Consumers are no longer satisfied with traditional information sources such as advertising. According to the trust score created by data and research institute Kantar, advertising comes last in their eyes (38 points) while review sites come in second (91 points) just behind friends and family (93)¹. The consumer’s Google review has become an essential element in your customers’ purchase decision.
Find out how to get Google reviews here.
And now, one French person out of two cites reputation, through online customer reviews, as the number one criterion for choosing a company, according to an IFOP² report. This trend can be explained by their need to be reassured when faced with an offer or a brand that they do not know well. Online reviews, from other consumers, represent a reliable evaluation of the service offered by your company, its point of sale or its product. In other words, customer reviews allow consumers to buy with confidence or to avoid unsavory companies.
In this article, we explain concretely what a consumer review is, its interest for your company and the good practices to apply so that it acts on your brand image as well as your digital visibility!
What is a consumer review? Definition
A consumer review, or customer review, is an assessment formulated by a company’s customer. This opinion can take the form of a comment, a note or even stars online and it can also evaluate the customer’s satisfaction with a product, a service, an overall experience or a visit to a point of sale.
If customer reviews existed long before the creation of the web, they were then less structured and less visible for the consumer in search of purchase assistance. Now, the Internet allows them to be widely distributed through numerous dedicated review platforms and many strategic sites for brand visibility.
Although there are false customer reviews, the impact of customer reviews is undeniably on purchasing decisions. And this, whether the purchase takes place online or at the point of sale. After having considerably influenced the tourism industry, and particularly the restaurant sector, customer reviews are now strategic for all sectors:
- Real Estate
- The automobile
- The craft
- Retail
- The health
- The habitat
- B2B services
- Etc.
What is the use of a consumer review for your business?
Customer reviews allow your customers to express their satisfaction or even dissatisfaction with the offer and/or experience proposed by your company. But beyond taking the risk of seeing positive or negative feedback flourish through your digital profiles, customer reviews allow you to gain visibility and reassure potential customers looking for services or products similar to yours.
Increase the visibility of your company and your points of sale through the web
First of all, customer reviews are a great asset to any digital marketing strategy as they affect your Google visibility. They allow you to increase your local visibility, i.e. your local SEO, through the search engine and the Maps application.
As a reminder, local SEO refers to the place that your website or your Google My Business listings get in the rankings of queries:
- Geolocated in your geographical area and whose search intent is related to your business sector. For example: a query “Car garage” made via a smartphone geolocated in Nantes.
- Including a location element close to your geographical area and whose search intent is related to your business sector. For example: “Car garage Nantes”.
And a 2021 study has shown that reviews are one of the decisive criteria for local SEO through Google³ services. 3 factors are particularly decisive to allow the reviews published on the Google My Business (GMB) listings of your establishments to boost your visibility with your local target:
- Their quantity but also their quality (i.e. scores of 4 and 5 out of 5)
- The positive sentiment that emanates from the comments associated with the scores
- The number of annotations published on each file
In short, if a GMB listing has a lot of positive, detailed reviews, it has a much better chance of being visible in the local queries of your prospects. Better yet, it has a better chance of appearing on the Local Pack, the box that presents three establishments at the beginning of the results of a local query. And all of these elements can encourage your prospects to visit your establishments and boost your sales as shown in the infographic below:
