How Can Customer Reviews Help SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the center of an online business. It is how you increase the quality and quantity of traffic to your business or website via organic search engine results. Many business owners invest large funds, time, and effort to get their business to rank higher. Usually, SEO involves inbound links, content creation, and much more. So, it might surprise you to learn that customer reviews can help you with SEO.

When it comes to customer reviews, most business owners don’t like to get into it. Customer reviews are hard to acquire and even when you have clients who leave reviews, you have to worry about those who drop bad ones. As an online business owner, you must know other customers depend on your existing reviews to guide them in a decision to buy from you. In fact, statistics show 92% of customers read online reviews and another 68% will trust your business more if they find online reviews from other customers. These reviews function as peer-to-peer talk in your internet marketing campaign. They help customers speak to each other rather than worry about trusting a business’ bias advertising.

For SEO, the most important way customer reviews can be a game changer for your business is keywords and relevance. Believe it or not, customers use keywords in their reviews. It’s easy to find phrases like ‘best electrical contractor in Utah’ in customer reviews and these words can help Google present you before more customers during a web search. If you did a practical test and searched these words on the web, you will notice the results that appear contain these words in bold letters.

To Google, fresh consistent reviews show relevance, authority, and authenticity. They help to keep your content updated with little effort or maintenance needs from your end. Some potential clients spend time reading these reviews as soon as they pop up from their search. They are also tempted to visit the entire website and get a feel of your business. This gives you traffic and higher conversion rates, and the best part is, you didn’t have to pay for it.

Google favors highly rated sites. If you use the internet as much as you sell on it, you would find that search engine result pages are shorter now. They are primarily occupied by highly rated sites for your search results. So, even when you didn’t come to buy, those visible star ratings keep on calling to you.

Customer reviews don’t just provide fresh user-generated content, but they also give you ranking for products. Customers will give a better, unbiased description of your product along with mentioning its name. This improves visibility and ranking for your products. Customer reviews are good for overall local SEO.

Knowing how customer reviews help SEO is exciting, but getting the reviews in question might be another thing entirely. A few tips include:

  • Encourage customers to leave reviews but never force them.
  • Reply to each review
  • Have an automated way to collect reviews.
  • Sign up with the best third-party review sites.

The Review Generator is here to help businesses grow their online reviews. Through our program, our clients have seen an increase in reviews on Yelp, Google, and Facebook. Learn more by contacting us via our website, email, or by calling (818) 588-0097.

Posted in SEO