How Customer Reviews Can Impact SEO

Fact… 90% of consumers read reviews before visiting a business highlighting the importance of customer reviews, but how does this benefit SEO?

Learning how to improve your websites SEO can significantly increase your businesses prominence in search engines results, with customer reviews now playing a major part in improving your websites online presence and SEO, especially rankings in local search engines. Customer review sites/local directories such as Yelp, Yellow Pages and Google My Business is a major component that search engines value and incorporate in their algorithm to determine your search relevance for local search results, by using location and ranking parameters Google is able to provide more useful and accurate local search results.

Customer reviews are vitally important not only for potential customers but also your business, so here’s five ways reviews can help SEO:

1. CREATES FRESH CONTENT:
Fresh content has a huge impact on SEO, but often it can be difficult for a brand to keep churning out new content. One way to ensure you have relevant and new content is the collation of reviews, this is a form of UGC (User Generated Content) which contributes to creating new and unique content straight from your customers.

2. GOOGLE FAVOURS HIGHLY RATED SITES:
Google takes into account a number of factors when its comes to ranking your site, so the importance of customer reviews is beneficial for a number of purposes with social proof and authority boosted considerably with Google taking into consideration the ratings of sites, favouring those with the highest ratings.

3. BOOSTS SOCIAL PROOF:
Social proof can be very effective for your overall marketing strategy as well as positively impacting your SEO. As an online retailer or service provider you need to build credibility and trust towards your business, therefore by obtaining customer reviews, it allows you to boost your social proof and improve buyer purchasing decisions.

4. IMPROVES LONG-TAIL KEYWORD TRAFFIC:
When it comes to search results long tail keywords are generally less competitive than a specific set of keywords therefore helping you to rank much higher. By analyzing your customer comments you can incorporate specific phrases as keywords for on-site optimasation.

5. SHAPES BASIC SEO ATTRIBUTES NATURALLY:
Websites are optimized for search engines via a number of characteristics including keywords, back links and titles. With reviews those customers become an army of link builders and keyword writers helping to shape your SEO in the long run.

In conclusion, customer reviews serves a number of purposes from enhancing customer trust of your brand to helping you get more traffic from search engines, so can not be overlooked as a strategy.  Using an email marketing campaign or promotional discounts to encourage customers to leave reviews is one way to boost your SEO and build your all important fresh content and make sure to set up verified accounts with local directories