The New SEO: Positive Online Reviews

Do you want to help potential customers find you and increase online visibility? It is time that move beyond traditional search engine optimization methods and concentrate your attention to reviews online.

As a well-designed website that has inbound links and SEO-optimized keywords still is important, search engines now are influenced by what your customers are saying about your services and products. Almost 9 out of ten (88%) consumers trust reviews online while considering a business.

From the initial search results to the details of your business listings to posts on social media and review sites, reviews and star ratings are inescapable. As a matter of fact, today, signals from reviews online are so substantial, they’ll rank 5th out of all factors that affect local search rankings.

Positive Online Reviews the New SEO

Simply pick your smartphone up and look for a retail business location close to you. Your selections are going to show up as a sequence of red dots: Bigger dots for the companies that have the biggest quality and volume of reviews, and smaller dots for companies that have few to no reviews.

If you have not claimed your business listings online and have no reviews, you’ll risk not being ranked whatsoever.

Data researchers assessed the impact of reviews online on search engine visibility and discovered that 4 critical factors have the most impact upon where your company ranks in search listings:

Review Timing: Present reviews are more credible than past reviews which might contain out-of-date details. As you produce reviews on a consistent basis, instead of all at one time, you’ll have a documented account of customer experience over time which customers may trust.

Review Volume: If your company has a higher volume of recent, positive reviews on Google, it is more than likely to appear within the search engine’s local “3-pack” — the 3 locations which appear within a “Near Me” search. In order to produce reviews, you’ll require a system for asking for them.

Review Length: Lengthier reviews that have details are considered more trustworthy than ones that are shorter. Ask for reviews from customers in a position to state something meaningful regarding their experience.

Review Sentiment: Google rates the quality of reviews by the number of stars a customer gives it. Higher average star ratings contribute to greater ranking in search results — you’ll want a lot of positive feedback to keep that average high.

Reputation Management Crucial for Success

There isn’t any question that boosting your online review volume may pay massive dividends for all location-based businesses. What is difficult is to manage reviews for several locations.

Turning a customer to a digital advocate who helps drive revenue and traffic will require scalable strategies for ORM (Online Reputation Management), like:

• Systematically asking for reviews from customers
• Streaming ratings and reviews to locations’ web pages in order to add credibility, depth, and context to star ratings, as well as drive more foot traffic and better search engine rankings
• Distributing reviews strategically across 3rd-party review websites, in order to reach consumers where they are
• Interacting with customers on social networks by sharing good reviews
• Mining social media, as well as running occasional thematic assessment of customer reviews — and placing insights to work in order to improve operations

For more information on reputation monitoring contact Soaring Away at (910) 471-5030.