5 Creative Ways to Make Customer Reviews a Powerful SEO Technique

Various web platforms and search engines are increasingly relying on customer reviews to rate business websites. What this means is that in matters of online business, everyone takes customers’ feelings seriously.Whether positive or negative, customer reviews significantly impact how businesses are rated online. The reason business owners can use reviews as a powerful SEO technique to help the search engine rankings of their businesses. They can use reviews to effectively craft new content which will attract good readership because such content addresses customer concerns directly. Here are creative ways you can take on customer reviews to make them a powerful SEO technique.

1. Be Conscious of Timing When Asking for Reviews

What this means is that after making a sale, you cannot afford to ask for customer reviews too early or too late. The right timing is very important. If you are marketing with email, at least 2-5 days after a customer’s shopping experience is about ideal. It is within this period the shopping experience is still fresh in the mind of the customer and he/she may have used the product as well. This is when a customer can actually give a fair assessment of the product as customer review. About the best time too to send your emails requesting product review! Whatever responses you get from your customers help your SEO because search engines usually factor in customer reviews in their rankings.

2. Use Good Customer Service Strategy to Get Reviews

It is always a good business strategy to make deliberate efforts to generate many reviews from as many of your customers as possible. You can do this by coming up with many ingenious ways to ask your customers to leave reviews as politely as possible. You can encourage them to do this even if such reviews may the largely critical of your product or even your business operations. Customers usually love it when business owners give them the freedom to say what they feel about a product/service. Smart business owners even use incentives such as discounts on some products to entice customer reviews. If you do this, your business can benefit from very insightful comments and constructive criticisms that can help you to do better in the business. Additionally, your business website stands to benefit from a fresh flow of online reviews that can help to improve its SEO ratings.

3. Be Diligent and Persistent When Collecting Customer Reviews

Customer follow-up is always very important when collecting customer reviews. You can in a subtle manner prod your customers to get reviews without appearing overbearing. If your customers don’t respond to your review request, no harm if you keep reminding them but be careful not to overstep your welcome. If you diligently follow-up with the right correspondence and timing, you’ll get good responses. The more of these responses you get, the more the impact they’ll have on search engines when rating your business.

4. Always Tailor Your Responses in Line with Customer Complaints

Customers may appear insatiable in their expectations but they always know what they want. So, it is not enough to collect reviews, you must endeavor to respond to them. That helps to keep the conversion going and to generate more reviews. You must tailor your responses in line with your customer complaints. Doing this generally helps to strengthen the relationship between your business and your customers. This is why you must have a viable strategy of how to respond to reviews irrespective of whether they are positive or negative reviews. Your responses either in terms of new content or providing answers to questions and concerns must directly address the needs of your customers. Always have at the back of your mind that your replies are public on the Internet. They can easily go viral so be very careful what you say in response to your customer reviews. Business civility demands that you should never fail to thank customers for sparing time to leave their reviews even if such reviews are not in favor of your product/business. Show them appreciation for their efforts and encourage them for more reviews going forward. Apologize for your short-comings where applicable and promise to quickly make amends. That way, you can put the customers at ease to keep reviewing your products, reviews that may turn out to be more favorable going forward. If you manage to do an excellent job of empathizing with your customers as necessary in response to their reviews, it can help your business to build a better and stronger customer relationship in the long term.

5. Be Careful with How You Approach Customer Reviews

That you can request your customers to leave their reviews does not necessarily mean they will. That is where the real challenge is. You must therefore exercise great care to get your customers to leave their reviews. You must be tactical in developing the right forms, some sort of CTA really, that can elicit unique and sincere reviews. Avoid taking your customers to task with reviews so as not to discourage them from giving reviews altogether. In most cases, a comprehensive, honest review is more valuable for your SEO than a short review with just a ranking tick.

Wrapping Up

Online reviews can greatly benefit the SEO of your website and that helps its search engine rankings. However, you must know how to generate these reviews and how you can effectively use them. If you can, your business stands to benefit from good organic traffic which can help boost your sales and generate more revenue.