Do Google Reviews Help SEO? How You Can Leverage Customer-Generated Content
Mostly everyone has seen or heard of Google and has read reviews for various entities, including movies, TV shows, books, recipes, places, restaurants, products, brands, and more.
Anything that has an identity and usability or utility will most probably have consumer or user reviews and ratings posted on Google. There are Google reviews for phones, apps, tools, eStores, service websites, and more.
Now, if you own a business, you have to know about this third-party evaluation and others because Google reviews can potentially make your brand stand out against the competition. When you get a ton of reviews, it is like an increase in publicity, and people see you more without ad costs – free advertising!
What is a Google Review?
Google reviews are customer or user opinions or personal evaluatory statements about an entity or subject. So you evaluate something and write about it on Google.
Two Ways Google Displays Reviews
There are two ways by which Google displays reviews, and to understand both of them, you must know how a “snippet” works.
A snippet is one result in a set of search results.
It generally consists of a title, URL, and the description of a page. It features the main point of a more extended version and shows its origin.
- When Google displays a review as a Critic Review, it takes a snippet from a longer review article that an editor wrote, curated, or compiled for a publishing entity.
- On the other hand, for Review Snippets, Google takes a snippet of a review or rating from a website that features reviews. For this way of display, Google shows the average of combined rating scores from reviewers on the website.
These snippets appear in Google Search results. You can either find them under the search result or on the Google Knowledge Panels area.
Indeed, as a business owner, you should concern yourself with how these reviews make an impact on your reputation and position in rankings. They can impact how you fare against your competitors.
So do reviews matter in terms of SEO?
Yes. Google Reviews genuinely matter in terms of your eCommerce SEO efforts.
Remember that Google and other search engines do not only listen to you and index what you say about yourself and your products on your website. Google also listens to what customers and other audiences have to say about you.
Google reviews are one of the most excellent direct channels for your company’s customer feedback. These reviews are critical to your SEO strategy.
When you use Google reviews to gather customer-made content, you add leverage to your SEO and digital marketing efforts.
Here’s how Google Reviews boost your business’s reputation and brand.
- When customers constantly provide relevant content about your business, they demonstrate that your website is active. These customer conversations effectively show that people are talking to you and about you.
- These reviews naturally shape your brand’s primary SEO attributes by providing usage and confirmation of keywords, links, and titles. They essentially build links without requiring your effort.
- Google reviews effectively provide content that improves your brand messaging through the use of words that the customers prefer to see.
- The content also boosts your presence on social media. As customers use related hashtags, share, like, or comment, the content they provide points back to you, your brand and your website.
Leverage Google Reviews!
Hence, you have to take advantage of these reviews and consider the entire process as a vital part of your search engine optimization efforts.
Google reviews impact your brand in a way that they can bring additional traffic from search engines. The traffic, in turn, generates interest in your products and services, increasing sales and revenue as a result.
Responding to Reviews
One of the best ways that you can do to help continue the flow of reviews is to respond to feedback.
When you respond, your customers will feel valued and will come to love your brand more. Also, you make them feel relevant, prompting them to return the favour in terms of loyalty and conversions.
Other Ways to Leverage Reviews
You can also use reviews for your CRO.
Customers are your products’ end-users, and they are the ones who truly know the value of what you offer. So you can pick out the positive things of value that they say about your products, furnish them, and use them in your copy.
Also, it would be best if you displayed actual reviews on your product pages. Doing so helps people shopping in your eStore to automatically see how others value your products – they won’t have to go and search product x reviews just to see evidence of value.
Putting reviews on your pages also shows your confidence in your products’ reputation and quality.
So, you will need to track your reputation by finding reviews about your brand and products.
The good news is that there are excellent tools online that you can use to effectively study how your name fairs in the market.
7 Tools to Monitor Reviews and Reputation
- Google Alerts
- Bing
- Social Mention
- Reputology
- Birdeye
- ReviewPush
- SentiOne
A Common Problem
Now here’s something that most business owners like you often experience.
Sometimes you find that doing SEO and other hyper-technical work on your website takes a bit away from your passion for your product and how you are helping to fill gaps in your chosen niche community.
Other times, you could find yourself stretched thin and trying hard to juggle tasks like product development, operations, personnel management and development, quality assurance, and more. Then, digital marketing work comes knocking at your door and asks for a big chunk of your already depleted attention.
There are also instances when you are product-inclined rather than digital marketing-inclined, and you have to take a significant amount of time and effort to learn the ropes of digital marketing, SEO, CRO, and everything in between.
If any or all of those examples are your problem, don’t despair. You can always outsource.
The best outsourcing you can get is a team of senior SEO and digital marketing professionals.
With KAMG, you will be backed up by a team of experts, with each member having a speciality that pinpoints detailed parts of the technical work needed to be done.
Leveraging Google Review for SEO Can be Easy
You can get the most benefits out of Google reviews if you have the proper personnel.
Invest in your reviews as they can almost effortlessly guarantee continuous leads, increased market authority, and, eventually, conversions and revenue that can take your business to the next level.
FAQs
How do I maximise user reviews?
First, you should display user reviews for your products on the product pages of your eCommerce website.
Also, you should look for the best things of value that your customers say about your products and use the ideas for your promotional and advertorial copy.
Should I avoid bad reviews?
Bad reviews are generally bad for your business. One person who experiences something bad with your brand can tell at least thirteen people about the event – this can stop them from even considering you.
However, as normal as it is, you will have bad reviews.
The good thing about them is that their existence makes people know that your reviews are not too good to be true.
Also, you can use them to find out if you are doing something wrong. And you can use that information to improve your products and business in general.
How do I make sure that I have Google reviews?
The easiest way is to make sure that your business is properly tagged on Google Maps and that you have a page on your website that Google can crawl for your information.
And when you see your business profile on the right side of the search results page when you Google your business, supply any missing information. Also, click “own this business” and let Google help you through it.
Also, find a way to link with review websites.
The best way to link is getting marketing linking services from an agency like KAMG.
How do I get excellent reviews?
Getting excellent reviews on Google and other platforms is simple: make remarkable products and have good customer service.
No matter how good you market, if your products and services are lousy, you won’t have anyone say anything good about you.
Should I buy reviews?
No.
People today are significantly discerning and Google is already smart enough to distinguish fake reviews from authentic ones.
Should I consider YouTube comments?
Yes.
One of the best practices you can do to get more action for your business is to upload videos that show how to use your products and what are their other applications. These videos will show the value of your products.
For example, if you sell a food item, maybe post how-to-cook videos featuring your product.
By doing so, you will see comments from people who have tried your product or the recipe that you taught in the video. These comments are considered authentic user reviews that you can have many benefits from.
