99.9% of people read online reviews when shopping or looking at businesses. Whether you’re operating an online business or a local brick-and-mortar business, looking at online reviews and responding to them can help your business grow. How? In this blog from Incept, we’ll be taking a look at just a few of the benefits your business can enjoy if you respond to online reviews.
1. Your Business Will Look More Active To Searchers
When customers can see that you’re actively responding to reviews – both positive and negative – they will know that you’re really looking at feedback and that you’re listening to customers.
Similarly to having an inactive social media page or a blog that hasn’t been updated in years, having lots of reviews without responses can make users question whether your business is still operating, or is providing legitimate products and services. By staying active on online review platforms like Google, Yelp, and Facebook, you can make your business look more active to prospective customers.
2. Actively Responding To Reviews Helps Build Trust And Authority
In line with our first point, actively responding to customer reviews can help build trust and authority. Whether the review is negative or positive, you can make your business seem more trustworthy by responding to it.
Engaging with a customer review, leaving a thoughtful response, and letting a customer know that you appreciate their time is a great way to help your business seem more trustworthy and legitimate to new customers.
3. You Can Delight Customers Who Leave Positive Reviews
When someone goes out of their way to leave positive feedback, you can thank them, show your appreciation, and delight them. Whether you simply thank them for their support, or you offer them a special discount, a freebie, or anything else, you can make customers feel like they're truly important to you.
Responding to positive reviews is a great way to show how much you care about your customers. And this can turn happy customers into truly loyal brand advocates. Just don’t go too far. It’s nice to offer things to customers to leave positive reviews – but you don’t want it to look like you’re bribing customers to say good things about your business!
4. You Can Mitigate The Effects Of Negative Customer Reviews
You do your best, but sometimes things go wrong, or there are misunderstandings. You may not always get good reviews. But when you have a bad review, responding in a level-headed way, working to fix the issue, and truly listening to customer complaints can be very helpful.
For most online review platforms, responses to all reviews are public and can be seen by anyone. This helps show other customers that, even if something goes wrong, you’re trying to do your best to help, and make something positive out of a negative situation.
Not only that, but you can change the mind of the person who left the bad review, in some cases. By offering to make things right or simply communicating how sorry you are, they may remove the review, update it, or at least come back to your business to give it another try.
5. Responding To Google Reviews Can Boost Business SEO Rankings
Google My Business is one of the biggest online review platforms, along with Facebook, Yelp, and some others. If you’re actively responding to Google reviews, this will actually boost your business SEO rankings.
Google prefers to rank active businesses higher, so taking the time to respond to reviews may give you a valuable boost over your local competition. That’s just another reason that you should take the time to read and respond to every review that you can.
Need Help Growing Your Business? Contact Incept Today!
At Incept, we offer outsourced marketing and customer support services. If you’re looking for a competitive edge and you want to grow your business, our team is on your side. To learn more about what we do and see how we can help support your small business as it grows, contact us online for a no-commitment consultation.