It is quite obvious that Google is beginning to put more importance on the use of reviews. It’s about trying to bridge the gap between the social, web, e-commerce and brick and mortar, where sales themselves are becoming more and more social in themselves.
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Given the high search priority to review communities like Google, Yelp, Yahoo Local and trip adviser it’s very important as a small business owner to focus some of your marketing ideas and time on generating reviews for your business.
Today local businesses are well used to seeking out reviews from customers. For those who are struggling to get customer reviews, you can always meet in the middle. Offer a free sample of your product or service in exchange for an honest, well written review.
Most of us have used online reviews to make a decision before – they’re almost impossible to miss. When you’re researching where or what to buy, when you’re out of town and looking for a place to eat, a site to see, a local business that is unique to that town or area if a business has a lot of positive reviews, new customers (you) feel more confident in giving them a try.
Beyond that, businesses with more reviews and ratings tend to show up higher in search results. For example, Google now offers Google Places results for location-based searches. That means that when you search a type of business along with a city or zip code, such as “dentist in Medford Oregon”, you will see listings similar to yellow pages within your search results (Give it a try – you will see a map with pins in it that correspond to business listings, including address and phone number). Notice the businesses that show up first have a lot of Google Reviews.
But how often do we actually write a positive review for a business that deserves it? Imagine if you made a habit of writing a positive review each time you had a really great experience with a business, almost like a digital thank you card?
So here is a challenge to you, take a couple minutes and write a review for one of your favorite local businesses, it will make a positive impact, not only for the business, but for new customers who shouldn’t be spending their dollars anywhere else.
What are you waiting for, hop on Google Places for Business and get started building that good karma.
- Published: February 25, 2013
- Author: Mike Frey
- Blog: Beyond the Pond Blog
- Category:
- Tags: customer, google, local businesses, marketing, Review, Web search engine, yelp
- Comments:
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Online reviews are very helpful for business owners. This way, you can get the pulse of the people patronizing your products or services and learn how you are perceived by the consumers in general. Instead of researching how you are doing in the market, why not just ask the people directly through online reviews? This way you can also study how to adjust to the needs and actual requirements of your market.
I’ve always thought that reviews are simply used to get opinions and feedback for certain products and services. So they can also increase page ranking? This is a useful information for business owners like me. Thanks for the share.
I am fond of leaving feedback because I feel it is my responsibility to share my good experiences with others when it comes to products and services. The same goes when I have bad experiences; I feel I owe it to warn other people to be wary of spending their hard-earned money on substandard products and services.
Reviews are useful for us consumers. Whenever I want to find out if a product or a service is of any good, I check for online reviews. I agree with you that more positive reviews is a good indication of quality products and services so it simply follows that we should be on the lookout for companies that are getting positive feedback.
Hi Mark,
You have done a good job, Online Reviews of Businesses can be very helpful in getting better rankings in search results. the more number of quality and positive reviews the higher rankings in SERP. I really appreciate your efforts in presenting this informative article on online reviews of businesses.
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