Business owners can benefit in several ways by using Google Reviews. While there are several review websites that businesses can utilize to engage customers, such as TrustPilot, Capterra and Yelp, Google Reviews has unique features that make it worth your while. This article will provide background information on Google Reviews, so you can understand how you can use it to enhance traffic and sales.
What are Google Reviews?
Google Reviews or Google Review summaries, are reviews of your business, which are left on your Google My Business Page. You will have to claim your own Google My Business page in order to have shoppers talk about their experiences with your business by using this platform.
Since your Google My Business Page is a Google product, it automatically offers you several benefits that you won’t get with review sites that are not connected to Google. It is linked to Google Maps, which helps you to get traffic from people who are living and working in the area where your store is located. It is also linked to search, so even people from further away can more easily find your firm if you have a Google My Business page with several Google Reviews.
How do customers use Google Reviews?
Customers who have had a good experience with your brand can talk about it by using Google reviews. They will simply go to your Google My Business page and from there, they can share photos of handmade wooden toys that they found in your store or a meal that they enjoyed at your café. They can also talk about your excellent customer care and anything else that they enjoyed about doing business with you.
Other people who are interested in shopping at your store will often check Google reviews before they decide to visit your store or even make an online purchase. Over 60% of customers check Google Reviews before they do business with any organization. By establishing a foothold in your niche by getting positive Google Reviews from real shoppers, you’ll encourage more customers to seek you out for whatever they need.
Benefits of Google Reviews
Google Reviews help several aspects of your business to thrive. Whether you are a small , local business or a large enterprise that operates several stores across the state, you can benefit in the following ways by using Google Reviews:
- Boost your traffic from search engines
- Positively influence customers
- Engage with customers
- Improve clickthrough rates
Get More Traffic from Search
Every business wants more traffic and sales. Even if you are a non profit, you can use all the positive attention that your cause will get from positive reviews that are left on any site. Once you create a Google My Business page and get the word out to shoppers that they can talk about their experiences with your business, people will go there to share.
That automatically increases traffic to the page. As the page gains ratings and boosts, it sends positive signals to Google. The search engine keeps track of the ratings that your business gets and will adjust your rankings accordingly. If you are getting a lot of positive rankings, you will increase your visibility in search as a direct result of that.
Google aims to recognize those businesses that try to engage their customers. Even if you’re just starting out online, when you make the effort to create a Google My Business page, it helps to boost your ranking because it’s seen as a move to engage positively with your shoppers. A good review rating can help to push your business to the Google Local Pack.
The Google Local Pack gives information to people who are conducting local searches. For example, if you are offering auto repair services in Boise, Idaho, you will be featured among the top three results when searchers enter local search terms related to your niche. So, you can benefit a lot in terms of local search, if you get lots of positive Google Reviews.
Positively Influence Customers
It’s a fact of life that people are swayed by the opinions of others. If a friend says that they had a good experience at a shoe store, you’re more likely to check it out than a store where they were treated badly by sales staff. This bias towards shopping at stores that are spoken of in a positive way, extends towards businesses that are praised by people you don’t know directly. You trust that other human beings will have some sort of feedback that can help you to make a good decision.
At least 9% of customers regularly or occasionally have a look at online reviews in order to decide whether a local business is good or bad. That means even if a customer drives right by your store, 9 out of every hundred customers who do so will read a review on their phone or desktop before they do a transaction in your store. Google Reviews help to positively influence those shoppers.
Engage with Customers
Customer engagement is critical to the success of every business. In the past, business owners were able to walk around the store and talk to customers. That way, they would get to know what their needs were and ensure that their business was meeting those needs. In this digital age, you have to find other sways to engage your customers.
Google Reviews help you to respond to the concerns that your customers have. If you find, for example, that you’ve overlooked people who use mobility devices in some sections of your café, you can make adjustments. Google also responds positively by pushing your business up in the rankings when you quickly communicate with your customers and try to solve their problems.
Improve Click Through Rates
Businesses that have a high number of positive rates will have a high click through rate. This is because customers want to see what all the buzz is all about. If so many other people are getting good service or finding exactly what they want at your store, they will want to click and find out more.
Google Reviews vs Trustpilot, Facebook Reviews and Other Review Websites
Google Reviews makes it easy for a customer who is a big fan of your business, to leave their review in one place. They don’t have to go to several different sites to spread the word and they should not have to do that. You should have a dedicated URL of your own that they can visit, that’s just for leaving reviews.
In addition, Google Reviews are convenient to use. Customers do not have to create an account on a platform that they don’t normally engage others on. For example, some people may have decided to stop using Facebook for personal reasons or they may have never used Amazon reviews. With Google reviews, they can leave feedback on your business without signing up for accounts on sites that cater to several other businesses.
Sites like Trustpilot can be a good source of direct traffic to your business. This is because they get lots of searches every month from Google. For example, Trustpilot gets over 400 million searches every month from Google. Some people are already familiar with Trustpilot, Facebook and Yelp, so they will leave reviews there for that reason.
Facebook is an important social platform, so you can get a lot of social traffic via reviews on that platform. Like the other sites that compete with Google Reviews, their main advantage is in the comfort that they offer customers. Many people have a Facebook account and are comfortable making their voice heard on it. They are also probably already signed in, so it’s easy for them to leave a review quickly.
While Google Reviews may offer more benefits than reviews on sites such as Trustpilot, reviews on other sites are still important. This is because Google also looks at the reviews left on those sites in order to determine your business’ ranking. They can use keywords that appear in connection with your brand on multiple sties, to rank your business.
Despite that, Google Reviews are the most important reviews for you to have, because they significantly impact your search engine rankings. Google is the global leader in search and one of the most important sources of traffic for many businesses. Do anything that you can do to boost your Google rankings.
New Tools
One of the newest tools for Google My Business allows marketers and SEO practitioners to track all the Google Reviews related to their business in one place. They can also check the status of reviews that they reported to Google. For example, if you know that a competitor has somehow managed to leave a false or misleading Google review, you can ask for it to be taken down.
You can now easily track the progress of that request. Currently, there is a limit to the number of reviews that the tool will show you. In the future this should be adjusted to make it possible to monitor larger numbers of reviews.
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