Realizing how important customer sentiment is to searchers, business directories often incorporate customer reviews into their websites. We encourage all of our clients to be in the habit of asking satisfied customers to leave them a positive review on their Google Plus Local page for a few important reasons. They improve conversion rates, rankings, and they offset the potential negative reviews have to harm your business.

Positive Reviews Improve Conversion Rates

Take a look at the screen capture of some Google search results to the right. If you were the searcher, who would you call first? In this case, the business listed in 3rd place immediately wins the lion’s share of attention, despite the fact that they are two spots below the top result. Now, imagine if this business had 7 Google reviews with an average rating of one star instead of five.

The point here is that reviews are powerful — even more powerful than rankings within reason. If you have more positive reviews than your competitors, you will get a larger piece of the pie.

Positive Reviews Improve Rankings

In addition to increasing conversion rates, the quantity and quality of your business’ reviews contributes to your businesses overall relevance, as viewed by search engines. The more positive reviews you have, the more you’re helping your search engine optimization services to work for you.

Positive Reviews Offset Negative Reviews

By making your business as visible as possible on the internet, we open the doors of opportunity for more customers to find you. And, as discussed above, positive customer reviews being visible to potential customers can have a dramatic impact on the business you get from the internet. On the other hand, this increased visibility also gives any dissatisfied customers a captive audience to share any negative experiences they have had with your company.

Whether you like it or not, reviews are your potential customers’ most reliable means of evaluating the quality of your products or services on the internet. I say, “whether you like it or not”, because customer reviews suffer from some major shortfalls — the biggest being that unless you are soliciting positive reviews from satisfied customers, dissatisfied customers are the most likely people to voice their opinion about your business. For this reason, the only winning strategy for a business on the internet is to be in the habit of always asking satisfied customers to leave you a positive review.

Potential customers understand that every once in a while, a customer will be unsatisfied. If they see that positive reviews overwhelmingly outnumber any negatives, they won’t be overly affected by the negative ones. In addition, some platforms, such as Google Plus Local, allow business owners to publish a public response to any negative review. In this way, you can show your customers that you genuinely care about each customer’s satisfaction.