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3 Ways Online Reviews Affect Revenue By: William DiAntonio

Founder & CEO ofReputation911

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Although advertising campaigns get customers to remember your company’s name, customers will still search for you online before deciding whether to buy your products or services. Online reviews play a pivotal role in every company’s online search results. Each positive review acts like its own advertisement, as reviewers praise everything from product quality to service, and even the atmosphere of your physical location. For example, the phrase, “try the new scones. They’re the best in the city!” carries more weight in an online review, where it feels like a testimonial, than it does in a print advertisement where it comes off as a gimmicky marketing tagline. Meanwhile, negative reviews can be as detrimental as a slanderous campaign. A poor experience detailed by a reviewer will convince individuals who read that review to take their business elsewhere.

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Search engine optimization, or SEO, entails all that goes into helping a webpage rank higher in Google’s search results. Online reviews assist with this process since the more reviews a business has, the more online mentions it has. When search engines such as Google see a high number of mentions, they recognize the business as more important than its less-mentioned competitors. Thus having a high number of online reviews, even if they are not all positive, will help businesses rank higher when customers search general phrases such as “Boston dentists” or “Raleigh Mexican restaurants.” This SEO boost can also help in online reputation management, since a company’s review site listings will take the place of damaging content in search results, pushing unwanted content off of the first page of Google search results entirely.

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Most businesses have a webpage and many have a social media presence, but the majority of small businesses still have not done enough to build a credible reputation. A social media profile that has not been updated in over a year will leave customers wondering whether or not the business is still open. Customers who are researching businesses before leaving their house might choose to stay home or look for a more trustworthy business if they are not sure whether or not a business is still open. A recent online review, however, will signal to consumers that the business is still open, which will lead to more new customers walking in the door. Even a response to a negative review will boost credibility, because it shows that the business is transparent. A business that only has positive reviews is actually more suspicious, since customers know that not everyone can be pleased.