Choosing which online review sites to use can help you maximize the benefit you get from your customers’ glowing praise.
You can’t stop your customers from posting business reviews anywhere they choose but you can recommend specific sites when you encourage consumers to leave you a business review.
Some review sites provide more benefits than others but identifying the best sites for your business also depends on the products or services that you offer.
Best Online Review Sites for Your Prospects
Start by identifying the business review sites that your prospects use to find companies like yours.
Whether those locations make sense to you or not, you need to put your company in those locations that your potential customers rely on. This may take a little research – and you’ll need to have clearly defined prospect and customer profiles.
One simple and effective way to identify these sites is to ask your best customers how they found you. Actually, this is a question you should be asking every customer anyway.
Best Online Review Sites for Your Industry
Some industries naturally lend themselves to online reviews. These include the travel industry, medical and dental, construction, real estate and, most notably, restaurants.
For contractors and home improvement-oriented businesses of all kinds, Angie’s List and HomeAdvisor are where most of your prospects will head first. Restaurants and bars are still strongly influenced by Yelp, although Yelp’s controversial history has diminished its popularity in recent years.
In the medical and dental fields, Zocdoc, Healthgrades, RateMDs and others feature practitioner reviews as well as practice profiles and directory listings.
Best Online Review Sites for Your Search Engine Rankings
No matter how great or helpful a review site may be, it won’t benefit you or your customers if no one ever finds it – or you. The good news is that customer reviews have the ability to boost your SEO significantly.
Google’s algorithms weight user-created content – like online reviews – heavily when determining your search results ranking. Google does look for recent reviews, however, so you’ll need to keep them coming.
Google (through Google My Business or GMB) remains the best online review site for boosting your SEO, and it will likely continue to be the leader for many years to come. With few exceptions, you should be directing your customers to leave you a Google business review, especially if you serve a local market.
Better Business Bureau reviews are influential as are those posted on Facebook, Yahoo, Bing, Foursquare and Superpages.
Once you determine the best locations for your customers to leave you reviews, you need to devise a way to make it easy for them. That’s where Accrue Reviews comes in. Our unique services help your customers leave positive reviews while helping you minimize negative feedback.
Contact us today to learn more about our affordable, easy-to-use system for helping your customers leave you an online review.