In today’s highly competitive digital world, online positive reviews have assumed immense importance. When customers speak good about your products and services, it acts like a social proof. It helps in influencing customer’s decision and ultimately impacting your sales. But how do positive reviews impact SEO results? Although positive review is not a direct ranking factor, it certainly has an impact on your SEO campaign.        

In this latest blog post, I will be focusing on the deep co-relation between positive reviews and SEO results.

Before I go ahead, I’d like to share some statistics and data that certainly sums up the importance of online reviews.  

BrightLocal Local Consumer Review Survey 2023 states that 93% of consumers consider online reviews to be important when choosing a local business. The survey further stated that 72% respondent claimed that positive reviews are more likely to persuade that the concern local business is highly trustworthy.

On this note, let us start the blog post by highlighting how positive reviews can improve your SEO performance.

1. Builds credibility and authority:

I had already mentioned in the beginning that positive reviews act as social proof. It proves that your company or business is indeed trust worthy and reliable. But to whom does it prove. While it certainly demonstrates the reliability in front of potential customers, it also increases your website’s credibility in the eyes of search engine.

When a search engine’s algorithm spots several positive reviews of your business or brand on the top of a review website, the algorithm starts seeing your website with great respect. This respect can be a notch higher if the review website links back to your website, earning you the much-needed backlink. Linkless mention, on other hand, can equally have a positive impact on your website’s ranking.

2. Increase in organic traffic:  

Once your website establishes respect in the eyes of search engine, it is only matter of time that your website’s organic traffic will grow. Remember in the previous point, I had told that positive reviews can help your website in snatching match needed backlinks, which is a big vote of confidence as far as SEO is concerned. And again speaking strictly in the context of SEO, increase in organic traffic is by far the ultimate triumph, whether it is caused by positive reviews or otherwise.

Positive reviews can increase organic traffic through four ways:

• Brand awareness.
• Schema markup & Rich Snippet (Star ratings, Reviews, Product prices, and Event dates).
• Your company’s website starts ranking for highly competitive keywords and relevant queries in SERP (thanks to backlinks).
• Creates credible social signals in the form of likes, shares, comments and reposts.

Talking specifically about schema markup & rich snippet, which is an integral part of local SEO, positive reviews can especially have a huge impact on the local SEO results.

For instance, according to study by Moz, businesses or companies that earn average star rating of 4.7 or higher are three times more likely to appear in the much sought-after Google Maps 3-pack.

Another Moz study conducted in 2022 disclosed that nearly 76% of local searches result in users visiting a physical store within the next 24 hours, making local pack visibility immensely significant.

Since we touched on local pack visibility, it is important to talk about Google Business Profile or GBP. Google Review is an important part of GBP.  

Google reviews account for nearly 73% of the total share of online reviews. This implies that for every 100 online reviews, nearly 73 of them come from Google alone.

To make it to Google Map’s local pack visibility, your Google reviews should satisfy the following characteristics:

• High Star Ratings (4-5)
• Reviews should reflect positive sentiments
• Quantity of reviews
• Recency and freshness of reviews
• Owner’s promptness in responding to reviews.

3. Increases User-Generated Content (UGC):

Positive reviews can also have great impact on user generated content.     

Actually reviews are itself a form of UGC.

Although there is no concrete correlation between UGC and SEO, several studies highlight its positive influence. In other words, the more UGC, the better it is for SEO.

A study conducted by Bazaarvoice revealed that pages with visual UGC witnessed users spending 90% more time on the page compared to those without. This invariably increases dwell time of the website, sending positive signal to Google’s algorithm and ultimately boosting organic traffic.

Besides, high-quality UGC, like blog posts or articles, can help in securing backlinks from other high-quality websites.

But what really is UGC or user generated content. I like to believe that many people reading this blogpost may not be aware about UGC.

It refers to any content created by your actual customers, who have used your product and services, and shared it on any online platforms.

Since this content is created by the actual customers, they carry great amount of trust worthiness. Potential customers and people in general tend to trust them a lot.   

They can come in several forms:

Reviews: Text-based feedback on a product or service published mostly on a review platform (e.g. Google reviews)

Social Media Posts: Customers sharingpictures, videos, and post text demonstrating user experiences with a brand.  

Blog posts or articles: Customers sharing their experience with a product or service in a blog or article format. These blogs and articles are usually published in third party websites.  

How to get online reviews from the customers?

There are several simple ways to get online reviews from the customers. Below we’ve discussed the same.

• Simple request: A simple direct request can go a long way in accumulating good number of online reviews. Train your staff or employees to graciously ask satisfied customers to leave review after a positive interaction. They can directly ask in person or else through mail or ask through website.

• Asking review at a right time: Right timing plays a very important role. For instance, sending a follow-up email barely few days after a purchase reminding them about the option to leave a review is a prompt & correct thing to do. In this scenario, what would be incorrect is taking nearly weeks or even months for sending follow up email as the experience of purchase might have faded away.

Another prompt way is to ask for a review immediately after when a customer expresses satisfaction with your product or service.

• Provide incentives: It is ethically wrong and also against the guidelines to pay for securing review. However, it is well within the rules to incentivize reviewers. This might include small discounts, loyalty points or cashbacks.

• Incorporate positive reviews: You should be more than willing to showcase or demonstrate your positive reviews on all your official social media channels as well as website. This will not only help in building trust with the potential customers but encourage existing customers to leave positive reviews.

Kindly make sure that your review template on your website is very simple and non-complicated. Additionally, ensure that links to third party review websites are easily locatable and visible on your website.

Why never indulge in Fake reviews?

The temptation of resorting to fake reviews can be very overwhelming. However, this malpractice hurts and it hurts very badly. The reason it hurts very badly because it can potentially serve irrecoverable and irreversible damage to the reputation and credibility of your business.

This fact especially applies to those people who go completely overbroad in seeking fake reviews for their businesses.

But how does Google go about in catching fake reviews.

The search engine giant has deployed artificial intelligence and machine learning technology to fight this menace.

In fact, only last year (2023) Google launched a new machine learning algorithm that helped it in removing almost 170 million fake reviews. The new algorithm, Google claims, is more efficient and faster in catching and removing policy violating reviews.

Google’s algorithm specifically looks of certain clues and signs to ascertain that the review is indeed fake. These signs and clues have been shared below:

• Abrupt increase in positive or negative reviews of a business.
• Accounts with distributing past of writing only writing only extreme (1 to 5) reviews.
• Identical reviews written from same account for different businesses.
• Google also investigates history or past activities of the accounts to detect any sign of inauthenticity such as new or inactive accounts and location inconsistency.  

Conclusion:

On the concluding note, i’d like to repeat that although positive reviews are not direct ranking factors, they are cherished and valued by all leading search engines. Therefore, when you give something that Google and other search engines love, they reward you mainly by increase your websites visibility on their SERPs. Essentially, by harnessing the power of positive reviews, you are turning your happy customers into brand ambassadors. And there probably won’t be a better brand ambassador than a satisfied customer, who can skyrocket your SEO and increase your online presence.