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Online Business Reviews – Are They Worth It?

matt-willson
By Matt Willson
6th March 2016

Google Reviews, Trustpilot, Reevoo, Reviews.co.uk – there are plenty of ways for your customers to leave reviews for your business online.  It’s good business practice to follow up with customers after a sale, but is there any additional benefit – especially when it comes to search optimisation and conversion?

The benefits to search visibility

  • Reviews mean fresh, unique content – which is especially useful for eCommerce sites that sell commodities, where your product description may well be the same as the competition
  • Using the right code to display your reviews means more chance of getting the review stars appearing on search results – which means more visual standout and more screen space is owned by your site on the search page
  • Getting customers to review your business on your Google My Business listing can help your ranking in the “local pack” of local search results that appear above the other non-paid search results
  • Click through from search results showing reviews through to your website improves by 10-20%, say Distilled

The benefits to conversion

  • Reevoo say that conversion increases by 4.6% on products that show reviews…
  • … and that online reviews as a whole produce an 18% increase in sales
  • And – here’s the odd one, that actually makes sense – Reevoo say bad reviews improve conversion by 67% (the psychology being that of appearing more honest and trustworthy)

How to get reviews

  • The simple route is to use review provider (Trustpilot, Reevoo, Reviews.co.uk are some examples), whose independence can help with trust from the potential purchaser. They take care of it all, and you just need to hook into their system to draw the results into your website
  • Doing it yourself? Have a sales process that includes a follow up email to the customer.  Make someone in your business the owner of getting reviews, and incentivise them.

To make the customer more likely to respond…

  • … offer an incentive, such as a discount to any further purchases
  • … and make it simple – provide a link that takes them direct to the reviews page, if possible with as much information pre-populated as possible
  • And the best route – be a great company, selling a great product

How do we do it at Aubergine?

We don’t sell online, and the most impact a review will have is before a potential customer has learned much about us.  This means getting review stars on search results, rather than on our website.

So we target getting reviews on our Google My Business listing – meaning anyone searching for a web or graphic designer locally sees us at the top of the local search listings, with our reviews front and centre (current score: 4.9 out of 5). Same for anyone who searches for us by name – our Google My Business listing with the reviews comes right up.

We follow up within 2 days of when a piece of work is done, and we provide a link direct to our review box on Google My Business. It’s all run by our Business Development Director, Mark Nesbitt.

So are reviews worth it?

Yes. From the very simple principle that “something measured is something improved”, to increased search visibility and conversion to enquiry / sale, the extra effort in getting and displaying reviews is more than offset by the return on the money and time invested.