If you’re an entrepreneur, then the reputation of your brand is what should matter the most. It is the way your customers feel about your product or service, how reliable they find your company to be, and how fast you are able to get rid of all their grievances for them, is what creates a viable profile of a brand amongst its customer base. And this profile is an extremely valuable asset to any company.
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That is why; feedback of customers holds a huge level of importance in bringing a brand to the top and then maintaining that position. It puts a lot of significance on the product reviews that people give online, even though they might look like a very small part of your online presence at first. The online buying decisions of people are swayed in either direction, largely by how better or worse the reviews of a product have been.
As the digital age has made us rely so much on online feedback, they have a direct effect on how customers decide to buy or not by something, how a website ranks in the search engine results, and how many search results actually get clicked on and viewed thereafter. An optimum SEO strategy of any website, hence, has a lot hanging on how its online reviews are handled.
How do people make use of online reviews?
First off, people only start reading the reviews if they have already decided they like the product they see. After reading just a few reviews, most customers decide whether or not they’ll be making a purchase or not. While it doesn’t take much time for people to figure out if they’re buying something or not, the reviews do play a huge role even in that short period of time. Also, most small businesses have a review system fit very well into the purchasing cycle of their products. Hence, they can have their online reputation built or damaged, just based on a few user reviews, in no time.
Do people actually read these reviews?
Research has shown that more than 80% people find online user reviews not just important, but trustworthy as well. In addition, there’s about 68% of online shopper population that go on to read at least 4 reviews, if not more, before deciding on purchasing a product or not. Therefore, there’s no doubt that a considerable number of people do in fact read reviews, and base their decision to buy or not, on them too.
But, it should also be taken into consideration, that the shopping habits of people are ever-changing. A shopper, on reading a positive review, doesn’t necessarily go to the website and buy a product. While the e-commerce traffic does almost always get positively affected by good reviews, the final purchase cannot always be predicted with absolute certainty.
Why do online reviews have huge significance for SEO, locally?
Customers usually prefer to review business websites to get the most accurate information. The shoppers find it extremely helpful to discover, then predict, and finally make a concrete decision on making any future purchases. In addition, various search engines, such as Google, rank the search results according to certain variables that include review signals, page signals, link signals, on-page signals, behavioral signals, and so on. No less than 10% of how a search engine ranks its results, comes from the online reviews only.
How does one craft a strategy for review acquisition?
Now that is amply clear that online reviews hold a significant place in the field of e-commerce, it becomes overly important to strategize the management of these reviews, and thereby the online reputation of a business. First of all, as an SEO executive, you should have an idea about the right websites and platforms for reviews. Then, you should know of all the policies that each platform has, in order to write reviews that will actually get published.
In order to successfully manage the online reputation of any business, it is better to set up a service, such as Google Alerts so that you don’t miss even a single customer feedback. Also, a good option is to hire the services of a third-party firm that specializes in drawing and implementing unique SEO and marketing strategies.
Conclusion
In conclusion, there’s one other thing that a business should remember – not all reviews can be positive. But, there’s no reason to always take a negative review in a bad way. Instead of getting saddened or frustrated by negative reviews, taking them as constructive criticism could really help you improve fast and boost the growth of your business!
Contributed byhttps://www.metizsoft.com/
