Online reviews are very important to a business. They can contribute greatly to the marketing of the company. Reviews bring so much to the business. They can help attract more potential customers to look at your business. Due to their presence in search results they can provide traction for the business. They can also help improve conversions like leads, sales, signups etc. statistics from online reviews is startling, about 90% of the people who filled the reviews said that the reviews influenced their buying decisions. Even more were influenced by the negative reviews. Yelp and Google arrange information such that it only allows for people to view sites with a minimum star rating, they even sort the sites by reviews.

Although Google and Bing do not say that online reviews have an impact on rankings, anecdotal evidence suggests it does. Further analysis of the hotel industry by Digital Marketing Works found that online reviews affect ratings. The two can be said to go hand in hand. In the 2014 MOZ Local Search Ranking Factors respondents believed that review signals such as the quantity of reviews, review velocity, review diversity, etc… are significant in rankings. Some sites encourage business to solicit reviews while some criticise it. For instance Yelp discourages the soliciting of customer reviews while suggests that businesses encourage reviews. As we have seen earlier online reviews are very important and it will be very advantageous for businesses to have a strategy for you to have a continuous stream of online reviews. One can follow some steps to make this happen.

First you have to make sure that your customers are happy. Happy customers will give you good reviews. Though unhappy customers are more likely to post reviews. Unhappy clients however may provide very useful information, their feedback is invaluable. Through them you can learn what it is that you are doing wrong and correct it. With the many review sites present it is important that you choose the best for your industry. Here we provide services such as search on your brand names, a search on non-important keywords and a search on brand names of your industry leaders and key competitors.

The process of online reviewing also requires that you entice customers to submit a review online. There are ways to do this well. You can make a webpage that include links that lead to profiles on some review sites. You can also put these links on your webpage and email signatures. Other things you can do include creating a business card with review site information, adding a request to an email about another topic and many more.