Improving Your SEO | Does Responding to Reviews Help SEO?
Over 90% of customers today trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. The majority of users browsing the web often seek out an online review before making a purchase.
With review pages highlighting the authentic experiences of other consumers, reviews today can significantly impact business performance. Unfortunately, many businesses have yet to realize the power, impact, and potential that responding to reviews can impart.
Does responding to reviews help SEO? Short answer: yes, absolutely! When a company responds to reviews, this helps to build authentic, translucent trust between the brand and a customer. However, review responses can also help build trust with a search engine.
The big search engines like Google and Bing aim to recommend the most credible businesses to their customers. By publicly responding to complaints and acknowledging praises, businesses can demonstrate to consumers and search engines that they remain willing to go the extra mile as a trusted resource.
Responding to Reviews and How it Can Impact SEO Performance
Every business should respond to its reviews. These reviews help other consumers form their initial impressions of a business based on their review page. When businesses take the time to thank customers or apologize to unhappy ones while attempting to remedy problems, this demonstrates their dedication to a customer base; an important contributor to online reputation management.
We can think about what positively impacts customers additionally impacts a brand’s relationship with search engines. The search engines want to provide their users with the best possible results for their queries. The factors that a search engine may rely upon to provide reliable search results and resources often reflect the same factors that a customer base may utilize to determine a brand’s trustworthiness.
We cannot discuss search engine relevance and SEO impact without discussing Google. Google takes review diversity, recency, and quantity into account with their complex algorithms. A brand can ensure its discovery from search engine inquiries by monitoring how the company performs regarding these factors.
As businesses respond to reviews, the business can improve local SEO by offering personalized responses promptly. For negative reviews, it is even more crucial to provide customers with a response as quickly as possible. Reaching customers with a negative experience in time can turn negative experiences into positive ones.
Determining Local Search Engine Rankings
Google and Bing determine local SEO ranking utilizing complex search algorithms. Some key ranking factors that the big search engines look at when evaluating how to display Maps and search results include:
- Distance – Search engines consider how far away a business listing is from a user’s location when searching.
- Relevancy – Search engines will measure how well a business profile matches with local searches, and how complete and detailed their business listing appears. This is where timely responses to online reviews can come into play.
- Prominence – Search engines analyze how well-known a business is when they rank search results.
A business cannot easily change its location or brand prominence. Nevertheless, businesses can increase their relevance by maintaining organized and accurate business profiles, in addition to asking customers to provide them with reviews while keeping up with response rates by providing helpful replies.
Does Responding to Reviews Help SEO? | Managing Business Profiles and Online Reputation with GOA-TECH
No singular tool or technique can magically solve all of a business’s SEO and search engine ranking issues. However, by promptly responding with helpful and accurate information, a brand can make the process so much easier.
Building and maintaining a review response strategy isn’t easy but remains the best way to help a business improve local SEO while climbing up the rankings. Businesses must rely on the right tools and strategy to accomplish ironclad review response and SEO performance.
GOA-TECH is a full-service SEO agency and digital marketing firm dedicated to assisting businesses in the South Florida community and abroad. To learn more about how we can help your company, reach out to our friendly customer service team today!
