As a small business owner, it’s essential to invest time in enhancing your SEO. Search Engine Optimization directly impacts your website visibility and can be the differentiating factor between successfully acquiring new customers and struggling to keep the doors open.

There are many different strategies you can employ to improve your SEO. One approach is to focus on generating customer reviews. Online reviews are one of the most important factors in local search ranking, so it’s crucial to make review generation a priority. Here’s a look at why customer reviews are important for SEO and how you can go about getting them.

The Role of Reviews in SEO

One of the primary ways that search engines determine whether or not a website is relevant is by looking at the number of inbound links pointing back to that site. In other words, if lots of other websites are linking to yours, it must be because you have something valuable to offer. That’s where customer reviews come in.

Reviews count as inbound links, which means that they can help improve your website’s SEO and make it more visible in search results. Not only that, but online reviews also contribute to click-through rate. In fact, a study by BrightLocal found that 84% of people trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations from friends and family members.

This means that if your website is full of positive customer reviews, potential customers are more likely to click on it when they see it in search results than they would be if there were no reviews at all. And since Click-Through Rate is one of the key ranking factors for organic search, this could have a significant impact on where your website falls in search results pages.

Getting Reviews from Customers

The first step in getting customer reviews is to actually ask for them. You can do this via email after someone makes a purchase, through social media channels, or even on your receipt if you have a brick-and-mortar store. You can also put up signage in your store reminding customers to leave you a review online. Be sure to make it easy for customers to actually leave a review by providing them with links to your profiles on popular review sites like Google My Business, Yelp, and TripAdvisor.

You should also take steps to encourage customers who had positive experiences with your business to leave reviews by offering incentives like discounts or coupons. Just be sure that you don’t offer incentives for negative reviews, as this could get you into hot water with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).

Conclusion

Customer reviews play an important role in Local SEO by serving as valuable inbound links and contributing to Click-Through Rate—two key ranking factors for organic search results pages. If you’re not already regularly asking customers for their feedback, now is the time to start! You can encourage customers to leave reviews by joining ReviewAlly today and using our review request feature and offering incentives for those who take the time write something positive about their experience with your business.