The advent of e-commerce has revolutionized the ways of doing business, benefitting both consumers and the businesses with some incredible features. One such feature, which has the power of changing the fortune of a business is customer review.

Earlier, it used to be word-of-mouth that would provide personal experience of a product or company. Customer reviews is a refined form of the same concept but with much wider reach and influence, thanks to the ever-increasing power of digital marketing.

What is customer review?

As the name suggests, this is a written expression of what a consumer thinks or feels about a product or service. This can be both positive and negative experiences, including likes, dislikes, praises, criticisms, suggestions, cautions, etc.

E-commerce provides equal opportunities for both businesses and consumers. On one hand, it helps small businesses to sell their products without spending on branding. On the other hand, it provides a platform where consumers can share their experiences to promote awareness among the buyers before placing an order.

This is the rule of the game. If you want to take the online route to speed up your business, you have to deal with customer reviews. This is a very important tool in the hands of buyers that helps them decide whether they should buy a certain product or service.

But customer review can be a great tool in the hands of businesses as well. In fact, Google reviews for business is seen as a crucial part of the marketing strategies of numerous businesses all over the world. Let’s understand why.

Google’s reviews for businesses

There are some crucial benefits of online reviews for customers. 91% of buyers see online reviews to make decisions. This has led marketers to devise review marketing strategies that use reviews and customer feedback to convince consumers. Google customer review services provide businesses with valuable and authentic feedback /reviews from their customers.

With a Google merchant account, you’ll have reviews of your business appear along with your business profile in maps and search.

Why customer reviews are important for small businesses?

Trust is the building block of e-commerce. People at large trust online reviews more than advertisements. As a result, obtaining as many reviews as possible from the customers can be extremely beneficial to small businesses. Google review comes in handy for small businesses to request and collect reviews from the customers.

How will Google reviews benefit your small business?

If you are still not convinced as to what the importance of Google reviews will be in 2022 for the success of your small business, take a look at the following 3 major benefits of reviews that you can avail of using Google reviews:

• Build social evidence – When a new customer wants to buy your product, it helps them decide fast if there is enough social proof of positive buying experiences around your product. This pushes your conversion rates as a result.
• As a brand building instrument – Customer reviews or feedback provide valuable insights into how a product and the company is perceived in the marketplace. For example, if the company takes prompt actions to sort out some issues mentioned in the feedbacks and publish whitepapers, the perception of the brand and the company improves.
• Improves local SEO – Local SEO is one of the thrust areas of Google and other search engines. Google reviews for businesses help local ranking of businesses through obtaining user experiences about that business

How important are Google reviews for SEO?

Google even also relies on online reviews to decide rankings of the businesses. Reviews are considered both in quantity and quality when evaluating the position on the search engine.

When you search for an item on Google, for example a gym, Google returns with a handful of names. The order in which they are displayed is called their ranking, which is decided by the three factors – relevance, distance, and prominence.

The first two ranking factors are self-explanatory; Google will display gyms near you. Reviews belong to the category of prominence. Gyms with many highly rated reviews are likely to rank higher than gyms with fewer, less positive reviews and ratings.

Source- Fluidscapes
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