Thunderbolt Digital are experts when it comes to SEO Surrey and have helped many SMEs rank nationally and locally for various keywords due to our tried and tested methods. Of course, once your site shows up in SERPs, you’d think that’s it, wouldn’t you? Well, that isn’t the case at all! It’s one thing showing up in a search result and another thing entirely for your site to be visited afterwards, and then patronised. So, how can you increase the likelihood of a user actually visiting your page? The answer is reviews! Read on to find out more…
In order for people to visit your site following an organic search result, there are two things that need to happen: your business first needs to be seen, and then it needs to be chosen. The former can be helped by good general and local SEO practices such as having up to date Google business information including your NAP, and the latter can be greatly influenced by the reviews associated with this business account. Remember that both of these are important – you need to be seen to be chosen, and you need to be chosen to actually receive any business!
If you’re sorely lacking in reviews it may be very tempting to try and pick up the slack by overcompensating for lost time, but flooding your customers with review requests may actually do more harm than good where Google’s concerned. A sudden influx of positive reviews after having none or very few before will look inherently suspicious to Google’s algorithms and to people in general, meaning customers might not take your reviews seriously, or, worst case scenario, Google actually removes the reviews!
It also does no good to hit a set target of reviews and then neglect your review strategy, leading to a large gap in your reviews. If your company hasn’t had a review in a while, it may appear that you are no longer in business, or are no longer providing as good service as you used to; customers tend to disregard older reviews as they believe them to be out of date, though it depends on your industry and location as to what length of time this starts to occur at.
You should aim to keep a fairly steady pace of reviews in order to keep things looking up to date and accurate; if you effectively manage your tactics for encouraging reviews, then you should hopefully avoid the two extremes above, and make your local business result more appealing to prospective customers as a result.