This blog, The Reviews Expert, is here to try to inform business owners as to the vital importance of reviews to your personal as wel...
This blog, The Reviews Expert, is here to try to inform business owners as to the vital importance of reviews to your personal as well as business reputation. I am experienced in SEO and therefore, I am intimately aware not only of the importance of reviews, but even more importantly the difficulty in getting your happy clients to leave positive reviews.
First you need to be aware that reviews serve a purpose beyond the obvious point of being read by potential customers. While that is obviously very important, there are other concerns as well.
Reviews have a great deal of influence on your business website's SERP, or Search Engine Results Page. So not only can reviews help or hurt when people find you online, they can also contribute to whether people find you online. Many articles and posts have been made regarding SEO, (Searcn Engine Optimization) and reviews. The search engines love reviews because they are all about relevance. And what can indicate whether a local business is relevant more than what the people that are utilizing a business and it's competitors are saying? I could link to other posts and articles referring to the connection between reviews and position and have 100's of links. So I decided to stop at just 3.
Now that isn't to say that the presence of positive or negative reviews controls a site's position, but they certainly play a role. And surprisingly it isn't just the search engine's reviews that effect position, Google as we all know by now is all about relevance. So this shouldn't be surprising, Google can look at all the algorithms imaginable, any or all of thousands of optimization details on a website. But if they want to know the best widget store in central Texas, few points of data are going to be more telling than those that have shopped at the widget stores in the area.
So it really is difficult to overstate the importance of reviews to your business. They can truly make or break a business in numerous ways.
If you are a business owner you are probably already aware of the fact that unhappy clients seem to be very quick to leave negative reviews. But it seems that motivating happy clients, (probably the vast majority of your customer base), to share their good experience is incredibly difficult.
I personally believe that people are more than willing to share their good experiences with your company! Let's face it though... Reading reviews, is far easier than leaving reviews. A couple simple clicks and there are all the reviews one could hope to find in order to pre-judge your business.Unfortunately leaving a review takes a little more effort. Even though research has shown that about 9 out of 10 people read reviews, the percentage of the population that has left a review, is a lot closer to the exact reverse of those numbers, less than 10%!
This is why simply asking people to review your business simply doesn't work! If you ask, you will find that pretty much everyone will say that they'll share their good experience. I personally believe that almost all of them have the best of intentions! They absolutely intend to at the time they say that they will... Then, life gets in the way. Immediately upon leaving your business, their attention naturally is on other things! Maybe they really don't know where or how to leave a review... Although in the moment their intentions were good, it simply isn't as important to them as it is to you. And since as we discussed earlier, reading reviews is far easier than leaving reviews, you wind up with just a couple happy clients out of a hundred that will follow through!
This is why I created GooViewZ, LLC!
When you consider that not only does almost everyone read reviews, around 9 out of 10 people trust online reviews as much as they trust advice from family and friends! That makes these reviews one of, if not the most vital outside influence on your business's reputation.
Our app, dashboard and possibly most importantly or system, makes it easy to get reviews from your happy clients! There are quite a lot of apps popping up in the marketplace to facilitate reviews, they are actually all quite similar, using any of these apps should get you to over 30% of your clients leaving reviews! That is a great increase from the single digit penetration!
But it really isn't good enough! Which is why we developed our system which has gotten over 70% and even as high as 125% leaving reviews! How does a business get over 100% leaving positive reviews? Our System explains how to get numerous reviews from single transactions. When you consider that this app dashboard and system can often cost businesses less than half what these other companies charge, it is really worth the look.
But let's look deeper into the why...
Were you aware that most people today trust reviews as much as advice from family and friends?
Combine that with the fact that people have changed their minds about a purchase after reading one negative review!
I personally can think of very few things more important to the success of a business than it's reputation. That statement would have been true 50 years ago... But today, it is even more so. Before review sites, it was word of mouth. That would generally blow over to some degree. But these review sites are forever and far reaching. resulting in one poor experience doing serious harm to your business if it isn't somehow mitigated.
Mitigating damage can be simply contacting the dissatisfied client, either by replying to the review or directly if you have their contact information. Just always be cautious, never challenge their version of events or try to make excuses. Your efforts should be only directed toward resolution. What will make them happy, especially happy enough to retract their negative review. Now be prepared, this isn't always easy or even possible. As a matter of fact be prepared to jump through all the hoops and meet all the demands a client might put forth, only to have them not remove the negative review as they promised. Unfortunately some people simply feel powerful striking out and maybe feel that removing a bad review also removes this perceived power. Whatever the deep reasons... It will happen. As will reviews from people that may have never even utilized your company.
As seen below ABC News found that the writers of the most harsh reviews often never bought nor used the product or service they were slamming.
There are many reasons that a constant flood of 5 star reviews is vital to your business. Mitigating bad reviews is only sometimes possible. So the most effective method is always going to be outpacing the bad reviews with that constant flood of positive. This is best accomplished by utilizing a review generation service such as Gooviewz.
The theory at work with any of these services is that you already have the flood of 5 star reviews you need within your already established client base. The happy satisfied people simply aren't as motivated as the angry ones. Now we can't motivate them with deals or discounts, but we can certainly make it as easy as possible for them to leave you a 5 star review!
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