How Online Reviews Help SEO and Google Rankings

Online reviews are great for a lot of things, but they have an incredibly important role to play in your local search marketing strategy. Online reviews can influence customer purchase decisions, grow your online reputation in the marketplace, and increase repeat customer visits. Furthermore, ORM services are quickly becoming one of the most important retail marketing channels out there as 58% of consumers now read them before making a buying decision.

So how do you use online reviews as part of your SEO and Google ranking efforts?

1) Online Reviews Help You Rank Higher

There’s no doubt that positive consumer feedback—and negative consumer feedback—have a direct impact on where companies rank organically (i.e., without doing any paid advertising). A company that provides a great customer experience will likely receive positive reviews, and a company that has lousy customer service is more likely to get negative feedback online.

So how can you quantify the relationship between review content and SEO efforts? Online review platform BrightLocal recently conducted a study analyzing 10,000 companies across 50 different locations. They found that over 70% of businesses with 5-star ratings rank in the top 3 search results on Google for their keywords, while only 2% rank in the bottom three search results. In contrast, 90% of businesses with an overall rating of 2 stars or lower ranked in the top three organic rankings – while just under 1% ended up ranking in the lowest page one results.

2) Online Reviews Help Increase Brand Visibility

Another benefit of online reviews is that they help increase brand visibility. Online review sites like Google, Yelp, and TripAdvisor are all high-traffic websites, and when your business has a good rating and some customer feedback to share, you can expect to see a significant increase in website visits.

3) Online Reviews Help Combat Negative SEO

Unfortunately, one of the risks of doing business online is the potential for negative SEO – that is, someone deliberately trying to hurt your business’s search engine rankings by posting negative content about you online. Online reviews can be a powerful tool in combating negative SEO, as they provide an easy way for potential customers to learn more about your company and what others have had to say about their experiences.

Overall, online reviews are an important part of any local search marketing strategy. By optimizing your review content and taking advantage of the various benefits that online reviews offer, you can help improve your SEO and Google ranking efforts while also increasing brand visibility and combating negative SEO.

Online reviews are great for a lot of things. They can help influence customer purchase decisions, grow your reputation in the marketplace, and increase repeat customer visits. Additionally, they’re quickly becoming one of the most important retail marketing channels out there.

If you haven’t focused on getting more online reviews for your business yet, it’s time to start — especially if you want to improve your search engine ranking results (SERPs). While this may seem daunting at first, note that the process is much easier than trying to rank organically without positive feedback from satisfied customers. Online reviews serve as third-party verification that helps businesses have an edge over competitors in engine results pages.

Here’s how reviews can impact your search engine results:

Online reviews help Google and other search engines understand what you do better than you can explain it in a keyword-optimized description or meta tag. Just like people use reviews to find out more information about the businesses they want to do business with, search engines look at reviews for insights on what type of service or product is offered, who offers it, where you operate from, and whether customers are happy (or not). Online reviews determine how high (or low) you rank in SERPs based on relevancy and quality of feedback.

Online reviews provide third-party social proof that positively impacts click-through rates (CTR) and conversion rates (CVR). Online reviews have a direct impact on CTR and CVR. Online customers are looking for other people’s opinions before making a purchase decision, so if your business has few or no online reviews at all, you’re likely to get little to no clicks from local search engine results pages.

Online reviews help build trust with potential customers who consider your company among their top choices in SERPs. Potential customers will be more inclined to use the services of a brand after reading positive feedback from other users. Online reviews demonstrate that your business is reliable and dependable, which makes it easier for a customer to make a purchase decision knowing they’ll be looked after by an established, credible enterprise. If you don’t have any online reviews, you could be losing out on valuable business.

The best way to get started with online reviews is to claim your business listing on Google My Business and other review sites. From there, make it easy for customers to leave feedback by providing links on your website, in email signatures, and on social media profiles. Respond to all reviews (positive or negative), regardless of how much time it takes, and always do your best to resolve any complaints.

Positive online reviews are a valuable asset for local businesses — make the most of them!