Influence of Customer Reviews on SEO and Sales Growth

A large number of business especially small and medium businesses have always lived and died by customer reviews. More number of negative reviews has always meant bad news for these type of businesses. In this world of social media and other platforms where people are connected to each other more than ever its important businesses stay away from negative reviews to have any chance of survival in the competitive world.

Why Customer Reviews Matter?

A lot of surveys point to the fact that a lot of people tend to make decisions based on the reviews of people who have had previous experience with a particular type of business. E commerce business is one such business where the success or failure of a product is largely based on the comments that arises from user experience. Negative reviews help readers understand the common problems users face with a particular product and can go a long way in influencing their decision.

Reviews can influence search engine rankings

Customer reviews not only influences a particular business but they go a long way in influencing the search engine rankings according to a survey by Moz. According the Moz, one of the factors that influence search engine rankings are review signals. Review signals rank as the fifth most important factor that influences search engine rankings of a business or a website.

Reviews signal is based on factors such as the following

• The number of reviews for your business.
• Number of sites that carries reviews of your business.
• Number of reviews on other sites not owned by Google.
• The frequency of receiving reviews from Google and third party sites.
• Number of testimonials or rich snippets in the reviews used in micro data.
• Number of customer review sites that have your business review.

The above are some of the factors that is taken into account for the survey based on review signals. It’s important that businesses make sure they stay away from negative reviews but at the same time should have a review system in place and manage it better through their good service there by getting positive reviews helping their business rank better in search engines.