Online reviews are becoming more important and influential in the consumer decision-making process. Here’s why it’s important to have independent valid reviews.
Recent research suggests that 93% of customers read online reviews before buying a product or service and 91% of 18–34-year-olds trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.
So, what are the benefits of having positive reviews?
- Increased consumer trust amongst customers and potential customers researching online before purchasing with you.
- Direct feedback from the customer to the company helps to improve the customer journey.
- Helps you to appear higher in search rankings on search engines such as Google.
- Helps the customer tell their side of the story and share their buying experience with others.
And the negatives of a negative review…
- A negative review can be damaging for a business. A negative review on Yelp can cost you 30 customers.
- Negative sentiment in Google Reviews is a negative ranking factor.
- 94% say an online review has convinced them to avoid a business.
- Customers don’t trust companies with lower than 4-star ratings. The most common filter applied is to see only companies with 4-star ratings and higher.
The rise (and fall) of fake reviews?
Fake reviews are becoming a real concern with many consumers not wholeheartedly believing the reviews they read to be real. This causes many problems for legitimate reviews and businesses that follow the rules and encourage reviews from real customers.
Thankfully, search engines are constantly updating their algorithms to root out spam and fake reviews left by bots by hitting their website with a penalty. The penalty usually pushes them further down the search engine result pages (SERPs) in a bid to favour and promote quality content over low-quality content.
Other bodies are now stepping in with tougher restrictions such as Britain’s competition regulator. They will now directly enforce consumer law and will fine companies up to 10% of their global annual turnover for using fake reviews and having bad business practices.
Overall, this is aimed at restoring consumer trust in that the reviews they read are of real customers, trustworthy and legitimate. And businesses are responsible for taking care to ensure they are genuine reviews otherwise they face a fine.
Start building your reviews with Keyboard Knights
Whether you are listed as a business in the Business Directory or our Smart Hands or Smart Hands Plus Directory, we encourage you to ask for reviews of the work you have carried out for clients.
At Keyboard Knights, we’ve been building on this since we launched ensuring that we have processes in place to stop fake reviews before they are published and visible to others.
Each review that’s posted is moderated first and checked for spam, validity and sentiment before being published to the site. In the event we believe a review to not be real or requires further clarification, we will contact the reviewer for further information to check it is genuine.
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