Can positive business reviews help to improve our SEO?
Introduction
When a business owner sits down with their marketing agency for an update, well it’s easy for a lot of company owners to quickly get baffled.
Sure, well known marketing agencies like us we will spend the time to ensure our clients understand everything that they would like to know.
But still, some business owners can quickly get lost in all the technical seo jargon, such as backlinks, content marketing and offsite seo.
Yet there’s one thing that all business owners understand, and that is a happy customer, that leaves a positive business review can help to improve business.
Yet in this article we will take things a bit further, that’s to say, will all those positive reviews have any bearing on the company’s SEO?
Can positive business reviews improve our SEO?
Well in a nutshell, yes they most definitely can. But as with all things seo related, there are a number of conditions.
Such as, the reviews must be genuine. This means if you are a start-up business, well it’s not a good idea to start writing a load of reviews yourself.
The reason for this is rather simple to explain, that’s because Google, as well as the other major search engines have rather clever algorithms that work for them.
This means that built into the algorithms will be coding that will be working to fight spam. Any attempt to fool the algorithm can result in a penalty being applied to the businesses website.
And this is no laughing matter, the reason being a penalty, such as a Google Panda penalty can result in the website losing where it ranks, and sometimes the website get’s deindexed.
Deindexing a website basically means it wont be able to be found, not unless someone types the url directly into the browser that is.
So to summarise, genuine business reviews can help a businesses seo, yet for this to happen it’s worth following the next pieces of advice.
Where should my customers be leaving reviews?
You may have tons of customers that want to leave a positive business review, but are unsure where the best place would be to leave the review?
Well, if this is the case, then we would always recommend that you state to your customers that the best place to leave a review would be on your businesses Google My Business account.
This means if you were to search for a say a local pet shop, if the business has a Google My Business account, then they will appear in the local business listings.
You can then click the tab, which will display their Google My Business listing, which contains all the important business information that you need, such as telephone numbers and a link to companies’ website.
Some customers may not have a Google account, so they may want to leave a review on your businesses Google My Business account.
In this case why not ask them to leave a review on any website they wish? This way it also looks more authentic to other customers when checking out your business’s reviews.
The reason being is if you have reviews across multiple websites, well this can look more genuine than say if a whole bunch of reviews have all been written on one website over a short timeframe.
How should we go about asking our customers for reviews?
Google and the other major search engines want genuine reviews, and not reviews left on a website because someone has been paid to leave them there.
Also business reviews obtained by giving away something for free, well this we think is not a good idea neither.
The reason being is as already mentioned Google’s algorithm is mighty clever, so its not a good idea to try and think your seo agency can cheat the algorithm.
It’s far better to take a more straightforward and honest approach, that is whenever you gauge you have offered a good service, why not just write in an e-mail or correspondence whether or not the customer would be willing to leave a business review.
That simple sentence added to the bottom of an e-mail, well sometimes that’s all that is needed to prompt a customer to start leaving positive business reviews.
Does your business require quality seo?
If your business requires help with its seo, then why not call us today?