How Important Are Reviews?
Author, Ahmed Reza
There’s a lot of talk on how reviews are very important.
This blog post is about how important Google and Yelp reviews actually are. With the ever-increasing growth in the use of mobile devices, finding out if a place of business is worth your time and money is easier and faster than ever. I mean look at how easy Google makes it to find almost all the information you’d ever need about a business - it’s super easy. You need directions to a place of business and BAM!, there are reviews, website link, hours of operation, and even a phone number to call ahead. Recent reviews are the first thing many people will notice.
Recent Reviews
One of the things that Google takes into consideration for a business is how relevant you are -- do you post on your social media a lot, do you have a 5-star review, how often do you get reviews, etc. From our experience, any review after 30 days becomes less relevant. Why, you ask? Well, an old review is better than no review; however, a few things come to mind if you haven’t gotten a review within 30 days. Now this next part is mostly subjective, but you will find it true yourself as a reader. When looking at reviews and you haven’t seen a new review in a month or more, I personally wonder is this place that busy? Do people think it’s worth their time and money? Or perhaps the service wasn’t good enough to want to write about it? Now, again, maybe you don’t think about this and yes, relevancy is purely subjective. However, there are a lot of people who think this way and for this, it matters that you request for reviews regularly. Ask for reviews especially in Google since they are the most commonly used search engine and they rate you off of relevance and your reviews.
Negative Reviews Hurt
There is no sure-fire way to avoid all negative reviews, unfortunately, and they hurt especially if you are someone who gets very few reviews. So rather than dreading a negative review or spend a lot of unnecessary time and money on trying to get it removed (since there are legal ways of making this happen), just accept that it happens (since you can’t please everyone) and then bury it with more good reviews. I know this sounds easy, but unless you have a team who is open to asking for reviews, this can be a challenging task. The staff is key to making this process easier.
So after you are done reading this blog, do two things:
Do you have a story about earning reviews? I read every comment left. Tell us your story!
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