Consumers are increasingly becoming more alert when searching for products and services on the internet. Studies have shown that almost 80 percent of online shoppers today go through customer reviews before they make a purchase. Therefore, if you want to make the right first impression to potential customers who visit your website, you need to display the right customer reviews. This article shows you where to put reviews on your website.
What Are Customer Reviews And Why Are They Important?
A customer review is an unbiased positive or negative feedback about your product, service, or overall business. These reviews are normally given by customers who have bought your products or interacted with your business in one way or another. When a customer posts a review on your website, it becomes public and can be read by anyone who visits the site.
Customer reviews are important because they help new customers to get an idea of what to expect from you. They also help to improve your business’s reputation because many customers tend to trust businesses with many positive reviews. Google also uses reviews to determine the credibility of websites when providing search results. Therefore, reviews will improve your site’s search engine optimization (SEO).
But does responding to reviews help SEO? Yes, it does. Google encourages business owners to respond to their customer reviews promptly because it improves their credibility, causing Google’s search algorithm to pick their sites more frequently. Therefore, always respond to all your reviews, including the negative ones to help your website rank better. Collecting and responding to customer reviews can be a difficult task but there are tools, like the best review plugin, that can help.
Another common question is, can I use Yelp reviews on my website? The answer is yes. But there are several conditions to this, including seeking permission to publish from the reviewers, not paraphrasing the reviews, and not altering the Yelp logo.
Where Should You Place Customer Reviews on Your Site?
Many businesses place a few featured reviews on their homepages for visibility. This is a perfect spot to place your reviews, especially if they are positive because they will boost your customer’s confidence in your products or services. But there are several other ideal places on your website where you can display your customer reviews, including landing pages, product pages, contact pages, underneath blog posts, in the sidebar, and exit-intent popups. However, you can’t know which part of your website is good for your reviews until you perform the following tasks.
Monitoring User Navigation
There are various user behavior tracking tools that can help you monitor your visitors’ movements throughout your website without violating general data protection regulation (GDPR). Tracking tools help you know where the visitors are coming from, the pages they visit, where they click, and how they interact with different elements of your site. It will also show you the areas of your site where each activity takes place. Where customers interact with your site would be the perfect place to put reviews.
Testing Different Places
Test different parts of your website for user engagement to know where exactly to place your reviews. You do so by publishing the reviews on different areas and reviewing their engagements after a while. The hard data you get will show you where the reviews are likely to have a more positive impact. You can also perform several A/B tests on different pages to get a more detailed user behavior report. Did review display option A perform better or was option B superior? This test will show you which pages have more user engagement near the reviews.
Common Customer Review Formats
Online customer reviews come in four main categories: testimonials, badges and widgets, featured reviews, and review streams. These formats are supposed to attract attention to your site, increase the time that visitors spend on your site and boost the confidence of potential customers. But you have to choose a format that works best for your online business and boosts your online presence.
Testimonials
Testimonials are the quintessential review among online businesses today. The best way to prove that your testimonials come from reliable sources is to link them to the reviewer’s social media page or a case study.
Review Badges and Widgets
Embeddable badges and widgets invite visitors to rate your business on various review pages like Yelp and Google. Some of these review sites offer badges that allow you to link the reviews to your website. These badges can be customized to suit the style and layout of your website.
Featured Reviews
These reviews are designed to offer a more detailed response to the questions and concerns raised by your customers. Therefore, they are long and include embedded links to your clients’ websites and external review sites like Yelp and Google. This type of review is very good for improving your site’s SEO.
Review Stream Widgets
A review stream widget is an automation tool that will help you to gather reviews from different review sites and post the most recent ones to your website. If your site is developed on WordPress, Joomla, or Drupal elements, a review stream widget will automatically collect the most recent reviews and present them with schematic markup.
Finally, showcasing your customer reviews on your website provides a look into the experience of both satisfied and dissatisfied customers. It shows potential clients that they can trust you to give them the best experience.
