Getting Ratings and Review from Clients
Ratings and reviews from your clients stand out in Google’s search results. They are featured prominently in search results. Plus, they can entice potential customers to check your business out. This will enhance conversions and improve your search engine rankings.
Do They Affect Rankings?
Google and Bing haven’t confirmed that they use reviews in helping them rank a website. But evidence showed otherwise. Studies found a correlation between ratings and positions
Should You Ask for Online Reviews?
This will depend on the review site. Yelp, for example, doesn’t encourage business owners to solicit reviews from their customers as the company thinks it jeopardizes the integrity of the site.
However, Google suggests website owners to remind their customers to leave their feedback on Google to help their businesses stand out from other sites.
How to Encourage Customers to Submit Their Reviews Online?
First, you need to look for review sites that provide unbiased reviews from actual customers. Then, make sure that you have read their terms and conditions so you know what you can and cannot do.
On your website, create a page with links to those review sites. Encourage people to visit that page by putting a button or a link on your web pages.
Or you could simply ask your clients to submit their reviews through email or by phone.
Offer 5-star Service
Some business owners want to receive five-star reviews yet they don’t offer high quality service that deserves such review or response from their customers.
Normal customers would only leave a review if they had a bad experience with the business or that they received good service and they want to help that business to flourish by leaving the best reviews.
If you do offer a five-star service, then encourage your customers to leave you a five-star review on those review sites. Apart from placing a page on your site with links to those review sites, it’s also ideal to create a landing page on your site with links to those review websites.
Having positive Google+ reviews is important but it’s not the only factor that you must consider to rank on Google local. Yelp, too, is a great source of referrals, especially to those local businesses. Bing Local utilizes the reviews from Yelp in their rating scale.
Google doesn’t just use Google+ in analyzing reviews. Rather, it uses third-party review sites in creating aggregated review score that can somehow affect your local search ranking.
