Do Reviews Impact Local SEO Rankings?
Reviews impact Local SEO rankings in a huge way. In fact, they may be one of the most important metrics you can track for the purposes of SEO optimization for local SEO! Google reviews, SEO local interaction, and keyword placement all matter for your website’s ranking. This article will show you how do reviews affect local SEO and what you can do to optimize them for the best results.
Table of contents:
- What Exactly is Local SEO?
- How Do Reviews Help With Local SEO?
- How Do Reviews Affect Local SEO?
- Local Reviews are Key
What Exactly Is Local SEO?
Local SEO is, basically, the SEO results for a given region around your physical location. For instance, if you’re a restaurant and nearby people are searching for the type of food you serve, they will see your business in their search results!
So do reviews impact local SEO rankings? Of course, in fact, they are one of the main driving forces of people being able to search up your business and contact you when they live near your physical store location.
How Do Reviews Help With Local SEO?
While there are many ways to improve your site’s SEO profile in general, getting reviews from locals – and improving your local SEO profile itself – is one of the most potent ways to get more traffic and business from those around you.
Google reviews, SEO local promotion, and social proof are all ways to significantly boost your website’s online presence. Combined with word of mouth and the current state of the world, reviews serve as a powerful indicator of the health of your business.
Online reviews comprise 87% of customer searches when looking for local businesses, and a whopping 97% of customers use online media when researching various products or services in their area, meaning that, together, the interaction they make is essential for your site.
Of course, reviews also play an important role for general SEO reasons as well: they are unique content that can be hosted on your Google business profile, or even your main site. This means that your social proof will increase and you will inevitably build trust with the community around you, leading to increased business and interaction. All because you had some great reviews!
How Do Reviews Affect Local SEO?
Significantly! According to a survey on Local Search Ranking Factors, reviews factor into 16% of search engine decision-making processes for local SEO. A significant number indeed! This isn’t all, however, when looking at how do reviews help with local SEO, there are many more tangible benefits:
- Having a four or five-star review with Google increases click-throughs, delivering more traffic to your main website and encouraging growth.
- A Harvard study suggests that an increase in ranking on Yelp by one star can lead to a 5-9% increase in sales.
- Having high reviews on your site means that Google will trust you more, enabling better SEO rankings by itself – but not only that, local customers will approve more as well!
- 7/10 customers trust an online review, definitely showing the benefit.
Reviews can be immediately found on your Google Business Profile, allowing customers close to you to get an instant snapshot of your business and how many people have interacted with it thus far. This profile affects two things: where your business shows up on the Map Pack, and your local SERP.
Google themselves have come out and said that reviews do in fact impact SEO rankings as well, proving that reviews do impact local SEO rankings!
Local Map Pack
The Local Map Pack is Google’s way of showing a brief summary of businesses in your area. Typically, this window has the company name of various companies, reviews of their products, a brief description of their services, business information (like address, phone number, and website), and directions to the business itself.
Local SERPs
SERP, or Search Engine Results Pages, are key to showing you what you actually want to see without any irrelevant data. They are the profiles that only show local businesses near you when you search “Corner Store.”
While both the map pack and SERPs contain similar information, SERPs are the results of the query itself and inform the Map Pack, enabling the Pack to function.
Find out more about our local SEO services and how we can boost your sales with efforts tailored to your business and location!
How Can I Get Reviews?
The best way to get reviews is to, simply, create a great product and have excellent customer service. Be the type of business selling the types of things that you want to interact with and buy! Giving the best service possible alongside offering a fantastic product is a surefire way to get a higher and higher rating as time goes on.
In addition, you can also simply ask people to rate you: by giving small incentives (like a candy jar with a simple sign above), you can radically shift your position on the algorithm. You can also operate a social media page and ask for the same – people generally like helping out local businesses and will often leave reviews after a Facebook post asks them to.
And since reviews do help with local SEO, it’s really worth asking them!
How Can I Deal With Bad Reviews?
You can’t please everyone all of the time. Whether they’re having a bad day, you do some kind of accident, or something else happens to give a bad impression, negative reviews are natural and expected.
Negative reviews also affect local SEO, so you shouldn’t ignore them. A simple first step to negative reviews is to respond to them. By engaging with your audience, you will come across as more genuine, and more people will be willing to be understanding. This increases your credibility greatly since it proves that your business is run by real people and that you care about your customer satisfaction!
Ultimately, showing that you care about your customers is one of the most important things you can do to improve your image, enhance social proof, and encourage more local customers that you’re more than willing to address their needs.
By doing so, you’ll be able to navigate negative reviews much more effectively!
Local Reviews Are Key
Local traffic is essential for small businesses and the best way to get more local traffic is by encouraging, curating, and addressing reviews of all kinds. As you already know, reviews do impact local SEO rankings as well, so taking care of them will make your business more visible.
It is easily one of the most important ways you can optimize your website’s SEO, and by dedicating time to reviews, you can gather more and more trust from both Google and local patrons.
You can also get some professional help, here at Delante we know everything about local SEO! Contact us and find out what can we do for your business.
