Four Reasons Customer Reviews Improve Your Business
You might be a business owner, but if you’re like eighty percent of the rest of the population you’re also an online consumer. So you probably know that in the modern online world saturated with clickbait, sponsored articles, and other potentially unreliable sources, trusting businesses you come across online can be difficult.
Horror stories and personal negative online shopping experiences have left modern consumers automatically skeptical of every online business they stumble upon while surfing the web. If your business isn’t a well-known brand name that already has millions of other online shoppers vouching for its legitimacy, potential customers who visit your site are unlikely to trust it at face value. Just because you claim your products or services are high-quality and your business is reliable doesn’t mean that your potential customers will believe it. And chances are, they probably won’t. So how do you prove the worthiness of your business to potential online customers if you’re not as established as, say, Amazon or Macy’s? The answer is through customer reviews. Online shoppers rely heavily on each other’s testimonies for reassurance that the products or services they’re about to buy live up to your website’s descriptions of them. Collecting a wide base of customer reviews on your website can do wonders for your business’s online reputation and significantly increase your online consumers. In fact, more than seventy percent of online shoppers report increased trust for businesses that feature positive customer reviews on their website. So how do customer reviews actually improve your business?
1. They Improve Your SEO
Most business owners rank search engine optimization as one of their highest priorities when it comes to online marketing and promotion. That high prioritization of SEO is for good reason. If online shoppers aimlessly surfing the Internet aren’t able to easily access your article using top search engines, specifically, Google—your site will gain very little traffic. Successful search engine optimization is one of the best and most effective ways to drive high amounts of traffic to your website. That’s why Internet-savvy business owners are constantly scrambling to improve their SEO techniques and come out on top when it comes to jumping through the hoops of Google’s ever-changing algorithm. Google’s algorithms become more complex all the time, making it increasingly difficult for online business owners to gain significant traffic by using tried and true SEO techniques. So don’t pass up an opportunity to improve your SEO. Customer reviews—positive and negative ones—of your business’ products or services are good news when it comes to SEO ranking. Every review that you receive from one of your past customers equals one time that the name of your business is published publicly online. Oftentimes, what other people have to say about your business means much more to search engines than what you have to say about it. The more your business is talked about by other Internet users,—namely your customers through their online reviews—the higher your website will rank on top search engines like Google and the more traffic your site will receive.
2. They Increase Your Conversion Rate
Every online business owner knows that one of the most frustrating struggles of owning an Internet-based business is converting people who visit your site into paying customers who buy products or services from you. It doesn’t matter how high your site ranks on Google and how many Internet users click onto your website per day. If your website can’t entice those who visit it enough to turn a high percentage of them into paying customers, the amount of traffic you receive is useless. When you’re trying to build up a customer base for your online business, a low conversion rate can be extremely frustrating and make any online business owner feel helpless. Customer reviews can make or break your conversion rate. Having a large number of reviews from past customers published on your website sets you apart from other online businesses who have to stay afloat based on their own testimony. The statistics don’t lie. More than eighty percent of avid online shoppers agree that they are more likely to make an online purchase if they are able to find accessible customer reviews for the product or service they want to buy.
3. They Improve Your Trustworthiness Through User-Generated Content
If you’re similar to other online business owners, you probably worry that a few negative online reviews from past customers will plummet your business’ success. On the contrary, online customer reviews improve your trustworthiness as a business whether they are negative or positive. Potential customers are much more likely to trust real people who vouch for your business’ products and services than they are to accept your advertisements at face value. In fact, user-generated content like customer reviews are so important when it comes to the trustworthiness of your business that more than ninety percent of online consumers look to customer reviews for help before deciding whether or not to make a purchase. We live in a clickbait and scam-saturated world. At this point in time, you have to assume that any potential customer who visits your website is going to have some level of skepticism about the legitimacy of your business and the quality of the products and services you advertise. Customer reviews can change their minds and transform potential customers into paying customers.
4. They Help You Keep Up With Consumers
Last but certainly not least, customer reviews help you change, develop, and grow as a business. Businesses that remain completely static in the products and services they offer and the marketing strategies they employ are not likely to find lasting success in the modern world where online shopping methods and habits constantly evolve. If you want your business to remain successful for the long haul, you need to be willing to really listen to what your past customers have to say. Even if they don’t always say exactly what you want to hear, testimonies from your customers help you evolve as a business. They give you a better chance of keeping up in the fast-paced world of online shopping where it’s so easy to fall too far behind.