Why It’s Crucial Small Businesses Monitor Online Reviews
Posted May 23, 2016
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Finding success as a small business can be tough. Small businesses don’t have the ability to avoid certain threats like the large national chains do. Some of these threats to small business are also online. Poor online reviews, for example, can be devastating. However, if you learn how to leverage online reviews in a positive way, they can become an invaluable asset.
Online Reviews Can Shape Your Branding
As a small business, branding may not be something you think of that often. Sure, you put thought into your business concept, name and logo, but you may have assumed branding is something only big national chains have to worry about. This is certainly not true. A small business’s brand is still very important even if you are playing to a local audience. If your branding is poor, it could drive people away even if those customers only reside in surrounding areas.
As a small business, your brand is extra susceptible to being hurt by things out of your control. You, for example, probably don’t have the marketing budget to purchase a large amount of ad space to counter negative things said about your company. With this in mind, your online reputation as formed by online reviews has a big sway in how your intended customer base perceives your company. If you want to protect your small business’s branding, you are going to need to make attempts to monitor and manage your online reputation.
Online Reviews Are How Customers Choose
The world of small business has certainly changed due to advent of the smart phone. These days, over 80 percent of internet users connect to the web on their phones. This allows consumers to access information they are curious about no matter where they may be during the day. If a group of friends enters a new town and wants to find a place to eat, for example, they will undoubtedly check online reviews on websites like Urban Spoon and Trip Advisor to make their decisions.
Businesses with better ratings will always be given preference in this scenario. Businesses with four or five stars, for example, will receive the lion’s share of customers. Businesses with three stars or less will be overlooked. This is not something companies had to worry about in the past. Good signage alone could drive in new customers. This, however, has changed. A very high percentage of consumers will make their decision of where to shop or eat based purely on the score or rating a business receives on online review websites.
Online Reviews Can Give You Valuable Intel
However, it’s not all bad news. While online reviews can certainly hurt a company, they also provide a valuable source of information to draw upon in regards to improving your business. If your pizza parlor, for example, has gotten bad reviews for poor customer service, you can focus more on training your employees on how to better treat customers. Certain reviews may even go into specifics that can help you pinpoint problem employees that are hurting your business.
Another good thing about online reviews is they are dated on most websites. Customers will obviously give more weight to recent reviews than reviews from years ago. While it may take an extremely long time for a negative review to disappear from the internet, newer reviews that are more positive about a business can certainly blunt most of the impact. With this in mind, you can use the information gathered from online reviews to improve your products and service so that better reviews are produced. This will result in higher overall scores and consumers getting a better first impression of your company.
Online Reviews Play a Role in SEO
These days, online reviews even help determine whether or not your small business is search engine optimized. One big trend with the major search engines like Google has been a move towards localized search. They know that one of the main reasons people use search engines now is to locate brick and mortar businesses. As such, a big change in search engine algorithms has been made to give search engine users the best answers in regards to local businesses related to their searches.
One of the ways Google chooses the best results is through the reviews they receive from paying customers. For example, if you search for “St. Joseph, MI pizza” the top results will actually be reviews from different pizza restaurants in St. Joseph. At the top will be the highest ranked pizza places in the city. However, with the way the search engine is currently set up, Google only displays the top three reviewed restaurants before going back to regular search results. You would have to click to see more than three.
To have the most visibility, a restaurant needs to be ranked in the top three for its category. Google also includes a Google Maps map of where those three different pizza places are located in the city. This can be even more beneficial for businesses with high review scores.
Online Reviews Can Act as Free Marketing
One thing most small businesses don’t have is sizable marketing budgets. Purchasing ad space on TV, the radio or even the local paper may simply be too expensive. Many such businesses in the past had to rely mostly on positive word of mouth to act as their marketing. However, word of mouth has now gone digital in the form of online reviews.
While online reviews can have either a cumulative negative or positive effect on a business, it is an absolute fact that they do have an effect. If a small business’s reviews are positive, those reviews can act as free marketing for the company. They will allow the word to quickly get out about the business in a way that would have cost thousands of dollars in ad spending in the past. Having a high cumulative score on review websites will insure that potential customers learn your company’s name. Even if they don’t visit immediately, they are likely to do so in the future.
