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Why Are Reviews Important?

Why reviews and ratings are important to your business - Start developing strategies to get the most out of good and bad reviews.

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As mentioned in our tutorial for Review Generation for our Reputation Management tool, increasing your business’s review rating from 3- to 4-stars increases your chances of a sale by 37%! And, a review that wasn’t written in the last month loses credibility for 44% of customers. You’ve heard these kinds of stats before; they say that reviews are incredibly important to your business, but they don’t explain exactly why and how they can make or break a business in this era. If you have a business, it’s worthwhile learning exactly how powerful reviews are so that you know how much potential they have to increase your sales.

How Customers Choose Businesses Online

This is something you know from your own buying behaviour. When you look up a business, you see at least three of them on Google’s first page of search results and you see multiple of them on the pages of any business search engine including dLook. How do you know which one to click on? You go off their rating. So people looking for a hairdresser click on a small amount of businesses that have good star ratings. Then they look at the reviews of each to find which one has the best reviews. That’s why reviews really are at the crux of searching for businesses online.

It should be mentioned though that there is another key factor here which is having a high position on the search results. MydLook provides this function as well for your business. It’s called search engine optimisation, and you can see the breakdown of all the services that involves here.

The Unrivalled Credibility Of Reviews And Ratings

Your business operates in a marketplace saturated with marketing messages, and people, particularly Millennials, have developed extremely strong barriers against it. They don’t believe many of the messages anymore because the very form of an advertisement arouses great skepticism. However, reviews and ratings are different. You, the company, don’t write them and that’s a big plus for credibility. Instead, the perspectives come from a multitude of real individuals just like the consumer themselves. There is a lot of social psychology involved. People are empathetic, trusting and positive towards other individuals, in contrast to corporations which lack a face.

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How To Maximise The Potential Of Reviews And Ratings

Most businesses do the obvious with their reviews and ratings: they try to get the highest rating and the least negative reviews and that’s it. But are you maximising your potential? Do you pay attention to these aspects of your reviews and ratings?

Having more reviews is better. Having over 50 reviews for an item can increase conversion rates by 4.6%.
Have reviews on your site (that you sell from). These are most credible if they are in the form of embedded widgets from the website that the review came from. This makes consumers 63% more likely to make the purchase.

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What Reviews Should I Promote On My Website?

When you are choosing which reviews to put on your website, you will want only the best. MydLook's Reputation Management Tool helps you get positive reviews to put on your website with links to your social profiles. It helps to promote your good reviews, whilst allowing you to respond to your bad reviews and try to come to a solution before the bad review can be made public by the customer. When putting reviews on your site there are a few things you'll want tot remember;

Firstly, how many reviews is the optimum? The most common number of reviews that customers read before buying a product is 4–6, so we recommend that number on your website. More would run the risk of being overwhelming.

Now which reviews are the best? This is a very conscious question to ask because the reviews that you see as the best aren’t necessarily the best reviews in the eyes of your customers. It is a bit hard to be objective about something like this, but there are stats available. The most important reputation traits for a local business are rated as reliability, expertise and professionalism. If you can get reviews that together span these three points convincingly then that should set you up well.

Then you should have a clear idea of the specific things that people want most out of your particular business. If you are a house cleaning service, you would list neatness, tidiness, thoroughness, punctuality and trustworthiness. If you can also cover these points in the reviews that you pick then that is fantastic.

But what makes it even trickier is that you have to keep these reviews brief. Instead of whole reviews, quote just fractions of reviews. This is because you want people to actually read these, and not just read one, but read all of them. You want them to be blown away by a succession of the best parts of the best reviews, blowing away their concerns across all areas.

The Risks And Problems Of Reviews And Ratings

Unfortunately, with a promotional tool as powerful as this there is going to be downsides. The main problem with business review websites is that they can’t be edited by you. If a customer leaves a bad review, even if it’s a completely misinformed irrational review, you still don’t have many powers to change it. You can try reasoning with the person and responding, but we have all seen instances of that on these sites where it didn’t work and it just gets more messy.

This is the risk of reviews and ratings, it’s that if you open your business up to them, you open it up to the potential for criticism and even defamation. Then again, a lot of these sites (including Google Search) open your business up to that without your choice in the matter.

The Solution For Bad Reviews And Ratings

dLook believes that in this day-and-age, your business is going to be reviewed online whether you like it or not so you may as well take matters into your own hands and make your own reviewing platform the center of attention. This Reputation Manager is the tool that was built to do this.

It automates a Customer Relationship Management system where customers are encouraged to review your business. A positive review goes on your site, hence boosting your search engine optimisation, keywords and rankings. Your customer is also promped to add the review to a variety of review sites such as Facebook, Yelp and Google. A negative review gets forwarded to your customer support system so that you can rectify the customer’s problem and hopefully leave them a happy customer without compromising your ratings.

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Reputation Management Across The Web

You know how we mentioned the problem of review sites listing your business without your permission or consent? You can’t close those listings down, but you can manage them with our Reputation Management tool. This tool has a ‘Mentions’ tab where you can see a list of all the times your business is mentioned across the web. This can easily and rapidly reveal to you:

Review sites that your business is listed on that you didn’t know about
People who have had negative experiences and need to be talked to
The main people, ways and places that your business is mentioned online
What customers like and enjoy about your business or brand

But then this tool goes further. It has a ‘Listings’ tab that gives you an overview of the accounts that your business has and doesn’t have on external business review sites. The philosophy here is: if your business is listed on an external review site, it is best that you have an account on that site so that you can manage it properly. One of the main parts of this is making sure that your details are correct on these websites and thankfully, our Listings tab makes this finicky task a breeze.

Under each listing is a summary of the information contained about your business on this site - such as phone number, address and email. This software automatically detects incorrect information, and there is an ‘Edit’ button that you can press to take you directly to the page on the site where you can change it.

Example of MydLook's review widget

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What To Do About Bad Reviews On External Review Websites?

Bad reviews have the potential to seriously impair a business’s sales rates literally overnight, and this is just one of the new realities of business in the Information Era. But there are two methods to get your reputation back after bad reviews that are not as instant and easy as MydLook's Reputation Manager, but that gradually work to restore your reputation online.

The first is to try to reconcile with the dissatisfied customer and address their problems. This has two benefits: it looks better if a company actively responds to negative comments on these review sites because it looks like they really do care and they have good customer service. It can also persuade the customer to delete or change their review which is the ultimate end goal.

If you failed to satisfy a customer and it was your company’s fault, it is probably worth it to offer your customer something like a discount or freebie in order to get them to remove their review (it can also mean that you get return purchases from that customer in the future). But if it is the customer’s own fault that they are dissatisfied, i.e. that they are being irrational, then you should just try to reconcile them. The logic stands that these are the types of customers who will be hardest to reconcile however and this is just an unfortunate fact of modern business that your competitors are dealing with also.

The second method can effectively erase even the un-erasable reviews. It is to drown out bad reviews by gaining a lot more good reviews. Then, the bad reviews will sink down into the 2nd+ pages where far fewer people will see them. And, the bad ratings will get flooded by good ratings that will bring your average back up. Of course, this is great in theory but how do you actually get so many good reviews? A good way is to politely ask your satisfied customers via email to rate and review you on the platforms where you have gotten negative reviews.

The Positives Of A Bad Review

This is an understandable opinion that you don't want any bad reviews, considering that the people that we have heard saying this have all cared deeply about their business and simply can’t stand to have defamatory things published about it online. What we always tell these people is: if you have a few negative reviews, those people are actually helping your business. It’s funny but if you have all positive reviews, people are more skeptical of you. In fact 95% have the suspicion that a business has edited their own reviews on these websites, so people feel comforted seeing just a few negative views, and a slightly-less-than-five-star rating for realism.

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Get Control Of Your Reviews Today!

As you've probably gathered, reviews serve a very important role in online business. They increase a customers trust in a business, so it's important that all businesses try to incorporate reviews into their daily business management. It can be extremely challenging however, to keep up an online presence and generate reviews as a busy business. That's why MydLook has developed reputation manager, to help businesses streamline this process so they have more time to focus on other important tasks. Click the links below to purchase or to get a free trial!