How Customer Reviews can Improve Your SEO

September 13, 2016 Uncategorized

Believe it or not, for many online businesses, customer reviews are something to be avoided. For some, it reflects an old-school mentality about the internet in that it is full of trolls who will leave bad reviews just to hurt a company. For others, it’s a simple fear of the transparency that the internet demands; the accountability each company has to deliver what they promised.

 

But when you look at the stats surrounding customer reviews, the numbers paint a much different picture:

  • 90% of consumers read reviews before going to a business’s site or location
  • 31% of customers are likely to spend 31% more on a company with great reviews
  • Reviews can improve your results through freshly-generated content
  • 72% of consumers will take action only after reading a positive review

While the different ranking factors employed by Google are always changing, there’s a clear focus on fresh content, uniqueness, device responsibility, and social sharing (which we covered last week). And reviews don’t only apply to businesses that sell a product or service. In this time when content is king businesses of all types are investing in original content creation, upon which users can comment. While only an estimate, it is believed that signals from reviews account for 9.8% of ranking factors.

So how can user reviews help your site? First and foremost, reviews are a surefire way to indirectly solicit user-generated content. In addition, reviews are almost always relevant, outside of spammers, which Google also encourages.

Reviews are also a solid way to improve your traffic around long-tail searches as the language customers use in their reviews is often similar to that used by searchers. Furthermore, Google has proven in the past that they give ranking preference to well-reviewed sites. In addition, reviews are a solid way to generate tons of positive social signals that Google rates highly.

So if reviews are something you’re ignoring on your site, start encouraging customers to leave reviews through incentives like sales and coupon codes for those who first leave reviews. Also, be sure to encourage the rate section of your audience, those that are repeat visitors, over those who only visit once.

By following the above steps, you can make sure that customer reviews give you the SEO boost you need.

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