Why Do You Need Reviews on Your Website For Your Small Business?
Why Do You Need Reviews on Your Website For Your Small Business?
As a business owner, you need to have educative, compelling, and authoritative content on your business website explaining why customers should trust your products or services.
However, with the short attention span, your content might not be the ultimate solution. That's why you need customer reviews. Many positive business reviews and testimonials represent social proof that other people trust your products. Therefore, your traffic will convert into customers unconsciously and very quickly.
Why Do You Need Reviews on Your Website?
As you already know, customers consider various aspects before making online purchases. Brand preferences, word-of-mouth marketing, and advertising are critical in buying decisions. However, very few of these factors are more influential than social proof. In fact, 94% of customers believe feedback plays a central role in their buying decisions. However, besides attracting more customers to your online store, customer reviews offer additional benefits, as discussed below.
1. Validates Your Products
Everyone in the business environment wants validation of their products. That's why there are unending and creative marketing approaches to persuade customers. Unfortunately, customers tend to trust the testimonies and views of their peers more than marketing messages. When you've customers to vouch for your products, you'll always be ahead of the industrial competition.
2. Improves Your SEO Ranking
In the competitive online space, every company wants to rank on the first page of the search engines. The higher you rank; the more accessible customers will find your brand and products. Having customer-generated content (reviews) will increase the freshness score, a measure that search engines use to rank websites. This will increase organic traffic, average session rate, and click-through rates. Additionally, social proof will highlight your product's features and save you from direct marketing, which has the potential to turn away potential customers.
3. Creates and Sustains Trust
More customers will trust what you're offering and want to stick around when you have credible business feedback. You're exploiting previous customers' marketing and advertising prowess using online reviews. You have enough evidence to show that other customers trust and value your products, and there are enough reasons other customers need to trust your products too.
4. Improves Your Business
You're constantly improving your business, and customers provide an opportunity to understand your business from an outsider's perspective. You can quickly learn your hits and misses from the online feedback and concentrate on optimizing your strengths while eliminating the existing gaps. Remember, you want to meet your customers' expectations, so you must listen to their feedback. Listening and acting on customer feedback ultimately leads to enhanced customer satisfaction, experience, and increased conversion rates.
What Are Customer Reviews Best Practices?
Getting reviews from sites like Facebook, Google, Yelp, TripAdvisor, and Trustpilot might be challenging. However, it's essential to indicate that the real challenge is managing feedback on your site. Poor handling of business reviews can water down your efforts and send your business into an uncontrollable downward spiral. So, how can you manage your business reviews?
1. Respond to Every Review
Responding to online reviews demonstrates you're proactively paying attention to what customers say about your business. It's practically impossible to respond to thousands of feedbacks, but you should try to respond to most of them, especially negative ones. Most customers want to be heard and will probably change their opinion when you engage them.
2. Observe Professionalism
It's common to defend your business through aggressive and hostile approaches. This is a dangerous review management strategy that can turn away potential customers. You need to maintain professionalism and listen to your customers. You should focus on offering a remedy to all the complaints that customers are raising. Arguing and providing a lengthy explanation will only add to the damage the review has caused your business.
3. Craft Original Responses
In the world of technology, it's common for organizations to introduce automated review replies on their websites. Others may opt for a standard response approach that appears in almost all feedback. This is a dangerous trend that may turn away customers. Therefore, you need to craft original responses that address the specific challenges that customers are facing. You want your customers to know that you read their feedback and take time to address their issues in a personalized way.
4. Track Business Reviews
It might be expensive, but you must track online reviews daily. They appear first on the search engine, which means they carry much more weight than you think. Your social media managers should track every positive and negative review and respond immediately. You don't want negative reviews to pile up for a month without addressing them, as this would be a crisis of a considerable magnitude that you may struggle to manage. It's advisable to use review management software to consolidate all reviews on a single interface for easier tracking and management.
How Can You Increase Business Reviews?
As you've seen, there's no getting away from reviews if you want your business to succeed. Also, the days of spamming and buying online reviews are long gone. You need to have legitimate strategies to attract reviews to your business. Besides offering high-quality products and enhancing customer satisfaction, here are some creative approaches you can use to increase your reviews.
Proactively request positive reviews from your customers
Reward customers who review your business through discounts and gifts
Post on customer support forums
Request business reviews on events
Ask customers for offline reviews
Make the business review process seamless
Run email campaigns
Create your profile on review sites
How Can Siguro Assist Your Business?
As a small business owner, you might not know how to go about online reviews. However, your business needs such reviews to attract customers through social proof and listen to their complaints. That's where Siguro comes in. We design a website for your online presence where potential customers can contact your business, buy your products, and, most importantly, post their reviews.
Book a call with me to get a website.
