Whether you run a bricks-and-mortar business or operate entirely online, it’s critical you understand the importance of Google Reviews. From improving SEO and your ranking on Search Engine Page Results (SERPs), to click-through rate (CTR), customer conversions, and ultimately increasing your revenue, the ‘busy bees’ at beefound have compiled a list of 10 key Google Reviews benefits for your business.
As the top review site in the world, the reviews left on Google are read by around 90% of potential customers before they make a product purchase. In short, you’re going to want to know how to leverage these stats in your favour.
Read on to discover why Google Reviews have come to play such an influential role in developing a business’s online presence, building consumer trust, and giving small to medium-sized businesses an advantage over their competitors. Our guide to Google Reviews benefits will shine a light on the ways in which investing in online customer reviews can help your business grow.
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- What are Google Reviews?
- 10 Google Reviews benefits for businesses big and small
- Recapping the importance of Google Reviews for business growth
What are Google Reviews?
Google Reviews are one of the more trusted and engaged types of reviews left for businesses today, for whilst anyone can leave a Google Review on your Google Business Profile (whether or not they have engaged with your offering), studies show that the public pays close attention to what’s being said there.
Regardless of the degree to which your business operates online, you are likely to have an online presence in the guise of a Google Maps profile and website, perhaps even an accompanying Google Seller Rating, as well.
Customers and clients are able to leave your business a Google Review directly via the search engine, by Google Maps, or occasionally by leaving a review on another site—e.g., TrustPilot, Okendo, Facebook or Reevoo (because Google sometimes will gather and display these reviews in the same format). You can also encourage customers to leave you a Google Review by sharing with them a link to your Google Business Profile.
The search engine giant compiles your Google Reviews and displays them in a simple two-tier system next to your business in Maps and Search, making it as easy as possible for internet users to assess your business at a glance:
- A rating out of five (5) stars.
- An optional written review, where users give context to their rating.
Most customers tend to automatically filter out any search results with ratings lower than four stars, which is why it’s so important you know the benefits of Google Reviews and how to leverage them effectively.
Exploring the importance of Google Reviews
Regardless of your enthusiasm for digital marketing—or your lack thereof—there’s no getting around the fact that Google Reviews are important to the continued success of your business.
The world of commerce and service providing has become increasingly digitised over the last few decades to the point where nearly a third of all business is currently conducted online, with the eCommerce industry alone set to be worth over $8 trillion USD by 2027.
When it comes to Google Reviews, studies show that 81% of people say they are likely to check a business’s Google Reviews before interacting with its offering. A further 95% read online reviews before buying a product or engaging with a service, and 94% report actively avoiding a business after reading a bad review.
Like it or not, Google Reviews are at the core of your business’s ability to attract, retain, and communicate with potential customers. And as we all know, customers are the ‘pollen’ needed to make that all-important ‘honey’—without them, your business cannot succeed, let alone grow into a flourishing ‘hive’.
10 key Google Reviews benefits for businesses big and small
We’ve defined Google Reviews and discussed their importance in the modern, digitised world of business. Now let’s get to the meat of this article, and discuss 10 key ways in which your business could benefit from positive (and negative!) Google Reviews.
1) Gather useful customer feedback to improve your offering
Market research remains fundamental to the success of any enterprise. Getting to know your target demographic helps businesses create an offering which is uniquely appealing to its prospective customers, whilst tailoring branding, advertising and more to stick in those customers’ minds. But market research can be resource- and labour-intensive to conduct.
By reading and compiling your Google Reviews, you are provided a direct line to the issues and concerns most important to your customers.
Gathering customer feedback from Google Reviews, for example, can help show which of your products or services is best received, and which is least liked. With information to hand, you can reassess your branding, marketing, and offering and seek to improve its reception within your customer base.
2) Enhance your brand’s credibility and trustworthiness
The majority of all online reviews are found on Google. As a result, the search engine provider has generated for itself an unprecedented level of consumer trust. What’s more, the ‘social proof’ of user-written reviews means that around 49% of people trust Google Reviews as much as they do personal recommendations from family and friends.
Effectively, the more high-rated Google Reviews your business can accrue, and the better your customer engagement through those reviews, the more credible your brand feels to new and existing customers. Google Reviews are as impactful as word-of-mouth marketing has been for millennia.
Pro tip: You can embed Google Reviews in your website so that visitors are further reminded of the positive experiences your customers have had with your offering.
3) Rank higher in SERPs with optimized & local SEO
Ranking highly on SERPs is no easy feat to accomplish, but once achieved can lead to exponentially higher levels of traffic to your website, higher conversion rates, more sales, and more profit. A lot of SERPs ranking depends upon the quality of your SEO practices, yet Google Reviews have become just as important.
When trawling the web for relevant, authoritative and trustworthy websites to display for an internet user’s search, Google not only considers the quality of your content, but also your brand’s Google Reviews rating.
High-rated Google Reviews are especially useful for businesses with a set geographical presence, elevating the local SEO potential of your business to rank on SERPs and gain a competitive advantage over local competition.
4) Become a more visible and recognisable online brand
The more trusted your business is online, and the more high-quality reviews you accrue, the more likely Google is to display your website and business information to users searching for relevant keywords, and/or for products or services you offer.
As a trusted business, you’ll begin drawing traffic to your website from myriad different sources—i.e., Google Maps, the Google search engine, social media and more—helping to cement your brand in the minds of prospective customers.
In other words, Google Reviews can help to put your branding in front of the right eyes, at the right time, and keep it there.
5) Gain a competitive advantage in your industry and locale
Competition is stiff, no matter what industry you’re in. And in an internet era of constant content and booming eCommerce, convincing a potential lead to engage with your business and not your competitor’s can be extremely challenging.
The Google Reviews your customers post and the stars they award your business say a lot about the quality of your offering and customer service. Moreover, we’ve already detailed some of the many ways in which reviews influence consumer decisions. Combined, this means earning more reviews and/or a higher rating than your competitor could prove the tipping point which convinces a prospective new lead to interact with your business.
6) Improve your click-through rates (CTR) from Google searches
Zero-click searches are what we call a user’s search which doesn’t result in them clicking on a link in SERPs. Back in 2020, the percentage of Google searches designated ‘zero-click’ rose to an astonishing 65%.
This statistic proves how important your CTR, or click-through rate, is. With the majority of searches ending in no clicks at all, it’s important that you pay attention to the rate at which customers are clicking on your link when it’s presented to them.
Positive and numerous Google Reviews—automatically attached to your links by Google—are proven to increase CTRs by as much as 35%. Search engine users are more likely to trust that your link holds the solution to their query if they can quickly and easily see that other people like them highly rate your brand.
The positive influence of Google Reviews on CTR applies both to ‘organic’ rankings on SERPs, and to PPC paid advertising via Google Ads.
7) Accrue free user-generated content (UGC) and word-of-mouth marketing
Earlier, we compared Google Reviews to word-of-mouth marketing in the digital age, but there’s more to be got from Google Reviews if you know how to leverage them correctly.
In digital marketing, user-generated content (UGC) is any content which promotes a brand without being commissioned by the brand. UGC is generated organically by an enthusiastic customer or client.
Google Reviews, in addition to working as word-of-mouth, can also be leveraged as UGC. Provided you acquire the permission of the review author, you can turn Google Reviews into highly valuable content for your social media marketing strategy—showcasing organic, positive opinions about your enterprise in return for greater social proof and wider brand awareness.
8) Build better customer relationships and address negative feedback
It is important to remember, of course, that Google Reviews are not a purely passive source of publicity and social proof. They can also be actively engaged with.
As a business, you are allowed to respond to the reviews your customers leave you on Google, and we would encourage you to do so. From the simplest of responses—a ‘Thank you!’ or ‘We’re so glad to hear you enjoyed your time with us.’—to more carefully crafted messages, interacting with customers via Google Reviews helps to build stronger relationships with your customer base.
The benefits of this are many. The customer you engage with feels seen and heard, and is thus more likely to show your brand greater loyalty. On the other hand, prospective customers yet to engage with your brand may be encouraged to try your offering after witnessing the friendly and professional way in which you communicate.
Of course, not every review is positive. Negative reviews require a reply, too, even moreso than positive reviews. By replying professionally to negative reviews, you can nip any potential reputational backlash in the bud early, whilst potentially also retaining a customer who may otherwise have left your company for good.
9) Gather voice-of-customer data for personalised marketing campaigns
One of the rather unsung benefits of Google Reviews is the insight they can give you into your customers—not just their wants, desires, and concerns, as previously discussed, but also the way they talk. This is called ‘voice-of-customer data.’
By compiling your Google Reviews into a single document, you can begin to highlight recurring themes, issues of importance to your customers, their tone of voice and language. You can then, with this data to hand, aim to replicate the way your customers speak when communicating and interacting with them in future—either in replies to your reviews or in your marketing campaigns.
The more personalised and familiar your communications come across, the more likely a new or existing customer is to engage and stick around.
10) Ultimately boost your business’s revenue and capacity for growth
Enhanced brand reputation and reach, insightful feedback, and greater visibility and CTRs are all well and good, but what about money?
Well, you’ll be pleased to learn that positive Google Reviews are also known to increase average customer spend by around 30%. In the long run, accruing, encouraging and leveraging high-rated Google Reviews can therefore boost your annual turnover, providing greater opportunity and resources to continue growing your business.
Recapping the importance of Google Reviews for business growth
There is a wealth of data out there proving that what other people have to say about a business and its offering plays a hugely important part in a prospective customer’s decision-making process.
Negative reviews, if left unresolved, can drive away up to 40% of potential customers, whilst positive reviews, on the flip side, generate greater traffic to your website and greater spend once there.
Moreover, in a world of endless content and countless businesses vying for online visibility, Google Reviews can help you rise to the top of the pack, eclipsing your competition and cementing your brand in the minds of local and international leads.
To learn more about Google Reviews and how they can help you ‘bee’ found online, come and speak with the ‘busy bees’ at beefound.agency, today.
