How Online Reviews Affect Local SEO

Today, review monitoring is no longer negotiable. Significant growth of review reporting sites demonstrates this. Customers head to these sites to see what they should buy, where they should travel, and what they should eat. Another reason why review marketing is vital is it impacts local SEO algorithms and your location in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

The ROI of Online Reviews

Before we get into the difference between local SEO vs. SEO, it’s vital to understand the ROI of reviews. Doing so isn’t as difficult as you might imagine. When your business receives good reviews, people see that they can trust you. They’re more likely to choose you over your competition. Once you start building up your business’ reviews, you can start charging more for your goods and services.

Unfortunately, the opposite can also be true. Negative reviews can damage your business’ prestige, trustworthiness, and profitability. With three negative reviews, you’ll lose over half of your customers. It’s also important to note that people are hesitant to do business with a company without any reviews.

How Local SEO Works with Reviews

Search engines factor in your review profile when deciding where to list you in the SERPs. They take a similar stance to that which consumers take. Therefore 16% of your ranking is based on your online reviews. Your business needs online reviews on numerous online review platforms.

Regularly acquiring online reviews gives search engines a continual influx of fresh content to digest. Reviews posted on authoritative platforms (e.g., Yelp, TrustPilot, Google My Business) is even more favorable. So if you want a high ranking in local SEO, you’ll need plenty of good reviews in these places.

Good reviews aren’t the only thing necessary for listing high in the local SEO SERPs. You must do more than impress the automated bots. Google also relies on its human quality control team. Therefore strong reviews are highly valued.

Of course, reviews aren’t the only thing that influences your listing in the SERPs. Click-through rates also affect it. Here’s another place where reviews can benefit your business. The more you have, the more people will want to click through to your site and check you out.

Why Negative Online Reviews Don’t Always Matter

Now that you know why good reviews are vital for local SEO, you should also know what happens when you receive negative reviews. Although you may assume that you’d tumble in rankings and thus should take steps to remove them, this isn’t true. When you occasionally receive a negative review, you won’t lose your position in the SERPs. Google’s Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines clearly state raters shouldn’t allow a few poor reviews to sway them.

People should learn not to be swayed by a few negative reviews when looking at a business online. Anyone can write a review (even the website’s creator or the business owner) for any reason. Therefore they should look for as many reviews as possible and expect to see a few negative reviews along the way. They also shouldn’t consider a single encounter with a rude clerk or delayed delivery of a single package an overall negative review of the company.

The Bottom Line

You need your online reputation strategy to be on point. Therefore you must acquire fresh reviews regularly. This is why you need to work with an SEO consultant. When you’re ready to consider online review services, look no further than the Affordable SEO company in Tampa, FL. Our review marketing will help you increase traffic, increase revenue, and look better overall. Talk to us today about putting our services to work for you.