As a business owner, it’s important to leverage your business’ online reputation in order to bring in more customers and to grow your business. At brainer, we help you leverage online reviews for your business to help you meet your business goals. Understanding how your online reviews can impact your business is essential if you want to grow your online footprint positively. Here are a few things that you can do to harness online reviews to drum up more support for your business.
Encourage More Online Reviews
Every customer that you engage with – either in person or online – is an opportunity for you to ask for an online review. Don’t be shy when helping customers check out, ask them to leave you feedback on Yelp, Facebook, or Google. These reviews will help your business grow brand awareness, reputation, and will even impact SEO and your digital marketing efforts.
Spread Brand Awareness
First, online reviews spread brand awareness. When a business has a lot of online reviews, it lets other online users know that a) your business is out there and b) you’re worth talking about. Think of this as the equivalent of one of your customers telling one of their friends about your business. Who doesn’t love a referral?
Improve Your Brand Reputation
When your business has a lot of positive online reviews, that goodwill only continues to grow. Encouraging customers to leave your business online reviews can act as a virtual advertisement for your business that you didn’t need to pay for. This will help convince potential customers to shop with your business.
Increase Your SEO Ranking
When you have a lot of online reviews that mention your business and keywords related to your business, it can help improve your search engine optimization results.
Let’s say that you’re a dog grooming business. When your customers leave you a review saying “this is the best dog grooming business in town!” search engine result pages pick up on those keywords. Search engines will then display your business under the keywords “dog grooming business.” All of this makes it easier for new customers to find your business online through organic search results.
Respond To Good and Bad Online Reviews
One incredible way to leverage online reviews in your favor is to respond to every single review – good or bad. Responding to positive reviews is obviously way easier than responding to negative feedback, but there’s an art to responding to negative reviews that will help turn public opinion in your favor. When a customer leaves you a negative review and your business can respond sounding authentic, concerned, and genuinely trying to resolve the issue, other customers will see that exchange and often overlook whatever negative experience the customer had.
Share Your Reviews on Your Website and Social Media
When you have positive reviews on your Yelp, Google, or Facebook page you want to make sure that you are sharing that review on other platforms. Sharing positive reviews on your website, on your Twitter, or on other social media platforms can make 1 review do the work of 3 or 4 online reviews.