Why Reviews Matter & How to Automate Them In Your Business

Why do online reviews matter? Reviews help consumers form an opinion about a business, and they help consumers research what others say. The data suggests that people trust online reviews as much, or more than personal recommendations. Reviews help turn interest into action and your prospects into clients. Likewise, having no reviews or poor reviews turns away prospects and gets your best salespeople looking for a new job. Here are some statistics from Website Builder supporting this:

Getting Clients

Customers who take the time to write up a positive testimonial can help nudge the prospect who’s on the fence about a product or service. According to Website Builder:

• Customer reviews can increase conversions by 270%.
• 84% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.
• 72% of consumers say that positive reviews make them trust a local business more.
• 97% of consumers report that the customer reviews they read influence their purchasing decisions.

Losing Clients

Conversely, if previous customers memorialize their negative experiences for others to read, you could potentially lose sales if those reviews go unanswered.

• 92% of consumers will hesitate to buy a product if there are no reviews left by customers.
• Four or more negative reviews about your company or product might take away 70% of its potential customers.
• On average, 1 negative review can cost you 30 customers.

Generating More Revenue from The Clients You Get

Prospective customers no longer rely on ads alone. It’s not enough to tell them about the product or service—they listen to feedback from those with firsthand experience to finalize their decisions.

• Consumers are likely to spend 31% more on a business with excellent reviews.
• From a study conducted by Yelp: A single one star rating improvement for a restaurant can increase its revenue by 5-9%

For better or for worse, reviews have a significant impact on your business. Consumers want to minimize risks and maximize their purchase, and reviews are part of the decision-making process.

Online Reviews and Local SEO

Reviews contribute to approximately 10% of Google’s SERP ranking. For features like Google My Business, the reviews that live there can impact your local map ranking. This survey notes that “within the top 15 local pack ranking factors, we can see ‘keywords in Google reviews,’ ‘high Google ratings,’ and ‘quantity of Google reviews with text’ all being important.” If SEO is part of your digital marketing strategy, you must focus on reviews.

The Problem

Reviews are hard as hell to get for a lot of business types. Law firms, real estate businesses, professional service businesses (like our own digital marketing agency), medical professionals, and many other business types have a really challenging time gaining reviews compared to businesses like restaurants. In fact, for WISE Digital, we found that we’ve had to ask clients to leave a review 3-5 times before it actually gets done. Here are some reasons why from the reviewer’s perspective:

1. You’re asking for my time, and my time is valuable.
2. You’re asking me to decide on where to leave the review, and I have to figure that out.
3. You’re not giving me a guide on what you want me to say.

In other words, businesses need to make leaving reviews easy and seamless for their customers, making it part of their complete experience with your brand. Reviews also provide an opportunity for your customers to interact with you, and when you’re not on top of your digital presence, it impacts your bottom line.

The Solution

With all the challenges and benefits that come with online reputation management, we wanted to make the process easy for our clients. That’s why we built our review platform. It lives directly on your website, it showcases your best client reviews, and it has a simple button to click to leave a review.

See an example here. Most law firms have trouble getting a single review (one of the most difficult ever), but our client Hoffman & Forde gets an average of two new client reviews per month. It’s not magic, and it didn’t happen automatically. It took work and technology to develop an automated system.

Here’s what we’ve developed for our clients.

1. We audit your current reviews online. We take a look at which sites have reviews, what the ratings of those reviews are, and which ones we want to display on your website.
2. We build you a custom review platform for:
3. Review display. This only shows your best reviews.
4. Review request (Leave a Review). Here’s a demo to try out yourself. Try leaving a good review (5 star), then go back and change it to a poor star rating and you’ll see different questions are asked. 
5. And most importantly, we teach YOU and YOUR TEAM how to use this tool now that you have it. As the business owner, it’s important that you tell clients and customers where to go and leave feedback on your products or services. Add a reminder to your email signatures, your invoices, and train your people to ask often and always.

We also integrate the platform directly onto these major review sites so that a review left on your site can be syndicated out to any major platform. This increases your reach and boosts your SEO.

• Google (57.5% of the total reviews on the internet)
• Facebook
• Yelp
• Industry-specific sites like AVVO, Angie’s List, Zocdoc, etc.

Establish trust among customers and grow your business with the right plan and platform for review acquisition & management. To learn more about our review platform or even our SEO services, schedule an initial consultation today!