You might think that customer reviews via Google aren’t really appropriate for your business. You might know that one of their main impacts is in local search ranking, and as a national business, you may not be worried about that. However, there are other reasons to come to terms with their existence, and to make the most of them.
For a start, they exist. If you search for your business in Google, the chances are that you’ll get a panel on the right showing your business information. I hope this will be under your control, using Google My Business, but even if you haven’t set it up, the panel might well be there anyway. And it’ll probably have reviews and the star ratings they generate. So don’t pretend they’re not there, or that people will ignore them.
Since they exist, you want them to reflect well on you. While getting a five star rating is great, encouraging a lot of reviews is important too. It looks just, well, weird if you’re a national supplier with three reviews. Worse still, if you don’t have many and get a bad review, that’s going to have a disproportionate impact on the overall rating.
There are also SEO benefits to having reviews. Google sees them as content, it would appear, which is particularly useful for associating product-related keywords with your business name. Like it or not, there’s evidence that Google takes reviews seriously, especially if you have a lot, generated steadily over time. We’ve spent several years on this, and I’m certain it’s had an impact. Now we just need to get rid of the photo of someone else’s vans which has appeared at the time of writing. But that’s a completely separate issue…