How Powerful Are Reviews for Your SEO?
Reviews are one of the major and often overlooked factors that affect SEO. While reviews serve as a guide for potential buyers and a way for businesses to prove their credibility, they are also a powerful tool that businesses can leverage to boost their online exposure.
Reviews and SEO: A quick summary
Reviews are the evaluations given by customers about the product or service they paid for. Their reviews serve as a guide for the 9 out of 10 customers who rely on reviews for their purchase. This means that without reviews, your business will have a hard time getting customers.
Meanwhile, search engine optimization, or SEO, is the process of boosting your website’s visibility in search results. Search engines have crawlers or automated bots that crawl through millions of websites, collecting information that they send to the search engine’s algorithm, which will rank the websites according to the information it gets from the crawlers.
How do reviews influence SEO?
Part of the information that crawlers collect are reviews. The reviews are 10% responsible for your website’s Google search ranking, but there’s more to it than that.
Crawlers like to “read,” so the more information a website has, the more information that the crawlers can collect. And the more information that the crawlers collect, the better your website’s chances are of getting ranked high by the algorithm.
So, if you have more reviews, your website can rank higher. Think of reviews as free content that boosts your SEO. They provide a large chunk of keywords and make the algorithm believe that your website is reliable and worthy to be ranked high up.
While the presence of reviews alone can improve your ranking, how positive or negative they are is also integral to the algorithm’s ranking system.
A whopping 72% of consumers will only buy after reading positive reviews about a product. A website that has good reviews gets more views and a higher click-through rate (CTR), which has a positive impact on your SEO. If you have a high CTR, this tells Google that your website has valuable information, so more people should see it. That results in Google ranking your website higher.
How can I use reviews to boost my SEO?
You can start by asking your customers to leave reviews. You can carefully ask them to leave a review right after a service is completed and a couple days after a product is purchased.
Once all of that is established, you’ll need to actively and professionally respond to reviews, providing assistance if need be. This tells Google as well as potential buyers that you care about your customers.
With Reviews911, you can manage all your reviews across all platforms in one place. Positive reviews will be posted on your top review platforms. Customers who give negative reviews will be given a contact form where they can explain their experience in more detail, and you will be directly notified about their response.
Reviews911 will help you gain control of your business’ reputation and improve your services. Contact us today to learn more.