Increase Visibility & do more with Customer Reviews

Customer reviews and ratings are  one of the most  effective ways of  increasing the popularity and conversion of your products and services. Reviews/testimonials from customers, which were earlier a good thing to have, is now a must have.

With Social media using customer reviews/ratings as one of their key ways of influencing and converting potential customers, reviews and ratings are the way to go. Not only has social media made it easy for your customers to rate, review a product or service almost instantly, it has also made it easy for you to respond promptly, and manage negative feedback.

How can you as a business owner make the most of your customer reviews and ratings?

1. By continuing to encourage your customers to send you their reviews/feedback and including their reviews and testimonials on your website on a regular basis.

2. By putting up pictures provided by your customers.

3. Video recordings, if they are from your customers, are the best visual testimonial for your products/services, and are therefore extremely effective.

4. Being vigilant and proactive in responding to a feedback in a timely and sensitive way will do wonders for your business. A negative feedback can be an opportunity to win back your customer’s confidence.

5. Displaying third party reviews of your products and services from Yelp, Google local, Maps, on your website is another every effective way of increasing the popularity of your products and services (because these reviews are from third party sites and not directly sought by you!)

The important thing to remember is to ensure that these reviews are not marked up in the structured data and schema. Only the reviews directly coming to your website can be included in the structured mark up, else you may get penalized by Google for duplicate content!

Reviews are here to stay. Never before have businesses had this kind of opportunity of  interacting with their customers and potential customers so easily. Since it is natural for aggrieved customers to post more often than happy ones…it is therefore critical that you are proactively involved in responding and sorting any issues and concerns that your customers may have. Not only will it help in regaining the trust of your existing customers, it will help you in attracting new ones:)