10 October 2020
By Simon Whittaker
simon@TheCork.ie
Reviews of your business affect your turnover, so what can you do to get positive reviews?
Reviews are very important in this day and age. Our online reputation often depends on them. Businesses like trustanalytica.com are built to help people get and improve their online reputation. If you don’t have a good online reputation, then your business will lose a lot of custom. It takes a very unusual business to exist these days without any type of online reputation whatsoever.
Normally people would say that quality matters more than quantity. This is not the case when it comes to reviews. Yes, you do want quality reviews – positive rather than negative ones! But you always want to have as many reviews as possible. The algorithms which control search engines aren’t coded to look for quality reviews. They are coded to look for quantity. If you want your site and online presence to be more noticeable, then you should get more reviews.
When looking to get as many reviews as possible, you should still be trying to get positive ones! Being at the top of the search engine means nothing if you are at the top for being rubbish! When you are looking to get more reviews, what you want is more positive than negative reviews. Keep it weighted in favour of the positive reviews when collecting them. This also means that the positive reviews will appear first in any search engine. Bad reviews are inevitable. But they shouldn’t be relied on to bulk up your overall review count.
How many reviews you need depends on what you are doing with the reviews. Are you using traditional review sites to give you the improved sales you are looking for? Or are you using your own site for reviews? Your approach will be different based on the sites you are using. If you are using traditional review sites, then you will need to focus on quantity. You need to get yourself up the search algorithm ladder. To do that you need enough reviews for it to notice you. If you are using your own site, then you will need fewer reviews. You can focus more of quality than on quantity. If reviews are to entice people in to do business with you, then they will need to do less work if people are already on your site.
The actual content of the reviews matters as well. People leaving just a star review with no words are unhelpful in terms of search algorithms. You need an actual written review for the search engine to show it. When you are trying to get people to leave you reviews, it can be hard to get them to leave written ones. But that is what you need to do. You can have all the reviews in the world, but if they are just stars, they won’t help you. When getting people to leave you reviews try and get more written ones than simple stars. Tipping the balance from stars to writing will help you get noticed.
Unfortunately, there is no set number of reviews that you should get to improve sales. It would make life a lot easier if there was a number. It depends on any number of factors. Hopefully, this article has helped you understand ways to improve your numbers, and therefore to improve sales.
