Google Reviews help your Business Website Grow

For businesses, online reviews are one of the best direct channels for customer feedback. So, encourage your customers to go to your Google Places listing and review your business. When you receive a high number of positive reviews, your business will start showing in the local search results in Google, which means you will get a lot of traffic to your website.

For small businesses, online reviews bring the benefit of social proof to the table—they help increase (or decrease) the degree of trust felt for an unfamiliar business based on feedback from other people with similar needs.

Ratings and reviews are a huge conversion factor, more influential for getting users to click through and make a purchase than business citations or most other elements of local SEO. If your search result has 4.5 stars and 18 reviews (compared to fewer for your competitors), that’s strong social proof that your product or service is trustworthy. But besides increasing users’ trust, recent search innovations have created new reasons that SEO-minded local businesses need reviews and ratings.

Customer reviews don’t influence just people.

Another factor about reviews is the influence they exert on where your business is listed in search engine results.

There are multiple sources for this finding, but let’s start with the most authoritative research - review signals ranked fifth among the most important search-engine ranking factors.

Encourage your customers to leave reviews using a soft-sell approach. You could make suggestions in your newsletter, ask customers after a satisfactory experience, or put up review-site logos in your place of business.

Set up a simple system for connecting with customers through regular social media or email contact. A local bakery, for instance, has a clipboard to get people’s names and email addresses for its newsletter. Get involved with social media, reach out to customers, and be responsive to their ideas. Being visible on the web can set your business apart.

However, if you’re just starting out, your business may not have had the time or resources to be concerned about Google reviews. To help you level the playing field against other businesses in the area.