SEO
Customer reviews can be critically important to capturing sales leads through your website. A website design that incorporates review pages and provides links for customers to leave and read reviews can give you an important tool for marketing both your business and your products or services to search engine users.
Digital marketing firms that offer local SEO services recommend including customer reviews on your site for a few reasons.
- Nearly 70% of online experiences begin with a search engine. Search engines capture everything, including reviews, on your website. When users search for “highest rated widget” or “widget product reviews,” your website could appear in the search results even if widgets are only one of the product lines you sell.
- Leads are more readily converted into paying customers when you provide reviews. A whopping 97% of Millennials read reviews before making a purchasing decision and most of them trust user reviews even though they are left by strangers. Even more significant, about 80% of Millennials do not buy something unless they have read a review about it.
- Customers for your products, even if they are sold by many of your competitors, will consider buying from you if your web design includes product reviews. In other words, if your industry has seven big competitors who all sell Acme widgets, and you have the only website with reviews of Acme widgets, searchers for “Acme widget reviews” will probably end up at your site.
Local SEO services know that high-quality reviews are necessary to use product and service reviews effectively. Here is a two-step strategy for getting high-quality reviews for your business.
Time Your Review Requests
Think through your customer’s interaction with your business and your products. Pick times to solicit reviews when:
- Customer satisfaction is high: If your products have a delivery and installation cycle where satisfaction peaks at an identifiable time, solicit customer reviews at the peak. For example, suppose you sell software and send a trainer to your customers’ sites to teach the software to them. Talk to your trainers about when customer satisfaction is high so you can solicit reviews at the peak.
- Friction is low: Pick a time when the customer does not need to exert a lot of effort to leave a review. By making it easier to leave reviews, your customers are more likely to leave a review and more likely to make the review a positive one.
Find Ways to Obtain Reviews at Scale
If you see a product with 100 reviews, you might consider the reviews reliable. The large quantity of reviews would persuade viewers of the reliability because the outliers would be outweighed.
But how many products must be sold to get 100 reviews? The answer depends on how you solicit the reviews.
- Unsolicited reviews: If you do not solicit reviews, only 3-5% of customers will leave you a review.
- Solicited reviews: If you solicit customer reviews, about 50-70% will leave a review.
To get high-quality reviews, you need to ask customers for reviews. Whether you do this through an email, phone call, or in-person visit, you must ask. If you do not ask, the number of reviews will drop dramatically.
Simply asking for reviews will increase your review volume. Adding in some of the hints about timing can boost your reviews even more. For example, if your trainers ask for reviews after teaching customers about all the cool features of your products, the volume of customers leaving positive reviews might approach 100%.
By using basic SEO strategies from your local SEO services provider and a thoughtful approach to how and when you solicit reviews, you can obtain high-quality reviews for your business.
