Google reviews are an essential part of SEO and must be a priority for your business. According to Moz, reviews are an important part of the E-A-T formula: Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness. The more reviews you gain, the more your website can grow in those areas. There are many things to consider in your SEO strategy, but Google reviews play an important part in Google’s algorithm.
There is also the social proof benefit of Google reviews and other review platforms like Yelp. Social proof is evidence to future customers that other customers have liked and seen the value of your product or service. 89 percent of consumers will read reviews before making a purchase, and 54.7 percent of those people read at least 4 reviews, according to Oberlo.
What is Google Looking For?
When Google is ranking businesses for searches, it looks at reviews in a few ways.
- The Right Business Category: If you have the wrong category, you aren’t even in the race. Make sure you have the best category and potentially secondary categories. There are almost 4,000 categories to choose from, so choose wisely. One way to do this is to see what your competitors are using.
- Number of reviews: Volume has a big impact on search results.
- Trending results: If the business has fewer reviews, but they are written closer together and more recently than another company with more reviews, it can still compete in search results.
- Quality of reviews: Reviews that are longer and have keywords in them will help more than a star-only review.
- Proximity: The location of the person searching for physical businesses will make an impact as well.
These pieces come together to make the most relevant business show up to the person searching. The individual searching can even search by a minimum number of review stars.
All of these help you rank higher in Google Maps and the top three results will get into the Map Pack, which is shows up in the normal results for local based searches.
How Do You Get Google Reviews?
It is important to have reviews coming in regularly, but that can be hard to accomplish. There are a few ways to be intentional about getting these reviews. Most times, all you have to do is ask and someone will be happy to write you a review, but make it easy for them. You can make it easy for them by giving them the link Google gives you in your profile settings, which takes them directly to the place to leave a review. You can ask virtually or in person, just make sure to do it often.
Online Reputation Management
Send out an email to your clients after doing business with them asking for their feedback. KWSM sets up reputation management for our clients that sends positive feedback to a review platform and gathers negative feedback in order to improve customer experience.
Additional if you have a form your clients fill out often, you could redirect them to a page that asks for feedback once they submit the form. Then ask them for feedback there.
Anything automated like this is helpful since we are all human and forget about it. We can help you find a place in your system to ask regularly and often.
Ask For Reviews In Person
In a world of QR codes, having one with a link to write a review makes doing so easier for your customers. Putting this info on a card you can hand out is a great way to gather reviews. This makes it easy for you to point a customer to writing a Google review if they tell you how much they love your company.
Social proof is a big factor in digital marketing, but it’s tough to gather reviews for your business. Talk to KWSM to see if reputation management is right for your marketing strategy.
89% of consumers will read reviews before making a purchase. Are your current reviews a good representation of your company?
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