The Importance of Customer Reviews for Online Marketing
You might have come across a typical online review if you have ever tried buying something online. Undoubtedly, customer reviews can be important for your online marketing campaign, but does the quantity or quality of the reviews you receive can really make or break a sale and have a big impact on your company’s overall success?
Online Reviews Influence Customer Behavior
These online reviews from different online customers for a certain product or service produce an impact on your brand and the behavior of your audience. Whether the rating is bad or excellent, 1 star or 5 stars, these reviews reflect what kind of product or service you’re selling to the people on your eCommerce website.
Some customers give their reviews to provide more information and share their experience about a certain product or service they purchase online that could help others make their buying decisions. According to Brightlocal, 90% of consumers read online reviews before visiting a business. And 88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. The results were really absurd, to think that 88% of consumers are willing to believe in an online review of a total stranger.
The more positive customer reviews your business has online, the greater number of people will be interested and buy your product. Then it means an increased conversion and sales for your business. According to Reevoo stats, 50 or more reviews per product can mean a 4.6% increase in conversion rates and reviews produce an average 18% uplift in sales.
Customers also pay for highly-rated products for they are assured that the product they purchase online has the best quality because of the positive reviews of other people. More often than not, businesses do not always receive positive reviews even the large business with the greatest customer service is going to attract a negative review at some point. But you don’t have to hide or delete any negative reviews because it gives you a challenge to make a person start engaging in your product or service.
A mixture of positive and negative reviews is important as it helps to improve customer trust in the opinions of other people they read on your site. Recent stats from Reevoo suggest that the presence of bad reviews actually improves conversions by 67%.
It is clear to see that customers are profoundly influenced by online reviews and often make buying decisions based on those online reviews.
Benefits of Online Reviews to SEO
Customers read reviews to inform their buying decisions, and so do local search engines. Customer reviews have a direct impact on SEO, and getting more and better customer reviews in the right place online only means you have a powerful benefit over your competitors. While it is true that small and medium businesses will always have a shark competitor when it comes to using Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to promote their products/services, it is also true that today’s businesses whether it is small or medium size cannot disregard the usefulness of having their site optimized.
Enabling customer reviews on your site can help your website reach the top ranking on search engines like Google. Google not only wants to know what your business does but also how your business is perceived in order to deliver the most relevant and valuable results for local searches.
In Google, the results reflect the source of the online reviews, with the help of the Pigeon. The Pigeon update effectively yields reviews from popular review sites like Yelp, TripAdvisor, and others are taken into deliberation when ranking local businesses. Google wants to offer users the finest probable outcomes and values reviews as much as clients do, so, the more positive reviews you have on Yelp and TripAdvisor, the higher the chance you will be ranking in Google’s local 3-pack, which is valued regardless of whether you only function locally or work on a nationwide scale. In addition, some Google reviews could be comprised of “rich snippets” associated with your business directly.