Reviews: Do they really matter to get found online?

When you search for a restaurant, a service, or even a pizza delivery, do you look at the reviews? Most of us do. It’s the same with your own business, so is it time you thought about how reviews affect your own search ranking?

Let’s go back to the most powerful form of marketing, word of mouth. If you think about it, reviews on search engines and websites are a bit like this, albeit online. Google and other search engines wade through the internet to find a user the best service or product in the fastest way possible. For you to keep using their service, they want to present the best information. Sounds similar? It’s the same goal! We all want the best information and answers to our searches. Reviews are similar and can be viewed as crowdsourced recommendations.

When you enter a local search term into search engines like Google e.g. ‘Pizza near me’, three points will affect the ranking of each site displayed:

• Relevance: how relevant is the search, e.g. does it have pizza and your location in the title

• Distance: is the pizza place near where you are located, instead of in India or the USA?

• Prominence: how popular is the local business across the web and offline, e.g. has the pizza place been featured in the local news, on blogs, on social media?

Your reviews will slot into this mix as a trustworthy source of information and have a lot to do with where your business ranks.

An optimised Google and search engine listing can help increase your visibility, especially when your business information on all websites also matches. Google will also look at the quality, frequency and recency of the reviews, so increasing your reviews will keep you near the top.

Remember, one bad review won’t cause you to drop to number 1,000 in the rankings. It’s more to do with the nature of the reviews – was it a simple mistake or a really bad review? Google will take this into consideration, so it’s always recommended that you reply to ALL reviews, good, bad and indifferent.

In Summary:

Google reviews in particular can affect your site’s position on search engine results pages because they influence how Google evaluates your relevance for local searches. 

We can help you manage your online reviews and ratings.

Taking control of your reviews, ranking, social media and off-site SEO it’s called ‘online reputation management’. It can be fiddly to do, to control everything about your business, everywhere.

Did you know that our new Sonar product can help you control all of that in one dashboard? So when your number changes, you won’t have to worry about updating 40 areas, or remembering to check Bing as well as Trustpilot for your reviews. Control them all in one place. Thank us later when those leads come in.

So don’t get left behind and lose out on vital business. Talk to us today about how SEO and Sonar can work together to improve your website and boost your overall online presence.

Enter your details to find out more and arrange a quick demo.