Customer reviews aren’t just a way for companies to gain more trust from consumers. When used effectively they’re also a beneficial way to boost a website’s SEO ranking. Customer reviews are used to familiarize consumers with a brand, and to publicly share what past customers have loved about a company’s products, services, or customer experience. Even when a business garners bad ones, customer reviews are still a great way to increase website traffic, which generates more sales and revenue and is helpful in the public relations process.
Off-site SEO
Off-site SEO practices include any actions that a company takes to build up its digital footprint outside of its own business website. This can include building a number of credible backlinks to the business website, creating a profile on third-party review platforms, and maintaining activity on social media platforms. Many businesses already have an on-page SEO strategy that benefits their organic search efforts, but not a lot of them invest in off-page SEO opportunities.
There are plenty of search engines that evaluate attributes like the authority, trustworthiness, and relevancy of a brand by using off-site signals. One of the most consistently measured factors search engines look at when making these evaluations is customer reviews. They can be used to improve those off-site signals that search engines use, and that’s why companies should collect their reviews on third-party review platforms. Building up a company’s online presence through the use of customer reviews on such platforms can help business websites rank higher in search engine results pages. In this way, they will be contributing to the authority and trustworthiness of the business.
Website reviews
Companies should be displaying the reviews they receive from consumers because they’re a potential source of content for their websites. By using reviews, businesses can diversify and add relevant text-based content to their websites, which can improve organic page rankings.
Since reviews increase the amount of text on a website, that additional text will make a company’s business website a lot more valuable to search engine algorithms. That’s because the search engines will get more context for what the website is about, and that contributes to whether that page will appear in a user’s search query. At the end of the day, search engines like Google want to show the best possible search results to users, so they can improve user experience.
Referral traffic
When it comes to off-site SEO efforts, companies can also generate more website traffic when they have a profile on a third-party review platform. This is because whenever a potential customer looks up reviews for the business, most of the third-party review platforms are what appear at the top of the search results they get. Those platforms have high levels of trust and authority, among both search engines and consumers, which is what allows companies to benefit from good reviews on them. Companies can improve their overall SEO efforts simply by creating a profile on a third-party review platform, which will boost the organic traffic that they’re already getting, and allow them to gain a competitive advantage.
