Online Reviews Are Important for Local Businesses

December 22, 2016

“How can online reviews affect my local business?”

People use the online reviews to make decisions about local businesses and other products and services. Make sure your reviews are helping sell your business, not hurting it.

Have you ever bought anything on Amazon without reading the online reviews first? Not likely. That’s because reviews are not written by the company, they’re written by the users of the products or services. Not that everybody trusts online reviews as the only factor in a buying decision, but they certainly can sway a person to choose one company over another.

In Google Maps, online reviews are important for several reasons.

They can help improve your ranking on the page.
They draw more attention to your listing.
Lots of 5-star reviews will get more people that see your listing to read about your company.
Well written reviews can convince a person that you are the best and increase the chances of you getting a phone call or order.

How many people read the online reviews for local businesses?

An industry leading SEO firm, BrightLocal, conducted a survey to see how important online reviews were to people that were searching for an online business. Here is a summary chart of the responses form 2010 to 2015 to the question “Do you read online reviews to determine whether a local business is a good business?”:

You can see that in 2010, 29% of the responses indicated that they do not read online reviews when researching local businesses. In 2015, that number dropped to 8%.

Said another way, 92% of people use online reviews to determine if your business is a good business.

If you don’t have online reviews, but your competitors do, how will people judge your business? Will you get 92% fewer calls? Food for thought.

We hope this helps!

The post Online Reviews Are Important for Local Businesses appeared first on Third Marble Marketing.

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