Customer reviews are the best tool for your online business to grow organically, without having to use any fancy tools or plugins. Most businesses are scared to use customer reviews and opt out of posting most reviews. They only highlight the positive feedback, retaining only the good things their customers have said about their business. Even though, on the nose, this strategy seems positive and consequential, it does more harm than good.
So, what is the way out?
Customer reviews can become your greatest ally when it comes to making conversions, if you know how to use them well. First things first, you don’t need to be afraid or over-excited about your customer reviews. They have the potential of being your greatest tool to rope in more customers and increase your conversion rates through the roof.
There are various approaches you can take to effectively use customer reviews to improve organic SEO.
They Represent The Product In Real World
When a new or potential customer surf’s through your website online, clicking on product pictures and going through description, what they are looking at is a 2D representation that looks good under proper lighting and settings. But what they are looking for is their representation in real life. This is the purpose of customer reviews that you can use to highlight your product in real-world setting
Most businesses have started playing it smart by encouraging their customers to post image as well as video reviews- which adds to the real-world feedback of the product. This relays to the new customers all the information they require to decisively make the purchase, increasing conversions for your website.
They Act As A Vehicle Of Trust
Brands and labels carry out extensive and detailed photoshoots for their product pictures that go up on the website. This makes the products look brighter, shinier and more attractive- literally looking the best they can. When a new customer comes on and goes through these, they are attracted but they know better now. These days, customers have the intensive knowledge of how staged the products are on online portals and they always carry a look of cynicism, not trusting the staged thing.
What customer reviews add to the SEO is a picture representation of the product in real world. This builds the trust of the newbie and they are convinced of buying the product if someone else has bought it first. Many a times, we buy clothes on the basis of the reviews that we see of them.
They Act As Elements Of Validity
Many a times, there is apprehension on the part of the customer when they come across a product that they wish to buy. The product description might be great, the pictures might be on-point, but the one thing that makes them doubt the validity of the actual product is the absence of customer reviews.
The lack of reviews makes them see the product as too-good-to-be true, or not worthy enough for their money. No matter how good or bad reviews are, be mindful that you balance them and put them in the product page nevertheless.
They Contain Sprinkled Keywords
Now this is a surprise positive twist that you need for growing your page organically. They say that any publicity is good publicity because eventually people get interested in checking your product out. With reviews, your customers inadvertently include the keywords- both long and short type- in their content, which makes them more searchable. This also helps increase interaction, making the search engine more confident about the authenticity of your page or website.
These keywords constantly come up in searches and reviews, where the search engine (for obvious reasons of authenticity) pick your website as a trustworthy source of information because of so many freely-put customer keywords.
Winding Up
We, at Kinex Media, is of the opinion that customer reviews are more helpful than is estimated in the world of SEO. One thing they demand is transparency and honesty from both the customer as well as the business owner. There are plenty of customers who spew hateful and unnecessary comments in the name of reviews, without giving anything useful in their content. These kind of ‘reviews’ should not have any space on the product page.
The reviews that are genuinely informational, no matter positive or negative, should be put stringently in the product pages. They deliver a constructional purpose and help the potential clients understand the product from the point of view of a customer who has already bought it and has used it.
Online business owners, on the other hand, should be transparent when it comes to putting up reviews of the product. Sifting through the feedback, what helps is looking at the content from the point of view of someone who is unsure about investing in a new thing. It helps search engines to crawl through your page and find out interactions that are honest and educational.
