Customer reviews are an integral part of any business’s marketing plan whether it be an online shop or a brick-and-mortar shop. They provide social proof for your shop’s visitors, but they are beneficial in so many more ways.
What are customer reviews?
A customer review is a written reflection of a customer’s experience with and feedback on your company’s products or services. Reviews are found on sites such as Google Reviews, Amazon, Yelp, and social media. Consumers use customer reviews during the purchasing process to understand how your product works and if it’s worth the investment.
Why are reviews so important?
Surely, you know that customer reviews are important to some degree. After all, you’ve most definitely used some reviews to help you with a buying decision in the past.
Reviews provide social proof
Therefore, we know right away that customer reviews can provide social proof for your shop and its products. This, in a very clear way, is building trust for your shop.
Three out of four shoppers say they trust online reviews as much as recommendations from friends and family.
Reviews can boost your SEO
Besides social proof, customer reviews can help your shop and products gain more visibility. How? Through SEO (search engine optimization).
In the eyes of Google, adding reviews to your website is comparable to adding fresh content to your website. Google’s web crawlers will scan websites for relevant information in order to decide where it should rank in its search engine results pages (SERPs).
This “user-generated content” provides your website with valuable keywords that will constantly be updated with the addition of new reviews (Google also loves websites that constantly add new content). Therefore, the more reviews you have, the higher you should rank in Google for your company’s most important keywords.
Reviews provide useful feedback
Last, but definitely not least, you should consider getting customer reviews on your website because they not only provide your potential customers with valuable feedback, but they also provide it to you!
Remember, optimization doesn’t just mean tinkering with a few website features and the wording of your ads. You can also optimize the customer experience as well as your product line.
If you get too many negative reviews about your customer service, for example, it might be time to consider some serious internal changes. The same goes for bad reviews for a specific product. If too many customers complain about a certain product, you might want to consider removing it from your product line.
Conclusion
All in all, collecting and displaying customer reviews can benefit your online shop immensely. By gathering these reviews you give your website much more credibility, you increase your website’s SEO, and you have direct feedback from your customers, which can help you optimize your business practices.
We have many years of experience in customer support and would gladly share our knowledge with you. Contact us right away and let us give your customer the best customer experience on the web!
Resources: hubspot, trustedshops.
