If you’re a business owner, we’re here to set the record straight: online reviews do matter. They matter a lot. Many people joke about how unreliable, biased, and sometimes downright goofy online reviews can be. This is because many online reviews are written by your average consumer – not a professional writer, reviewer, or critic. But, that doesn’t mean they are irrelevant to modern businesses. Here are just a few reasons to value online reviews.

Consumers Read Online Reviews

Many modern consumers check online reviews – it’s an easy way to get a read on a business before committing to giving them a try. More importantly, an overwhelming majority of people state that they trust online reviews, and take them into account when considering a company. This means most consumers are going to trust businesses with positive reviews, spend more money on them, and possibly decide to avoid buying from a business with too much negativity in their reviews.

Fewer Consumers Write Reviews

It’s important to note that a tiny percentage of a business’s consumers are going to be writing reviews for products or services after receiving them. Combined with the fact that most consumers read reviews, that means that a tiny minority of consumers may have a huge impact on a business’s image.

Businesses that aren’t encouraging their customers to leave feedback and reviews are missing out on a big opportunity to gain both useful insight and to get more people in the door.

Negative Reviews Aren’t That Common

We’ve all seen them: the extremely ruthless, negative reviews left on a business’s Yelp page. It’s these types of reviews that keep many businesses or companies from really pressing for more online reviews. The good news is that negative reviews are actually very rare. In recent studies, nearly half of consumers say they usually leave positive or very positive reviews. Less than 5 percent claimed to frequently leave negative reviews.

Remember: online reviews matter. So as long as a business is confident in their products and services, there’s no reason to not encourage customers to hop online and give their feedback!

Online Reviews Are Great Marketing

Like it or not, online reviews are part of marketing in the modern-day business world. Countless people utilize the internet and online searches to find products and services that it would be foolish to ignore the fact. From the credibility of reviews from actual customers, to the marketing potential from sharing positive feedback on website and social mediums, to the free insight customers might provide into the experience of interacting with your business, the list goes on and on.

Online reviews also help to build a strong, trustworthy reputation for a company’s brand, as long as they take the time and allocate the resources to respond to each review with a kind word or a promise to look into any complaints or negative feedback.

Finally, having a lot of reviews, especially insightful and positive reviews, will boost a business’s visibility on the internet. Many search engines and review sites tend to sort businesses by their ranking, and that means the business is more likely to be the first one a consumer sets their eyes on when they’re searching relevant keywords.

In short, online reviews matter because we make them matter. We, as consumers, want to see what other people thought of a place before diving in. We want to avoid unpleasant experiences, bad products, and unsatisfactory services – and online reviews offer a way for us to gauge the general opinion of a business before we try it for ourselves.

Sources:

https://www.brightlocal.com/learn/local-consumer-review-survey/
https://searchengineland.com/70-consumers-will-leave-review-business-asked-262802
https://gatherup.com/blog/willing-consumers-leave-reviews/
http://web.mit.edu/simester/Public/Papers/Deceptive_Reviews.pdf

Why Online Reviews Matter