The Complete Guide to Online Reviews
Things Have Changed
Reviews currently influence 88% of consumers in discovering a local business. They are 2x more likely to be an important factor in choosing a local business than loyalty, and 7.4 x more likely than traditional marketing.
In today’s digital marketplace, no marketing strategy is complete without online reputation management and reviews. You need a holistic approach that includes customer communication, effective data, and review generation and management to stay competitive.
Review Generation
Online reviews are user-generated comments that current or past customers can post about businesses on online review sites such as Google and Facebook. Generally, a review site will allow the customer to give a rating between 1 and 5 stars and add commentary that other potential customers can view.
Why Online Reviews Matter
Today, online reviews impact the customer journey more than ever. According to a recent interview with Neil Patel, collecting as many reviews as possible should be your main focus when it comes to getting found and chosen.
- 93% of consumers say online reviews have an impact on their purchase decisions
- 65% of consumers have read an online review in the last week
- Approximately half of consumers are willing to travel farther and pay more to patronize a business with higher reviews
Online reviews also have a significant impact on the visibility and online ranking of your business. While Google doesn’t openly share details about how they calculate local search rankings, they claim they give attention to (1) Relevance (2) Prominence and (3) Distance. Reviews impact the first of these, alerting crawlers that a business is relevant to the searcher.
A Moz survey also suggests that online review signals such as review quantity, velocity, and diversity account for approximately 10% of the total weight of the over 200+ ranking factors in Google’s search engine algorithm for local businesses.
This means small businesses have the advantage over national chains on a local SEO level if they can consistently get new and authentic reviews. Local SEO benefits, however, are just a means to an end. The real benefit comes from what happens when your business ranks higher—namely, increased trust in your brand and the potential for an associated increase in revenue.
Focusing on the Most Effective Sites
Not all review sites are made equal.
In general, local businesses focus on Google and Facebook because of their sizable audiences and impact. However, each industry is different, and industry-specific review sites can also be an important part of your overall reputation strategy.
So which online review site is right for your business and which should you focus on? According to our research, focusing on Google and Facebook while supplementing with other niche sites will give you the best chance of getting found and chosen.
Review site guide. Google currently hosts the most visible reviews on the internet and places a big emphasis on local reviews, meaning you have the potential to rise to the top of the Google Map Pack. Many businesses see this as the sole reason for focusing on generating Google reviews. However, because not every customer has a Google account, it’s wise to supplement those efforts with other online review sites.
Facebook reviews also carry clout with around 2.5 billion monthly active users and over 1.6 billion daily active users. One main advantage to Facebook reviews is that most of your customers use Facebook and will already be logged in (via mobile or desktop), allowing you to easily direct them straight to your review page. While Facebook reviews arguably aren’t on par with Google reviews, the platform is fast approaching.
Industry-specific sites. Once you’ve created a review inventory on either— or both—of these sites, industry-specific review sites are a great way to supplement your efforts. Reviews for legal experts can be found on Avvo. Healthgrades or Vitals.com host patient reviews for medical professionals. Zillow is popular for real estate, and Angie’s List for service-related business. Every industry is different and usually has a couple of leaders for online reviews that should be part of your review strategy.
How to Ask for Online Reviews
The vast majority of consumers leave a review once a quarter or less, and a fifth say they’ve never left one. So what’s the best way to generate authentic reviews? The key is to make leaving reviews ridiculously easy for your customers. The two critical components? Timing and Convenience.
Timing. When asking for a review, timing is key. The Bridal Collection had an average review rating of 4.5 stars, which didn’t reflect the quality of the superb customer experience the team was providing. After some digging, Lynn (the owner) noticed that customers weren’t leaving a review until after they had picked up their dress—but the moment they were most thrilled was after the gown viewing appointment.
The team began sending review invites immediately following appointments. And began getting a flood of five-star reviews. A few months later, their rating bumped to 4.9, with 975 Google Reviews.
When asking your customers for reviews, it’s important to find the optimal time within your customer journey to ask. Generally, try to do so immediately following the service, when the experience is fresh on their minds. Ask them verbally on-site, and then send an invite afterward— also, if possible, while the customer is still on site. Taking action to capture the experience in this way will give you quick and quality results that accurately reflect the value of your business.
Convenience. But how do you make leaving reviews convenient? For them and for you? Text. Text has an open rate of 98%, and 95% of messages are opened within 3 min.
- 65.6% of consumers think texting makes working with a local business more convenient
- Consumers are twice as likely (1.8x) to prefer texting to any other communication method
- 40.5% of consumers say they are likely to switch to a different business because they offer text messaging to communicate
With automated messaging tools, you can send an automatic review request immediately following the transaction, or at any other touchpoint in the customer journey. This results in completion rates up to 15x greater than traditional email-based requests.
You send the text. They click the link to leave a review. Done.
After implementing text, Lake Powell Paddleboards went from less than 100 reviews on TripAdvisor and only 11 Google reviews to nearly 300 reviews on TripAdvisor and 400 Google reviews—all with an average rating of 4.9 stars.
Review Management
You’ve worked hard to get your reviews. Now, it’s time to utilize them. While generating reviews is the goal, it’s just as important to monitor and quickly respond to positive and negative online reviews. Google’s Google Business Profile support page explicitly says responding to reviews “shows that you value your customers and their feedback” and helps “build consumer trust.”
According to a recent study, 56% of consumers say a business’s responses to reviews have changed their perspective on the business. Businesses are more likely to respond to positive reviews than negative ones. However, this should really be the other way around. If you have to let any slide, miss a few positive review responses and respond to every negative review. Consumers are more likely to look at negative reviews than positive ones before engaging with you.
Responding to every review is ideal, but not every team can realistically do that. Choose a review to response ratio that is actionable for your business and stick to it. A well-rounded review-to-response ratio is around 1 response for every 4 reviews.
Pro Tip: Businesses are more likely to respond to positive reviews than negative ones. However, this should really be the other way around. If you have to let any slide, miss a few positive review responses and respond to every negative review. Consumers are more likely to look at negative reviews than positive ones before engaging with you.
Positive Reviews
Positive reviews are gold for your business. They tell your potential customers that you’re the business to engage with, and they tell you what your business is doing well. Respond in a way that is personal, conversational, and authentic to stand out and show that you’re engaged with your customers.
Steps
- Thank the reviewer
- Express hope that they will return (“We hope to see you…”)
Negative Reviews
Negative reviews are obviously more difficult to digest than positive ones. However, they’re invaluable in showing you what needs to be improved. Enterprise companies spend millions of dollars each year to find ways to improve their services and customer experience. With online reviews, you can see what needs to be improved for little to no cost.
Taking the time to respond to negative reviews can have a huge impact. In fact, 41% of consumers see a brand’s response to an online review as a sign that the brand really cares about its customers. This is a chance for your business to act fast and fix whatever mistake the customer feels your business made. Best practice is to respond within 2 hours—24 max.
Steps:
- Apologize
- Approach the review with a calm, collected response
- Offer a proactive way to solve the problem
- Ask to continue the conversation privately
It’s critical not to take a negative review personally when responding. Even if the customer’s review seems incorrect, a negative response will reflect even more poorly than the negative review did in the first place. Keep your response sincere, concise, and personal to turn a negative into a positive.
Pro Tip: You might also consider offering compensation in the form of waiving a service fee or comping their purchase to restore trust. If you’re successful, their negative review could change into a positive one, or they might delete their original post.
Driving customer experience with online reviews
Online reviews can serve as a revolving feedback loop. You can effectively implement, test, and alter processes that affect your customer experience.
For example, a customer might leave a 3-star review for a dealership that says the cause for discontent was the hour she had to wait after the paperwork was finalized. That dealership might adjust its process to clean the car while the paperwork is being completed.
The next customer who comes in leaves a positive review (maybe even noting this efficiency), and boom. Higher rating. More business. More reviews.
Online reviews can also help your business identify potential case studies and evangelists. Happy customers are powerful assets to your business; it’s marketing you didn’t have to pay for. In some cases, you can reach out to people who have left positive reviews and ask for case studies and quotes to use elsewhere in your marketing.
“If I’m getting bad reviews, I want to know about it and I want to do something about it. Give us a bad review so I can know what’s going on. If we get anything that’s not five stars, we’re reaching out to them to ask them what could we do differently to give them the five-star service that we’re striving for.”
– Dr. Desai, CT Braces
Choosing a Platform
Responding to, collecting, and analyzing reviews can be quite a task for any team to take on. And in our competitive marketplace, optimizing reviews is crucial for local businesses who want to stay relevant.
This is why local businesses need a reputation management system to optimize their review management. 94% of local businesses who use a reputation management software at least somewhat agree that it provides enough ROI to make up for the cost.
- Local businesses are 1.4x more likely to have an average star rating of 4.5 or higher if they are proactive about their online reputation vs if they are passive
- 45% of local businesses say online reviews are “very important” to their success
What you should be looking for
Not all platforms are built equally. When considering different options, keep in mind that an effective review management platform should allow you to consistently:
- Generate new, authentic reviews
- See your reviews from all sources in one place
- Respond to all those reviews in one place
- Generate insightful data to drive your business in the right direction
Having all these tools and data in one place allows your business to efficiently manage review activity, progress, and customer satisfaction. It also helps you understand where your customers are for marketing and advertising purposes
Podium’s platform lets you take ownership of your online reviews
Podium’s platform is a powerful suite of messaging tools that does all this—and more. The Reviews tool lets you not only gather reviews from dozens of review sites, but also manage, respond to, and interpret your reviews from one convenient dashboard. Features like notifications when negative reviews are received, time stamps, and automation help you stay on top of the game.
On your dashboard, you can see:
- Total number of reviews
- Overall average rating
- Most productive review sites
- Recent reviews from all platforms
- Employee leaderboard
- Response times
Additionally, Podium puts all your other interactions into the same easy-to-use inbox. This allows you, your team, and your customers to create a seamless customer experience together.
And the results speak for themselves.
After implementing Podium, the team at Cascade Collision was able to streamline their review generation and responses. Cascade now has a 4.8 average star rating with hundreds of reviews and has appeared in 59% more Google search results.
After adopting Podium, Dunn Tire saw a 5% increase in rating and 41x increase in average monthly reviews, surpassing 4,500.
Before we engaged with Podium, we had maybe 3,000 online reviews across our entire system. Since starting with Podium, we’ve gained somewhere north of 50,000 reviews.
– Chris Carson, Zerorez
Podium proves that messaging isn’t just the better way to get reviews—it’s the better way to do business. See how quickly you can gather reviews for free with Podium.