Online reviews have become an integral part of internet marketing. A big percentage of customers today want to check online reviews before placing an order to understand how other customers feel about your product or service. So, as you look for simple ways to improve the search engine optimization (SEO) of your website, don’t forget to consider the impact that reviews have on your site. As a business owner, what do you do about the reviews? And does responding to reviews help SEO?
Where To Place Reviews And What Kind Can I Use On My Site?
Before you even think about responding to your online reviews, you need to decide where to put reviews on your website. You also need to ask yourself, can I use a review plugin for my website? You need to think through these concerns carefully because they’ll determine the effectiveness of your reviews in improving your SEO. When choosing the best place for reviews on your website, consider the kind of impact it will have on your customers.
Most websites place their reviews in headers or hero images because they will catch the attention of visitors the first time they visit your website. A positive review by a recent customer displayed on the homepage of your site will create a good impression on potential customers.
Also, you are allowed to use Yelp reviews on your website, albeit under several conditions. For instance, you need to ask the reviewers for permission to publish their reviews on your website or anywhere else. Also, you shouldn’t rephrase the reviews in any way or quote them out of context. You are supposed to attribute the reviews to Yelp using its logo and don’t alter the star ratings.
How Does Responding To Reviews Help SEO?
As the business owner, you are supposed to promptly respond to your customers’ reviews and feedback, especially since most customers form their first impressions from what they read on your review page. If you respond to your customer’s complaints and compliments and show genuine care in addressing their concerns, it shows that you are committed to high-quality customer service which is essential for your online reputation.
Recent studies have revealed that at least 50 percent of customers who leave reviews expect the relevant businesses to respond to their reviews. Additional studies have also shown that businesses that promptly deal with negative reviews experience a 16 percent boost in their customer advocacy. So, when you respond to reviews, you help your business to acquire new customers and increase your sales.
What increases your number of customers also improves your search engine ranking. Remember that Google is always looking for better ways to provide its users with the best results for their searches. Therefore, it employs the same approaches that customers use to determine the reliability of a business to give its users trustworthy search results. In most cases, Google’s search algorithm considers the number of reviews your site has, their diversity, and how recent they are to determine their reliability. Since reviews help your business to appear trustworthy, it certainly follows that your reviews will improve your search engine ranking.
In fact, Google continues to encourage its business owners to actively interact with their customers by responding to their reviews because it helps their businesses to rank better. On its support pages for Google My Business, Google insists that responding to reviews proves that you value your clients and their experience with your business. Additionally, your local SEO is likely to improve when you continuously respond to reviews. When you are responding to your reviews, make sure you give each review a personalized response.
How to Respond to Reviews?
Responding to your business reviews promptly can be a difficult and time-consuming task, especially since you have to make every response personal. That’s why many business owners fall behind on this important task. Unfortunately, most customers expect you to respond to their feedback within a day. After that, it’s very difficult to change the customer’s negative thoughts about your business. Luckily, several tools can help you to stay on top of your reviews.
For instance, you can use automatic review notifications to know when a customer leaves a review on your website. That way, you will be able to respond to their concerns immediately. Second, you can use review templates and automatic responses. These are positive and negative review templates to help you shoot quick responses to customer reviews, especially when you don’t have time to write a response. However, these response templates are only suitable for uncritically positive reviews because you just need to send a simple “thank you” response.
But when a customer complains about your product or service, you need to write an apology and direct them to the relevant department for further assistance. This is where review ticketing comes in handy. A ticketing management feature allows you to assign the task of responding to customer reviews to specific employees. Once the response has been done and the concerns addressed fully, the employee will close the ticket.
Conclusion
Building and maintaining a consistent review response strategy is an effective and inexpensive way to improve your brand and boost your SEO. The specific advice provided by Google to promptly respond to customer reviews is a sure sign that you should be placing a high priority on review responses and need the necessary tools and strategies to perform this task successfully.
