By Doren Aldana
Did you know that roughly 90% of consumers read reviews before visiting a business or making purchasing decisions? Are consumer and customer reviews part of your marketing plan? If you haven’t started gathering reviews we want to help you! Here’s how reviews affect purchasing decisions and what it means for your SEO…
Here are some important stats to note:
- More than 88% of online shoppers incorporate reviews into their purchasing decision
- Reviews will boost your search results by using recent and up-to-date user-generated content
- 72% of consumers will wait until they read reviews before taking action
If this is not enough to convince you, you might want to recognize that Google’s ranking factors change constantly, but there is always an increasing focus on content, uniqueness, social sharing and device friendliness.
Some other things that affect Google’s ranking factors include content that is:
- Unique (they are looking for content that is not repurposed)
- Relevant (contains content engines consider to be on-topic)
- Helpful (resolves and searcher’s questions)
- Valuable (provides information that’s no where else)
- Offers great UX (easy to access from any device)
- And is likely to be popular info or spread to the public quickly
Reviews contribute to SEO and account for roughly 10% of total ranking factors, which means they cannot be ignored.
When you think of online reviews, which top websites come to mind? Amazon comes to my mind immediately, but actually the top three online platforms dedicated to reviews with the most global traffic are Yelp, Tripadvisor and Foursquare.
58% of consumers have said they have recently (within the last 5 years) begun leaving online reviews for customer service. Online reviews are becoming more and more relevant.
If you haven’t started collecting reviews, or need help managing or responding to your feedback, request a free demo of the Testimonial Engine! We want to help you gain long-term customers, new customers, and most importantly, a good reputation on and off line.
