Strengthening your local SEO: what’s the latest review?

What do you do when you have to try out a new bistro or restaurant? Check reviews online, apparently! Today, what a business says about itself hardly matters. What the consumers say hold more importance. The freedom of expression is nowhere more prominent than the internet and with so many review sites; a business has to keep its eyes open for any new reviews popping up.

The online reviews affect the decision-making process. This does not only affect online purchases. We all love reading reviews. We like to find out who launched what new products and who is giving the best offers in town. For that, we keep going to a few trusted sources that include Yelp and Zomato. Depending on your nature of business, you must have received at least one review.

Today, almost 84% of your potential customers trust online reviews before making a purchase or reservation. They trust these reviews as much as personal recommendations. More than 74% customers take into account positive online reviews about a brand or a product. Social networking sites play a critical role as the source of most reviews. About 68% of all online customers read reviews posted on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter before buying something off the internet.

You must be wondering why we are harping on about reviews and their impacts when the topic clearly says SEO? That is because reviews dictate how your business will rank in the local search results. It is a significant factor for SEO. According to Google, good reviews boost local search ranks like nothing else in the world. In a SERP, the number of good reviews your business has will dictate which rank you will hold.

Let us see a few ways in which reviews impact local SEO –

1. New content: most of the times even a seasoned SEO services company fails to realize that reviews are a source of fresh content. Content is always a dominant ranking factor for every kind of business website.
2. Visibility: did you see the new Guardians of the Galaxy posters and trailers? Of course, you did! They are plastered everywhere you look. That is good visibility. When you get your name and logo up in multiple places, the probability of your potential customers changing on them increases manifold. Similarly, Google bots can find your mentions easily as well. This is exactly how you gain prominence in the SERPs.
3. Increased CTR: CTR or click through rate is when a user clicks your link from the SRL. If you have more reviews, you will be higher up on the SRL; this will increase the chances of users clicking your website link. This is more of a cyclic process where more reviews generate more CTR, and that generates more reviews.
4. Backlinks: Yelp and Zomato are good sources of strong backlinks. When people post reviews of your products and services in there, we can notify you about the mention. We will also link these reviews to your website and generate some backlinks.

Getting good reviews –

There is just one rule about good reviews. Get as many as possible!

Getting good reviews naturally is the best thing that can happen to business. However, most of the times, it is a very slow process. We help you egg it on. We make sure that your good reviews are authentic. We pace it out so that they do not appear as fake to humans and bots, and we collect every one of them together so your customers can read all the right things about you from a single place.

This is a brief walkthrough of getting high-quality reviews from real customers and patrons who have tried out your products and services.

1. You should start with your Google My business profile. This will help you out with your local search results. Once you claim your businesses, verify your Google+ profile and provide the correct NAP visitors will start flowing in. You can ask them right away to post reviews. Just need just five studies to be visible in the Google Maps results. However, the more, the better!
2. Do not forget to add a review landing page to your website. If you have multiple locations, tie them to a simple internet site. You can dedicate separate web pages or sections of the site to these businesses but keep a common link. Google should understand that these are not multiple listings. This is a smart way to save your website/business from Google’s penalties.
3. Increase your presence on social media platforms. Claim all your business mentions or open new pages. There you can ask for more reviews. Facebook and Instagram work marvelously for local rankings since you can boost user engagement by using photos and videos. You can post attractive offers for reviewers as well. Mere rewards and not bribes!
4. Approach Yelp, Amazon and the likes so your customers can post reviews on them. The choice of the website will depend on your niche. However, we can fetch the reports and link them to your site.
5. We can also use review and rating rich snippets for your website. Every time someone searches for related key terms, they will also see your site ratings and reviews. We saw this work like magic to increase CTR and conversion rates.
6. We can set up review campaigns to boost your local SEO. Here we can design newsletters and on-site windows to ask your customers for reviews. We have special campaigns where we do follow-ups with old customers for reviews via email or text.

If you do not have an evaluation campaign in place, you are losing out on significant conversion rate and business. Your local SEO is worst hit by it since it thrives on positive reviews and ratings. Rankingbyseo.com has designed multiple study collection campaigns in the past. If you want to know how your local SEO, local business rank, and CRO can improve, just ask us.