How Reviews Can Boost Your SEO by Caledon SEO Company

Posted by Pikdigital Marketing Agency in Toronto on September 21st, 2021

In the age of digitization, the online reputation of your company is crucial for success. User-generated reviews are a crucial aspect of SEO.

Therefore, it is important to ensure that satisfied customers also express themselves with positive reviews. Otherwise, bad reviews can affect your SEO badly. Today Caledon SEO Company explains how customer reviews can boost your SEO.

In This Article

• How important are customer reviews?
• SEO Strategies for building an online reputation with reviews
• How do reviews improve your visibility?

How important are customer reviews?

Most consumers will consult Google when searching for a product or service. Here you can find the company\'s website and read what they services provide. 

However, it won\'t be easy to convince a consumer to buy in this way. Opinions and experiences of other customers, on the other hand, are much more persuasive.

Search Engine Land reports that 72 percent of respondents trust user reviews as much as they trust recommendations from friends and family. Capterra surveyed the comparison portal to examine the importance of user ratings in the purchase decision.

SEO Strategies for building an online reputation with reviews

SEO strategies are suitable for building an online reputation through reviews. These are divided into short-term and long-term measures.

Short term measures

Companies should first write to their known, satisfied customers and ask for a rating. In this way, they initially collect positive reviews. To motivate customers to give a rating, you can offer those vouchers and discounts.

Long term measures

In the long term, companies should focus their reviews on one or a few portals. By concentrating, companies can pursue a clean strategy for their online management. 

If companies let their customers choose the platform, they risk reviews ending up on Google, Facebook or Yelp. If a positive rating is posted on the wrong portal, it will lose its usefulness because the target group will not find it. 

Furthermore, companies do not influence portals such as Facebook and Google. Therefore, if the rating is bad or wrong, it is very difficult for companies to take action against it.

How to deal with negative reviews correctly

A negative rating doesn\'t always have to be bad. It can be used as an opportunity to demonstrate to customers that criticism can be deal with and that negative feedback is used as an opportunity to improve. 

Dealing professionally with negative reviews often increases credibility and appears more trustworthy than a company that has only received positive feedback. 

It is particularly important to react quickly to the reviews, respond neutrally and in a friendly manner, apologize if necessary, and ask the happy customer to revise his review if the error is corrected.

How do reviews improve your visibility?

User reviews are usually not the first thing companies think about when it comes to SEO. Reviews, however, should get more attention - especially when it comes to local businesses.

One of the most sought-after rich snippets in Google\'s local search results is the \"Local Pack\": three highlighted, map-based search results. For example, if I search for \"pizza,\" Google uses the user ratings as a ranking factor, and it primarily shows restaurants that have been rated well.

The Local Search Ranking Factors Report 2017 by Moz reports that user ratings (number, frequency, and variety of ratings) are among the five most important factors determining whether companies are listed in the Local Pack. 

According to Moz, online reviews, in addition to backlinks, keywords, user-friendliness, etc., make up 13% of the factors that bring companies into the results of the Local Pack.

But reviews also play a crucial role for online companies. For example, if a website receives links from other relevant pages, Google will reward it with higher visibility. User reviews have a similar effect. 

If customers rate your website, Google sees that other people can interact with you and help potential customers with future decisions. User reviews will continue to include keywords that will help your company\'s SEO efforts. 

So every person who writes a review for you is subconsciously helping you with content and keywords. It is well known that SEO rankings are also influenced by click rates. More people will click on your website if it has a high average rating.