North Korea Signals It May Resume Nuclear Testing, Prepare For 'Long-Term Confrontation' With The U.S.
Majority Of Mysterious 'Havana Syndrome' Cases Not Linked To Hostile Foreign Power, CIA Finds
Senate Democrats Fail To Advance Voting Rights Bill — And Fall Short Of Changing Filibuster
Antibiotic Resistance Killed 1.2 Million People In 2019, Study Finds, A Leading Cause Of Death
Biden Still Thinks 'Big Chunks' Of Massive Social Spending Bill Can Pass This Year
CDC: Prior Covid Infection Offered More Protection Against Delta Than Vaccines — But Both Together Did Best
Supreme Skirmish Squashed: Justices Deny Report Claiming Gorsuch Refused Request By Sotomayor To Wear Mask
Advice For Young Engineers: Nothing You Learn Goes To Waste
How To Increase Search Rankings And Conversions With Customer Ratings And Reviews
Forbes Councils Member
Forbes Agency Council
COUNCIL POST
Expertise from Forbes Councils members, operated under license. Opinions expressed are those of the author.
| Membership (fee-based)
Loren Baker is the Founder of Search Engine Journal, as well as Foundation Digital, a full service Digital Marketing Agency.
Business owners sometimes complain about the accuracy of online ratings and reviews. But no matter how the angle swings on this feedback for your business, user ratings and reviews have a significant impact on sales. They are a critical part of whether a buyer decides to make a purchase or not.
According to research, 85% of online consumers trust online reviews on the same level as personal recommendations from friends and family. Likewise, additional research shows a 166% increase in sales conversion when ratings and user-generated content are integrated into the online shopping experience. Not bad, right?
Not only do ratings and reviews determine purchasing habits, they also affect a businesses' search engine results.
Below is more information about how online reviews work with search engines, and also how you can integrate them into your site to better influence conversion rate and brand trust.
How Ratings And Reviews Affect SEO
For branded or product searches, search engines display business websites but also usually display results from top review sites such as Yelp, TripAdvisor or industry-specific sites, like Edmunds for vehicles or Consumer Reports for products.
Because these sites are often on Page One of search results, it's critical for businesses to ensure that the reviews about their business are accurate and properly reflect how they treat customers. When receiving a negative review, answering it constructively can earn the respect of potential customers. To answer a negative review constructively, business representatives need to show the customer that they are heard and apologize for their experience. If the review isn't accurate, the representative can state their side of the incident -- but respectfully and without name-calling or exaggeration.
In fact, consumers don't expect businesses to be perfect. In a study by Northwestern, participants said they are suspicious of five-star ratings, and consumers often look at negative reviews first to determine the legitimacy of the reviews as a whole.
Customers often check out reviews before deciding to contact a business, as well. A study found that consumers read about seven reviews before they decide to trust a business. According to the study, this is an increase of about 14% in the number of reviews compared to the previous year.
These trends prove that honest reviews have a significant pull on consumers' buying habits, and in some cases, may have more influence than the company's website itself.
How Google And Other Services Bring In Third-Party Data
Yelp and Facebook are consumers' most trusted source of business reviews, with Google and the Better Business Bureau coming in third and fourth. One of the reasons why Google is such a trusted resource of ratings and reviews is because it pulls in reviews from multiple places, aggregating them into an overall picture of a business.
While Google used to do this automatically by pulling in reviews from third-party sites, they received pushback for doing so without permission (because this decreased traffic to the review sites themselves). Google now still pulls in third-party data, but only with permission via an opt-out.
Besides showing reviews for organic results, you can also use Google seller ratings in paid AdWords campaigns to boost your website's search results in Google. In fact, Google Ads with seller ratings see up to a 10% increase in click-thru rate, according to Google's findings. Google pulls seller ratings from collected customer reviews, so these are important to monitor as well.
Google isn't the only place review sites are showing your company's reviews to current and potential customers. Yelp has continued to integrate its reviews through its API to over 100,000 registered developers.
Some of these developers are pulling in Yelp reviews to well-known apps, including Microsoft's Cortana, Apple products and Eat24. Customers are increasingly seeing reviews for almost every search they complete, no matter whether it's in an app, through voice search or in a traditional search engine.
Integrating reviews as part of your SEO strategy can have significant benefits to your business. Aside from allowing reviews to be shown in organic and paid search result pages, you can incorporate third-party and native reviews onto your website for both product and service-based businesses.
Some services, like Yotpo and BazaarVoice, collect reviews on your behalf, which are then automatically integrated into your website once it's set up. You insert a code or plugin into your CMS and pages to show the most updated reviews (how it's installed exactly depends on the service you use).
You can also use Yelp and TripAdvisor APIs to pull review data for your business directly onto your website. Some APIs have display requirements, like TripAdvisor, which says that its reviews can't be aggregated with any other data source. Their reviews must be displayed on their own.
Including reviews on your website gives visitors an instant glimpse into what other customers' experiences were and allows them to review this feedback on your own site without having to jump to an external source to read them.
Off-Site Solutions
Whether you are collecting reviews using a service or API, it's still important to take the time to monitor and respond to reviews on your most popular review site profiles. These review sites can be a significant source of traffic for you, so make sure they are kept up to date with the most pertinent information.
If you have multiple locations or handle a large number of reviews, you can use a third-party service like ReviewPush to aggregate and monitor reviews (much like SaaS products like HootSuite do for social media profiles).
Commonly called "reputation management," constant review monitoring is crucial in today's online marketplace. Not only do consumers in all industries rely on reviews and ratings to make purchasing decisions, they also use review sites as a place to find information about a business (e.g., hours of operation, service offerings and more). A comprehensive reputation management strategy should be integrated into your SEO efforts to help get more conversions online.
Forbes Agency Council is an invitation-only community for executives in successful public relations, media strategy, creative and advertising agencies. Do I qualify?