Online Reviews Make You Look Trustworthy

Online reviews represent real-life experiences, offering potential customers a glimpse into the quality, value, and reliability of the product or service they’re considering.

They provide a form of social proof that is much more relatable than advertising and can significantly influence purchasing decisions.

This means that whatever your industry, having a positive online presence gives you several key advantages, which is why it’s becoming a key part of branding.

Understanding why business owners need online reviews will help you optimize your customer experience and create a positive online footprint on review websites. Let’s review these seven reasons why your consumers’ published experiences with your brand are vital.

Effective social media marketing is about much more than just posting. Understanding proper optimization on social networks is a nuanced and delicate thing. What works for one brand may not be best for your brand.

Social Proof Drives Purchases

We’re more likely to make a purchase if others around us—even total strangers—agree that it is a good decision. Today, online customer reviews are the biggest source of social proof, and they have a clear impact on sales.

Online Reviews Make You More Visible

Most shoppers use search engines like Google and Bing or social media platforms like Facebook to make purchase decisions. These review websites platforms have unique ways of indexing and surfacing content, and they value original and fresh content. Positive reviews on review sites can help feed the content machine, keeping your brand favored by algorithms and improve your search results.

Online Reviews Have a Clear Impact on Sales

Case studies and theory can be misleading. Reality doesn’t always follow a logic, and there are always outliers. But there’s a growing body of benchmark data that proves that good reviews do empirically lead to increased revenue.

A study by the Harvard Business School found that online reviews can demonstrably impact your bottom line. Brands that are viewed positively have better sales, but even improving your star rating can have a positive effect on your sales.

According to the study, a one-star improvement on Yelp.com leads to a boost of 5% to 9% on sales in the short term. Even a small improvement can have a massive impact.

Online Reviews Are Increasingly Essential to Decision Making

Your brand can build significant trust and credibility from a steady stream of positive reviews.

One of the more interesting findings of recent research is just how powerful reviews are at building your company’s online identity.

Many shoppers distrust businesses that have negative reviews and ratings below (or even above) four stars. This leaves a small margin of error at the top, but companies with better average ratings are significantly more likely to see views converted to traffic and sales.

A proactively cultivated brand increases your online visibility, and today, that means encouraging several ways for people to talk about you. Social media is a great tool, but the ability for customers to talk about you on other channels is a crucial component of your presence.

Almost two-thirds of shoppers think that online reviews are an essential part of the decision-making process. When they want to know the best places to go, they’re more likely to turn to Google, Yelp, and TripAdvisor than they are to a newspaper or even their friends and family.