The #2 Reason – Online Reviews Convince People to Buy

Welcome to the next important section in our series: 5 Scary and Exciting Reasons Why Local Listings Are Changing the Way People See Search Engine Results! In this article, we’ll discuss the 2^nd important reason to consider a local listing campaign—the fact that local listings usually contain an online review feature. This has a powerful effect on the way people buy.

Competition is a Challenge to Overcome for Local Businesses

It’s always been the case in the United States, Canada, Europe, and other free-market systems that consumers have a lot of companies to choose from when they’re trying to do business. It’s the great benefit of capitalism. Competition can be a very good thing for a lot of reasons that your economics professor can elaborate on.

To the local business, however, competition is a big challenge to overcome. How do you get your business to stand out in a sea of too many options? What’s become increasingly obvious to more and more marketers, business owners, and consumers, is that one of the best ways to choose a company or product is to look at online reviews or testimonials.

The Huge Strategic Advantage of Online Reviews

As I mentioned in the article previously, review stars give your search results a visual quality, which can be a huge advantage. It makes your listing stand out from the other search results.

Beyond the visual advantage, most users of the Internet now understand what those stars mean. A company that has a lot of reviews that are mostly positive and better than their competition has a huge strategic advantage over other companies. If you’re looking for a plumber in Miami, Florida, and you’ve got a whole bunch of options like we saw in this example, you’re likely to call one of the two Google local listing options that have reviews. Both look like the best options.

A Changing Buying Landscape

Online reviews and testimonials have totally changed the landscape for consumers. It used to be that we relied totally on the information given to us through the marketing departments of companies. But now we have real information from actual customers on products and companies. This gives us customers much more reliable information to base our buying decisions on.

The Changing Nature of Reputation

Consumers have always tried to do business with companies based on “word of mouth” recommendations from sources that they’ve trusted. But we were very limited in how we could get this information. We’d ask a few friends.

Online reviews have given us a method of magnifying and quantifying the process of determining a company or product’s reputation globally. This is a very, very powerful tool that can’t be overstated. Online reviews are in no danger of going away, and they will only expand across the Internet, across user sites, local listing sites, and in search engine results, because they are so useful.

How We Buy Products and How That Affects Customers and Companies

I recently was trying to buy a mop bucket online at Amazon, and it was clear that certain buckets had a real tendency to break, while others had a history of successfully pleasing their purchasers. I knew exactly which products to avoid and which were safe buys.

Buying Decisions are Now Scientific

A decision, which a few years ago would have been a bit of a crap-shoot, is now a methodical, somewhat exact, and precise process—It’s scientific! Not only do we probably make better buying decisions when we consult online reviews, but they have a huge economic impact on companies, a negative effect on those that cannot provide products and services that don’t perform, and a positive effect on those that do deliver.

The Importance of Companies Delivering High-Quality Products and Great Customer Service

A lot of small businesses hate Yelp for the fact that it shines a light on many of their customer service disasters and shoddy products. It gives a forum for angry consumers, no doubt. But as this video from Yelp points out, the vast majority of the user reviews on Yelp are positive.

In this day and age, you have to provide high-quality customer service and products because word of mouth is online and in many cases, it’s permanently and prominently found in search engine results. So the bottom line is, don’t screw up with your customers, cause they now have enormous power to spread that word of mouth like never before!

Online Reviews Affect Your Search Rank

It’s also fairly clear that having reviews makes a big difference in how your site ranks in the search results. This almost goes without saying, as it should be obvious. Search engines that see lots of high ratings on multiple sites for your business are obviously going to value your site. They’re going to show your company site when the user is looking for a business in their search query. If two company websites seem equal, but one has a lot of good quality reviews and the other doesn’t, those with more good reviews are going to have the advantage. They’re going to get a bump in the search results, and an increase in how they’re perceived by potential customers.

Asking for Reviews

Companies that seek online reviews from their customer base gain a huge strategic advantage over their competition. You can’t just sit around and wait for customers to review you. You have to be proactive about this to make this happen online. You must ask them the right way, and we’ve created a whole training system on this for our clients. You can affect the quality and quantity of your reviews online.

If you don’t ask for reviews you’ll be left in the dust by the competition in search engine results, which as we all know is the present and future marketplace. So the time to get started in getting online reviews was probably yesterday. Since there isn’t a whole lot you can do about yesterday, let’s start today!

See next section in the series: The 3rd Scary and Exciting Reason to Consider a Local Listing Campaign!

Wade Mann, the author of this article, is an Internet Marketer at Holistic Web Presence.

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