online. It is important to encourage your customers to leave comments. To avoid inappropriate reviews, teach them how to write reviews on Google , explaining:
That’s all for today’s article. I hope you found it useful and you start today to work on your reputation through reviews by Google and social networks.
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About the Author
Mariana panunto
Department of social networks and web positioning Aeuroweb .