Your online reputation will play a crucial role in your online success, and it’s more important than ever to give value to the opinions posted by your customers. According to research carried out by Marketing Land, 90% of consumers have said that online reviews play a significant role in their buying decisions. 88% of today’s consumers trust online reviews just as much as a personal recommendation. What you may not realize is that reviews are also one of the most important factors when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO). Read on to find out more about the impact reviews have on click through in PPC (Pay Per Click) and SEM (Search Engine Marketing).
Receive Noticeable Star Ratings
When star review ratings appear in Google search results, potential customers can quickly decide whether they feel they can trust what you have to offer enough to click through to your website/landing page. This increases traffic, and potentially sales, however, its not necessarily an easy task to achieve. Google uses third party review sites to help establish your star rating. You need to have received at least 30 unique reviews over the past year, with the rating averaging 3.5 stars or higher. Since star ratings can result in increased conversion rates, it’s worth your while to find out more about how to take advantage of them, as well as Googles guidelines regarding how to be eligible.
Reviews Generate Fresh, User Generated Content
Unique content is king when it comes to search engine ranking and reviews are the perfect form of user generated content (UGC). User generated content is one of the easiest and most effective ways to drive unique, original content for your website, and you can bet that your target audience will want to read honest reviews from your previous customers.
Increase Long Tail Keyword Traffic
Because consumers that leave reviews are buyers of your products/services, the language they use is comparable to your target audiences. As a result, a steady flow of reviews will make it possible for you to target more traffic via relevant keywords right from your own customers.
Encourage Social Interaction
Incorporating reviews into your social media strategy as a way to prove the quality of our products or services. Showcasing a collection of impressive reviews on your Facebook business page will help your product or service gain in popularity, increasing the all-important social reach, ultimately generating more sales.
Google Favors Highly Rated Websites
Google takes a website’s ratings into consideration, favoring the ones with the highest ratings. Reviews enhance authority and social proof, meaning that its not just about including reviews on your website, you also need to concentrate on finding ways to improve them.
Online Reviews and Local SEO
Local search engines are all about online reviews and for one primary reason – consumers appreciate and rely on online reviews to make their buying decisions. Local SEO is focused on providing consumers with fast, accurate information that they can use immediately or in the future.
If youre not doing this yet, its time to make reviews a part of your online marketing and SEO efforts, improving click throughs in PPC and SEM, ultimately increasing revenue.
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