Online Reviews Are Crucial For Success

Online reviews and testimonials are pretty crucial for the success of your business. If you’re not utilizing these yet, this guide is going to tell you exactly why you should be.

Online reviews and testimonials are a form of free advertising for your business. A good advertising campaign costs money, but this is something invaluable you can get for free with a great product and service. Reviews can even influence search engine results, especially if keywords and your business name are used regularly. Consumers tend to trust peer reviews more than they trust advertising. This means more revenue for you as consumers begin to trust you!

Not only that, you can use these reviews to improve business practices if you need to, thanks to your customer’s constructive criticism. You also have the opportunity to fix a customer’s issue and respond publicly, if you need to. You can do your best to ensure that each customer has a positive experience with you. With your replies you can develop a closer relationship with your customers. They’ll see that you’re not just a big, cold, corporate organization. This is a form of on-line reputation management, and is very important. It’s a good idea to respond to all reviews and testimonials, both positive and negative. You can handle a negative review by taking the issue off-line and then leaving a brief update once all is resolved.

Not only do you help to influence the buying decisions of consumers with your reviews, you can also improve your ranking in the local search engines.

You may think that all of these benefits mean you must get 100% positive reviews, but this isn’t the case. Having a small amount of negative reviews can also be helpful. Why? Because some people see 100% positive reviews as suspicious. They may believe you have constructed them yourself, or paid others to make them. When there are a small handful of neutral/negative reviews, with the majority positive reviews, people will trust these opinions much more.

Just bear in mind, that having too many negative reviews will surely impact your business negatively. That’s why focusing on offering the best service possible is crucial. If somebody feels compelled to tell others about their bad experience with you, studies have shown the information reaches more people than a positive experience will.

• 83% of people in a 2015 Nielsen survey said they trusted opinions of people they knew

• 70% of people in a 2015 Nielsen survey said they trusted consumer opinions on-line

• 80% of consumers have changed their mind about a purchase based on negative reviews they read

• 85% of people surveyed in 2011 said they would be more likely to purchase if they found recommendations on-line

• 94% of customers would use a business with a 4 star rating

• Only 9% of consumers never search for a business on-line