Why are Good Business Reviews so Important?
You’re always going to need good business reviews. Being part of the online world as a business comes with more than just having a good website or making regular posts on social media. Both of these things help people find your company, but there’s much more to it than that. In addition to potential customers being able to find you, you want them to also want to go to your website or call for your service. Most people determine whether or not they’re interested in a service by checking online reviews.
Before the internet, you pretty much had to take a leap of faith or rely on word of mouth when it came to using a new product or service, but the internet and it’s endless amounts of information have changed that. You can look up any business and find out what past customers thought about it. Whether it’s a restaurant, marketing company, mechanic, financial advisor, or lawyer you can find reviews and opinions on their services somewhere online. This fact makes having reviews available to your potential customers a vital part of bringing in new business.
Having a good amount of reviews easily accessible online is good for a number of reasons:
1. It allows potential customers to get an idea of whether or not you have what they need before they even look at your website, and people like to be able to figure that out ahead of time. Everything is about speed, and it’s faster for someone to make a determination based on a few three sentence reviews than it is for them to spend twenty minutes searching your website for what they’re looking for.
2. It allows potential customers to see both the good and not so good aspects of your company. The reason this is a good thing is because it prepares them for how your business functions. They can decide they see things they just don’t want to deal with or they can decide that the good outweighs the bad. In the latter situation there is less of a chance they’ll be surprised or outraged if they come in contact with one of the lesser aspects of your business.
3. Doing something like endorsing your reviews or offering a place for customers to do reviews puts potential customers at ease. This shows them that you’re not hiding something or trying to scam them. You allow your customers to express their feelings about your services where the whole word can see them. This is one of the biggest reasons a person is more likely to use a company they’re able to read reviews on than a company they can’t.
How do you get Good Business Reviews?
Encouraging your customers to review your performance is one of the best ways to ensure that reviews for your company are easily found online. This is also a good way to get a higher percentage of positive reviews. But, how do you go about doing this? There are a few good strategies for getting reviews online. Here are a few:
1. Hand out review cards: After a customer has purchased a product or service from you, give them a card with your contact information and a way to review your performance. If you’re a business that has ongoing appointments with your customers or clients, putting the review information on the back of an appointment card is even more effective. That way the review information will be on something that most people are likely to keep track of and see often.
2. Use a QR code as well as a URL on your review cards: If you simply give people a URL they are much less likely to use it. Why? Because, people are less likely to do something if there is more work involved. Typing in a URL at their home computer or on their cell phone browser is much more work than simply using their phone or tablet to scan a QR code. Including both will ensure that a higher percentage of people actually participate in a review.
3. Use a trusted and popular review tool: Using something like Google reviews will not only help get more reviews, but it will also help your reviews to show up in search results. People are more likely to supply a review to a site that is well known, those are the same sites that are more likely to show up when your business is searched. Google reviews is great because it’s part of their rich snippets package. This means when your company is searched on Google your review rating will show up right there in any search result your company comes up in. (They appear alongside Google authorship and the summary of your website)
Good business reviews are a huge part of having a complete internet presence as a business or company. This will help drive traffic to your website, bring in new customers, and build your brand name. All of those developments lead to your company growing and bringing in more money.
If you’d like more information on how to get good business reviews, check out the resources we have available on our resource page or contact us to talk about it.
