Isn’t it great to receive positive feedback from your customer, patient, or client? Whether in-person, in writing, or online, a happy customer reaffirms your reason for doing what you do. When posted online, these testimonials also serve to encourage and reassure potential new customers that you are the right choice, but they also bear even more power than that!

The reviews you receive online also serve as another instance of your name or your business name to be mentioned online. This is not only good for the ego, but it’s good for your positioning in the search engines. Generally speaking, the more “mentions” of your company online, the better your quality score is going to be, which positively links the keywords your business focuses on with your website. This is true from an organic standpoint (the fact that the keyword a person is searching for is actually related to your business),  but your positive reviews are also taken into account within Google’s algorithms that determine where you will appear, or your ranking (Moz 2015) .

When you take this into consideration, it becomes even more important to not only take advantage of the reviews you receive, but to increase the amount of reviews you receive. How do you do that? One of the key factors in receiving more reviews is ASKING the customer to do so. This can be done in person, after your business transaction is complete, via email or text message, on social media, and of course on your website. Using these platforms to simply ask for reviews from your customers can greatly increase the likelihood they will leave a review.

Another positive effect of having more positive reviews (other than the obvious) is they help drown out any negative reviews you might receive. Every business makes mistakes, has the occasional unreasonable customer or client, or falls victim to false negative reviews. As long as you have a steady stream of genuine reviews, potential customers see the presence of both positive and negative reviews as a sign of transparency and authenticity. Shoppers also take note of how negative reviews are handled, so it is also important to acknowledge and respond to reviews.

If you would like help increasing your volume of reviews, managing the promotion of those reviews, and monitoring/responding to the reviews you receive, reach out to Brady at Solutions Digital Marketing today!