How to leverage reviews for your company and SEO

Resource mentioned: The Busy Executive’s Guide to Hiring A Digital Marketing Agency.

Hey there I’m John Doherty and I’m the founder and CEO of Credo where we help great companies get introduced fast to the best pre-vetted digital marketing firms.

Today we’re going to talk about leveraging reviews for your business.

It’s a common misunderstanding that reviews are really only important to local businesses. In reality, reviews are extremely useful for many types of businesses, including local businesses as well as ecommerce and online service businesses.

Your business probably faces the same challenges as most businesses – attracting enough visitors or potential customers to your site or place of business and then converting them into paying customers or leads. Every business I have ever worked with, on, or for has this challenge.

But the opportunity in front of you today is to make strides towards solving those issues, or at least improving those metrics, using reviews.

You’ll be able to:

  1. Attract more customers because you stand out from the competition
  2. Get more sales because you’ve already built trust with them before they even contact you
  3. Build an engine that gets you more reviews from customers so that you continue to drive the flywheel

When I was first getting Credo off the ground, I was looking for areas of opportunity to build our brand and start associating us, as a relatively new company in 2015/2016, alongside already trusted brands.

We play in a pretty competitive space, and we needed to set ourselves apart not only with our offering but also with our branding. So I launched Reviews on Pro Profiles, and incentivized agencies to get reviews on their profiles because it helped them rank better on the site. By doing this and then using Schema.org to show these aggregate ratings in the search results, we were able to piggyback to a bit of brand recognition.

So how do you get reviews and then how do you leverage them for your own marketing? That’s what we’re going to cover today.

There are 6 areas we’ll cover today:

  1. Ask your existing customers (via email) for a review after asking them to rate their service. Be careful with incentives like gift cards as this can go against terms of service.
  2. Use reviews gathered on platforms like Google My Business or your own site in other places, such as advertising, to drive traffic and build trust with potential customers.
  3. Use reviews as testimonials on your site to showcase positive things people have to say.
  4. Leverage Schema.org, especially AggregateRating, to give yourself a good shot of them showing in the search results for your website.
  5. Prioritize linking from your site to your most positive profiles on other platforms to help them rank for your brand name as well.
  6. Leverage tools like GatherUp, Square, or your own email marketing/marketing automation tools to follow up shortly after a customer had a positive experience to solicit feedback and reviews.

To review:

  1. Reviews can drive more qualified customers because you’ve already shown them what others have to say about your business
  2. Use reviews in multiple places in your marketing to drive trust and traffic
    Leverage Schema.org to have reviews show in Google’s search results
  3. Prioritize strong platforms like Google My Business or Yelp, if they’re available to you, as they’re trusted by consumers.

If this was helpful to you, I invite you to download our free ebook – The Busy Executive’s Guide to Hiring A Digital Marketing Agency.

Also be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel so that you’re notified about weekly videos moving forward.