Business owners should always monitor their company’s reviews on sites like Yelp, Google+, Facebook and Angie’s List. Taking a screen shot of rave reviews and then posting on social media serves as a great tactic for improving your business’ public perception and may also help entice other customers into leaving a review as well. Meanwhile, when a patient leaves a negative review the best call in certain situations is to respond to the reviewer and offer your apologies.
While negative reviews drive many business owners crazy, is it worth worrying about in terms of SEO? In other words, will your business appear lower in search rankings if your company’s Google Review rating is lower than your competitors’?
Yes and no.
While Google completely disregards (supposedly) Google+ reviews in their organic search rankings, they do showcase higher-reviewed companies in local listings. This is because they want local listings – or the businesses that appear at the top of SERPs underneath the map – to serve as an alternative to Yelp, seeing as they want to direct site visitors to the best businesses in the area they’re searching from. However, you’ll still see companies with lower reviews outrank businesses with superior reviews since reviews are just one of many ranking factors.
All in all, having a Google Reviews rating over 4-stars will help tremendously – more so in just the way consumers behave than in SEO. Its impact on your business’ search rankings is minimal in comparison to the impact it has on potential customers’ perception of your business. Strive to make your business as well-received as possible with the intention of improving your business, instead of solely doing it to improve your SEO. If your customers are happy with the services you provided them, your business’ SEO team will have a much easier time marketing your business.