Online ratings and customer reviews play an increasingly powerful role for brands and consumers alike, and more marketers are beginning to recognize this. To get a full picture of what’s out there and what brands are doing to optimize their efforts, we spoke with three retailers who are doing it right.
What You Should Know
Before you get started with your SEO efforts, there are a few things you should know.
1. Customers Can Leave Negative Reviews for Many Different Reasons
A negative review isn’t always just an expression of honest dissatisfaction.
You don’t know why a customer is dissatisfied with a product they bought.
The product may have a flaw, but the customer is just in the wrong place, or they don’t know how to use it properly, or they simply don’t like the product at all.
A negative review can also simply be the result of a mistake on the customer’s end, like ordering the wrong size or receiving a product that’s too big or small.
Sometimes negative reviews on a brand are the result of companies using tactics that don’t play well with their consumers. For example, Nike had to admit that they used celebrity endorsements on their sneakers. The move caused a huge uproar and negative reviews for the brand.
The same thing happened when Target used a sketchy seller to sell the Kardashian Kollection and then had to publicly apologize to its customers.
A negative review isn’t always just an expression of honest dissatisfaction. It can be, and it should be, a sign that a brand did something to put a customer off.
When a customer reads a review or sees a complaint online, they may assume that they have an understanding of the brand.
They may go to the brand’s website and buy that same product expecting the same experience as before, when, in fact, they’ve just been led astray.
In the age of the internet, it’s incredibly important for brands to know exactly what they are doing online to keep consumers happy, and that means looking at any complaint that may be on a website.
2. Reviews Are Still Important. Even If They’re Negative.
Even if you’re a big, established brand, negative reviews on your products or services can still hurt you.
Here’s a simple way to think about this: If your customers leave a review online, you can’t control what the reviewer writes. You can try and contact them to try and convince them otherwise, but they don’t have to listen to you.
When you look at online reviews, you can’t control what a customer writes.
“You’re not controlling what the consumer writes, but if you want that consumer to be your customer again, you can’t have a negative review,” Matt Richey, a veteran writer at Brafton (an SEO consultant and writer), told the Brandchannel.
For that reason, it’s incredibly important to think about what you’re doing online and how you can respond to a negative review or complaint.
For starters, Richey recommends that you think about what a customer is writing in a negative review.
“How can you improve on what that customer is writing?” Richey said. “It’s not about saying, ‘We will make our customer happy.’ It’s about, ‘How can I make them be even happier?’”
You need to go beyond just fixing whatever problem the customer is having. You need to show the customer that you are listening. You need to do your best to address the problem that may be causing the customer to write a negative review in the first place.
“What are the things you can do differently?” Richey said. “How can you be better at what you’re doing?”
If you fail to listen and learn from the review, or fail to react and try to address the issue in a way that would make a dissatisfied customer happy, you risk alienating customers.
This could lead to you losing a customer for good. It’s extremely important for brands to recognize this fact and learn from any online review.
When you have the chance to get a review, you can’t control what a customer writes online.
“You’re not in control of that. What you can control is your response to that review,” Richey said.
When you have a chance to get a review, don’t ignore it. Get it. Try to make sure that you have a quick and responsive way of reacting to negative reviews or customer complaints online. This will save you from having to deal with more than one complaint at a time.
You can’t control what a customer writes online. You need to make sure that you’re responding quickly and that you’re listening to any and all complaints.
Don’t be fooled by negative reviews. They can hurt a brand, especially if you’re not listening to the review or if you don’t know how to respond to the review.
You may think that no one will care about a negative review or customer complaint, but it’s important to look at any complaint that may come across a company’s online platform.
“I would say to every brand: Do your best to listen,” Richey said. “It doesn’t have to be right away, but when you have the chance, try to do your best to react to any complaint. It can make or break you.”
3. Online Ratings Are Better Than They Used to Be.
Back in the day, online ratings were incredibly important. Before the internet, consumers would look at what people thought of the products they bought on the sides of the boxes. Consumers would go on a review site and check out the products on it to see how others rated the products.
Online ratings were hugely important before the internet. They were a way for consumers to find out what people thought about the products they bought.
However, this method of finding products and getting ratings is not very effective. Not everyone is going to go out of their way to leave a review online, or they may just look at the number of reviews, but don’t actually read the reviews. You can’t control what people write online.
More people than ever are using online ratings and reviews to find products and services online. This is because there are fewer reasons to leave a review if you use reviews as a way to find a product or service.
Even if you were to buy a product through Google, Amazon, or another search engine, Google doesn’t make you fill out a review. You don’t even have to pick up the phone to the seller. You don’t have to put in any shipping information either.
It’s incredibly important that brands know that a large percentage of people who look at online reviews are actively doing so. They’re using the ratings to make decisions on which products to buy, or to see if a product or service is even worth buying in the first place.
Google is also using online ratings to make more money. Google is making more money off of reviews than it is from AdWords. It makes a lot of money from sales, but it doesn’t make much money from Google AdWords. Google is making more money off of review sites.
In the beginning, Google wasn’t really good at figuring out how to make money off of reviews. The company still isn’t good at making money off of reviews.
Now, however, Google has made a major move to start making money off of reviews. Google is starting to display reviews in the same area as it displays other reviews. This means that brands have an opportunity to influence how their products are reviewed and rated.
The company is also beginning to use reviews as a way to sell products to people. If people do something online, Google will ask them if they want to put their brand on that product. If the user says that they do, they’ll go to Google and buy the product.
It’s worth noting that Google is not the only company that is using reviews as a way to make money off of products and services. Facebook is also trying to make money off of reviews. The company is buying ads on review websites in order to boost the visibility of a product or service.
Why It’s Important
Reviews are important because they help people make more informed decisions.
If people see a lot of reviews on a product or service, they can be pretty sure that it’s a good product.
There are just a lot more people looking at reviews these days.
Brands can learn from any online review.
Brands should always be ready to react to any complaint.
Brands should learn from every negative review or complaint.
Brands can influence what people write online.
Brands should try to influence positive reviews, even if it’s just a little bit.
Brands can even influence what people write online.