How important are online reviews?
Reviews are always an important asset of any business, especially online reviews. You can say what you want about your own business but naturally, it’s a little bias. Just as if people depend on word-to-mouth recommendations they also depend heavily on online review sites to give them recommendations if they don’t have a personal referral.
Online reviews provide businesses with a certain amount of credibility – it gives your business a voice from a client’s perspective. To some business owners this might sound scary, but if you conduct your business in such a way that you’re always treating customers with respect, integrity and good customer service then it should be no big deal. That being said, you can give a customer 110% and they could come back and give you a 1 star rating. Why? Who knows. It doesn’t matter how hard you try, or if you go above and beyond – at some point your business will receive a negative review.
Most review sites are set up in such a way that you can’t remove negative reviews – rightfully so, because if it was easy to remove them everyone would be doing that and the review sites wouldn’t be valuable. But don’t stress out – this gives you and your business an opportunity to turn a negative into a positive.
While negative reviews are not ideal, it gives you an opportunity to show online searchers that you are taking the time to reach out and respond to these reviews. Reviews give you an opportunity to rectify a situation and in appropriate ways explain the situation, without coming across as defensive. Reviews are biased – a negative review gives you an opportunity to show people that perhaps the review was untrue.
That being said, instead of focusing on the negative let’s focus on the positive. The positive aspect of reviews – in addition to helping boast your reputation, also helps with your organic search results. When you get positive reviews it shows search engines that your business is being ranked high. High rankings help show google your relevance – and that in turn helps your SEO and organic search results.
Do you need help managing your SEO or online marketing strategies? We can help.
LRT is a marketing and graphic solutions company that serves a large variety of clients in Chico and surrounding North State and Northern California areas like Oroville, Paradise, Corning, Red Bluff, Redding, Orland, Reno, Sparks, Yuba City, Marysville, or Sacramento. We would be more than happy to work with your SEO or online marketing- talk to the experts today!
Call us at (530) 879-9261 or toll free (888) 934-6578 for creative, innovative and successful marketing strategies that are sure to drive traffic straight to your website.
