How Important are Customer Reviews?

In a word -- VERY.

Before we get started on this important issue, let's identify both search engines and their respective pages. Google's business community is known as "Places" and Bing's is "Local". We will refer to these communities as P&L since this call-to-action will affect your bottom line.

Whether it's Google or Bing, reviews are more important than ever. If Google or Bing persist with putting competitors on your P&L pages, then the best way to deal with it is to push them as far down as possible. And the best way to do this is to add more data to your details and get more customer reviews.

How do you get more reviews:

Direct your happy customers, your reviewers, to your P&L pages. Simply ask your customers to post reviews on either Google (gmail) or Bing (live, msn, hotmail) or both. When you’re soliciting online reviews, don’t be shy about directing users to the P&L pages.

What about reviews posted on other websites?

If a customer left you a glowing review on Yelp or your Facebook page, it may be worth an e-mail asking if they’d mind reposting on the P&L pages. If they were so happy with their experience that they’re leaving one review, it’s likely they wouldn’t mind reposting it somewhere else, as well. Educate them on your preferred review process.

So how important are customer reviews?

With all branded services equal on the P&L pages, the company with the best and most reviews will be chosen when up against a competitor who has few and/or bad reviews. Make reviews a part of your online marketing strategy.

For additional information on getting noticed in your online community, I found this article interesting for any size business. Please click here to read.