Online reviews can build or break a business. Yet they are a valuable asset for every business. Smart entrepreneurs use online reviews to derive actionable insights for their business. Every business needs to know its customers and their expectations in order to build its brand further.
Importance of Online Reviews
If you’re still wondering about the “Why”, here’s some context.
- 82% of consumers read online reviews before purchasing a product.
- Good reviews drive more revenue. Products with a 5-star rating sell 126x more than products with a 4-star rating.
- SEO experts say good reviews are one of the top-ranking factors.
Reviews can be an extremely powerful tool for attracting new customers. They also help you better understand your target market, their wants, and what improvements you can make.
Let’s look into some of the great things that online reviews can do for your business:
1. Build Credibility
Customer reviews impact revenue generation to a considerable extent. The more reviews you have for your products and services, the more credible your business appears to the customers.
2. Contribute to your Digital Portfolio
Online reviews will help build your online portfolio so that you can get new leads. Essentially, online reviews act as a testimonial that you can portray to your future clients. This will help you to convince your clients that your products and services will be valuable to them. And it goes without saying online reviews help you to establish a strong brand identity.
3. Improve Online Visibility
According to research by Bright Local, around 82 percent of customers check out online reviews before investing in the products and services.
Hence, the more reviews your brand has, the more eyes you catch. This means better online visibility for you.
4. Boosts SEO
If you think that the use of keywords and optimized alt tags can get you the targeted traffic and make your website Google-friendly, you are wrong. According to a local search factors survey by Moz, review signals contribute 15 percent of Google local pack ranking factors.
Customer reviews have become an integral part of SEO. Customer feedback adds more keywords naturally. Thus your customers act as your content creators by adding keywords through their reviews, and this process improves the search engine rankings.
5. Increase Interaction
By responding to the reviews that clients leave for your business you can improve your website’s interaction. Responding to reviews also indicates that you genuinely care for your customers. This customer-centric approach can take your business to new heights.
6. Research and Development
Listening to your customers and interacting with them over reviews can help you gauge their needs. When you take these insights into consideration you have data for your R&D team. Say you are a company manufacturing and selling audio devices. Listening to reviews you understand that the ear-pieces in most headphones are malfunctioning. There is clearly room for improvement.
How to Find Useful and Relevant Reviews?
Hearing positive reviews is the dream of every entrepreneur. But, getting positive reviews may not be a cakewalk. You may need to revamp your business strategies if you want positive reviews for your business. And in order to revise your product, service or your business strategy you need to know the goal. Listening to real-time feedback can help you with that. How do you track these feedbacks?
Google Reviews
The simplest way to look for reviews for your brand is through Google. Perform a search for your brand name on Google and customer reviews show up.
This is a free service. However, there are limitations attached. Google records reviews by customers who actually come to your Google Business page and leave it there. You need a more 360-degree approach.
Social Listening
Social listening services like Auris can help you listen to every mention, every review your clients leave for you even if they don’t tag you officially.
With social listening, tracking reviews don’t stop there. The tool runs a complete analysis of the data acquired from different sources. It tells you about your pain points, audience sentiments, areas of improvement, your SOV, SOE, and much more.
When you track reviews, analyze and take action it goes to show you care for your customers. This can help you build a loyal customer base and more. The raving fan reviews on your web page can do great things for your business. And we hope you get positive user reviews for your business following the tips here.