Why Local Business Reviews Are So Important

Onboarding a new employee to your in-house marketing team or digital marketing agency? Need to get ahead of your competition in Google’s local packs and Maps? Today’s column is for you! Bookmark it, share it, and boost your brand’s understanding of why local business reviews deserve to sit at the center of your local search marketing strategy. 

In this column I’ll cover the mindset you can bring to this form of user generated content (UGC) that reveals its true impacts.

See the full spectrum of local business review powers

The sight of a rainbow is aweing enough to make people stop whatever they are doing for a moment to gaze in wonder at the gorgeous array of colors in the sky. As an artist, I believe it’s getting to see all of those vivid hues in a single glance that captivates people.

I’m hoping that by putting the full spectrum of local business review powers all in one place for you, you’ll come to share my sense of wonder at the majestic big picture of the many ways in which this content helps local brands.

1. Reviews are core to customer service

The term “customer service” may initially call to mind ideas of help desks and helplines, but as soon as the public was granted the power to start reviewing local businesses online, it redefined the meaning of this traditional term.

I’ve been reading every review-oriented survey I could get my hands on for decades, and these high-level takeaways from years of published research demonstrate why it’s smart to see reviews as a customer service medium:

• The majority of reviewers expect to receive a response when they write a review, just as they would expect to be acknowledged when approaching staff at your place of business.

• Reviews have become an online complaint department, capturing pain points customers are voluntarily reporting to you for resolution.

• Reviews are conversational, like a help desk at your place of business; customers communicate, and you respond via the owner response functionality offered by most review platforms. When a stated complaint is resolved, a satisfied customer may return to the conversation to update their existing review and rating, or write new content to reflect a better opinion of your brand. 

• Just as the presence of floor staff at your premises signals that your brand is ready to provide customer service, the presence of owner responses to your reviews demonstrates to all online searchers that you are accessible, responsive, and eager to connect and assist.

• Your communications skills are as important in managing review requests and responses as they are in serving customers in person. Qualities like friendliness, expertise, authoritativeness, helpfulness, transparency, and fairness all come into play whether you are participating in an offline or online dialogue with a patron. In fact, your online customer service voice may be even more important than your real-world one, because it is read by the consumer public instead of being private.

2. Reviewers are your most persuasive PR department

Large local business enterprises may devote millions to PR campaigns, but review-oriented surveys have helped me understand the following: 

• Potential customers trust what other customers say about businesses far more than they trust anything your brand can say about itself. 

• Many customers trust local business reviews as much as they trust word-of-mouth (WOM) recommendations from their own family and friends. 

• While traditional PR activities like distributing press releases may still get your brand noticed in some circles, their audience cannot compare with the medium of reviews; surveys regularly find that a little short of 100% of consumers read local business reviews.

• One excellent aspect of the persuasive power of reviews is that each reviewer has a unique narrative voice which may resonate with particular readers. Not only may a particular reviewer’s story about your brand feel relatable to a potential customer, but reviewers can cumulatively mention thousands of aspects of your business all within a single review corpus. This can provide confirmation to searchers that your brand is, has, and does exactly what they’re looking for.

3. Reviewers are your best unpaid sales force

Happy reviewers don’t just create good public relations for your brand – they deliver profits. Local searches like “vegan pizza near me”, “emergency vet”, and “plus size clothing store boise” all have a transactional intent and cause Google to surface Google Business Profiles and local pack results. Anyone accessing these results is on the verge of choosing a brand with which to do business.

Positive reviews turn up at just this critical moment in the buyer’s journey, and can convert a searcher into a shopper if the UGC they read convinces them that your business is the best local choice for their needs. Given this, these unpaid and unofficial brand evangelists don’t just persuade the public that you have a great reputation – they can profoundly affect your bottom line.

This is all the more reason to use the owner response function to thank every customer who has volunteered their good opinion of your business. It shows your gratitude, not only to the reviewer, but to any other customer who is weighing whether to spend a few minutes of their free time writing a review of your brand.

4. Reviews as critical business intelligence

There is value in conducting formal consumer surveys to better understand the communities you serve, but these can involve both considerable time and expense. By contrast, your review corpus is always free, always fresh, and filled with invaluable business intelligence. Consider the following:

• Positive reviews confirm what your business is already getting right; happy customers let you know which aspects of your business they value most, meaning that these are goods, services, policies, and amenities you should continue to prioritize. 

• Negative reviews are even more valuable, surfacing both simple and structural problems that can be addressed to improve customer satisfaction. This type of data becomes even more crucial for multi-location brands, enabling them to identify trending negative sentiment surrounding specific branches of the business. For example, if multiple negative reviews begin to emerge for the Portland location of a pizza franchise that food is cold, late, incorrect, or too salty, then corporate will know it is time to intervene to fix problems as quickly as possible so that the reputation of that branch stops eroding.

• Both positive and negative reviews provide competitive business intelligence. By auditing the reviews of the top local competitors in any market, you can discover what a community likes and dislikes about a particular business. This can help you in creating the necessary strategy for a better local offering.  

5. Reviews as your content marketing treasure chest

Given what we’ve learned about the public trusting review sentiment over brand messaging, take the brilliant and logical next step of putting this form of UGC at the center of your content marketing strategy in all of the following ways:

• Feature reviews on multiple pages of your website, including your home page, location landing pages, product and service pages, and, if you have one, your blog.

• Feature reviews across your social media profiles.

• Feature reviews in your Google Updates/Posts and as both images and video content on your listings.

• Feature reviews on real-world assets, such as store signage, menus, print marketing materials, billboards, and company vehicles.

• Obtain and feature audio-based testimonials on your website, podcast, and podcast and radio paid advertising.

• If you are investing in local or national television advertising, find a way to feature UGC in it.

6. Reviews as ranking factors

If you need to get more buy-in and budget from the SEO-minded folks in your organization to place a higher priority on review management, this is the section to share with them. The annual Whitespark Local Search Ranking Factors Survey consistently finds that aspects of Google Business Profile reviews directly impact rankings in Google’s local packs, local finders, and Maps. The most recent edition of this survey of world class local search marketers finds that all of the following have an impact on how well businesses rank in Google’s local results:

• High numerical star ratings
• Quantity of Google-based reviews
• Sustained influx of reviews over time (rather than reviews coming in bursts)
• Recency of reviews
• Keywords in Google-based reviews
• Positive sentiment in review text
• Quantity of text-less star ratings

All of these signals number among the top 50 most important Google Business Profile ranking factors, meaning that each one is deserved of management. Both the most impactful factor (high numerical star ratings) and the factor lower down the list (positive sentiment in review text) will result directly from the quality of the customer experiences your brand is providing. They demonstrate the crucial nature of all forms of customer service. The other factors in this list, however, require additional consideration. 

Now that we’ve looked at the full rainbow of review powers and understand their deep and varied impact on local brand success, you’re likely wondering how to acquire as much of this potent UGC as possible. We’ll cover this in next week’s post!

Miriam Ellis is a local SEO columnist and consultant. She has been cited as one of the top five most prolific women writers in the SEO industry. Miriam is also an award-winning fine artist and her work can be seen at MiriamEllis.com.