Does Responding To Reviews Help SEO?

For your business to thrive in today’s highly competitive market, you must take advantage of the internet to reach a broader range of target customers. However, digital marketing requires strategy and in-depth knowledge of search engine optimization (SEO).

Without good SEO, some of your efforts to promote your business on the internet will be futile. Therefore, you must understand what SEO stands for in marketing and learn how to apply effective SEO techniques to your marketing endeavors. This article talks about the importance of responding to reviews to help your SEO.

Review Responses And SEO

Whether you’re doing your own SEO or you’ve hired an SEO expert to optimize your site and other online platforms, you must understand the importance of customer reviews. These reviews help you know how your customers feel or think about your products or services.

You’ll need to find time to go through reviews and respond to them appropriately. It shows your commitment to improving your products or services, and assures your customers that you care about their opinions. 

You also need to understand that potential customers trust reviews when they are deciding whether to buy your products or not. Studies have shown that at least 92% of online customers check reviews before placing an order. Therefore, you should include a reviews page on your website, where customers can leave a comment about their experience with your products or services. Apart from providing potential customers with authentic experiences of other clients, reviews will also help your SEO in several ways.

First, it is essential to mention that Google and other search engines want to give their customers the best results for their queries. Therefore, they rely on various factors to provide trusted search results. These factors are often the same ones that customers use to decide which products and services are trustworthy. Some of the main factors that Google relies upon to choose the most reliable search results are review quantity, diversity, and newness.

So, if you want to know how your business is doing in terms of it’s visibility to potential customers, you can analyze its performance with respect to these factors. Apart from these factors, you also need to pay attention to your customers’ reviews because they help to increase your trustworthiness. Therefore, reviews will also help you to improve your ranking in search engines.

Importance Of Responding To Reviews

According to Google, responding to reviews left by your customers helps to improve your search ranking. Their support page on Google My Business, explicitly advises you to interact with your customers by responding promptly to reviews about your products or services. Furthermore, responding to reviews helps to improve your business’s local SEO by allowing you to show up in the local pack results (the first three businesses that appear in Google search queries).

Although it is difficult to handle all the reviews consistently, it is vital to ensure that your response to each review is personalized. This makes the customer feel that you are addressing them individually. You also need to respond to the reviews on time, especially since most customers who leave a review expect you to respond to their issues within a day or two. Fortunately, there are many free online tools that you can use to stay on top of your review responses. These tools will send you timely notifications whenever a customer reviews your business.

Also, make sure that you respond to all kinds of reviews, whether positive or negative. When responding to a positive review, be thankful to the customer and show them gratitude for doing business with you and for taking their time to write the review. When responding to a negative review, you must exercise a lot of restraint, especially if the client has used aggressive or foul language in the review. Just apologize and thank the customer for their feedback. You should also promise them to take the issues they’ve raised seriously.

In conclusion, the more reviews about your business you respond to professionally, the more noticeable your business will become in the search engines. Google and other search engines consider reviews’ quantity, diversity, and newness when determining which websites are more reliable.