There are a multitude of components that determine where a company’s website will fall on a search engine results inventory. Optimizing your website’s rank can increase viewers and ultimately attract potential customers.
Today, customer reviews play a crucial role in online visibility. Service recommendations are just as essential as product reviews; customers compare the interpersonal skills, quality of work, and complaints from business to business. If the volume and ratings on your company’s online profile are both high, you’ll find your information creeping up the search engine result inventory and more customers contacting your business.
Here, we will discuss how customer reviews not only can establish a business’s online presence, but also increase traffic and the number of prospective clients. Finally, we will provide you with techniques to build a multitude of strong reviews for your small business.
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Why Are Online Reviews Important?
Online reviews are essential for many reasons. Building a website or social media platform serves as an informative resource to potential clients. While the information you provide can help their decision-making process, the customer will realize that the glowing illustration of your companies mission and services was self-created. Of course, your website, along with any of your competitor’s pages, will paint their company in the best possible light.
Online reviews, on the other hand, offer consumers a more realistic perspective of a business or service. Hopefully, the majority are positive, but a business owner should be aware that people put slightly more trust in the reviews of their fellow consumers than a company website. Search engines will be able to see that you have reviews on your website and on various other sites too, which helps improve your ranking.
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Reviews and High Search Authority Sites
From the range of customer review sites, ensure your customers are completing follow-ups on search engines considered “high authority sites,” such as Google, Yelp, Angie’s List, and the Better Business Bureau. The reviews listed on high authority sites will create better search engine rankings than reviews on miscellaneous websites.
Of course, there are factors other than reviews that leading search engines such as Google use to determine site rankings. Making your company reviews a low priority, however, is never wise when establishing an online presence.
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How to Get Reviews
Building in (pardon the pun) a consistent time in your customer communication process to ask for a review makes it easy to manage the delivery of great customer feedback for the search engines to digest. Purchasing fake reviews or making up your own can be detrimental to your business initiatives. Review sites have instilled strict regulations to prevent falsified ratings, and many can pick out a fake review easily. Such reports will be deleted, and your site risks being penalized in search results.
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Timing Is Important
Your clients are more likely to leave a review immediately after you’ve finished their construction project, as opposed to doing it weeks later. Encourage them to do so; shining, detailed reviews are more probable if the project is still fresh in the consumer’s mind. Consider emailing your client a link to “let you know how you did” when you wrap up a project.
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Ask
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with asking someone to leave honest feedback. Asking for high marks might be overdone, but typically customers will respond to a three-minute request for input on Yelp. Again, gentle email reminders can be extremely beneficial.
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Provide Instructions
If you send out an email, provide clients with a direct link, or list of instructions, on how to leave feedback. If they’re required to create a profile first, include that detail and provide further directions. Make sure the links, emails, and sites you send out offer payment free reviews and are not plagued with spam.
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Keep it Simple
On top of direct links to the review site, including one that directs customers to your company’s page can be beneficial. This way, when composing a review, your clients can toggle between sources effortlessly.
Trying to build up your page rank in local searches requires a lot of work, especially if there are a number of construction companies in the area. As with many of the tasks a small business owner has to do, you’ll need to devote some time to get reviews from your clients. The impact, though, is well worth it.
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