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Many business owners understand the importance of customer reviews in building brand loyalty. However, that’s not all that customer reviews can do for your business.
Customer reviews not only build brand loyalty but also enhance your business’s online presence. Businesses that encourage customers to share their feedback benefit from a steady stream of fresh content that search engines value. More unique reviews translate to improved search engine ranking, higher customer engagement, and stronger brand trust.
Building these reviews takes time, and while November is just a few short months away, there’s no better time to start than now. In this guide, we’ll discuss how businesses can leverage customer feedback to drive organic traffic, improve search engine rankings, and build lasting relationships with customers in a competitive digital landscape.
What is SEO, and why does it matter? SEO is all about getting your website to rank for search terms that your customers are actually searching for. It is the process of optimising your website for a set of keywords that have volume, that are relevant to your product or service.
This results in your products appearing for your customer’s high intent searches, increasing your sales and your revenue.
How do you achieve this?
There are several areas that you need to focus on for success with SEO, from content and link building to technical and user experience. It’s all about your customer. Does your website content answer what they are searching for? Did they find the products that they were looking for? Was the process simple, easy and quick to navigate? These all impact your organic rankings.
Here below is an SEO RECIPE framework long term SEO success, with results driven by:
You can’t make changes to anything in life without first understanding where you are currently going wrong. So, that’s why we conduct an in-depth site quality audit before making any changes first.
We crawl your website to understand all of the technical and content aspects. Are your meta titles optimised? Are your pages indexed? Is there any duplicate content? How fast does your website load?
Then we conduct competitor analysis to understand what your competitors are doing and what is yielding successful results.
This is the first part of the creation stage. We allocate a specific keyword that has volume to each individual page on your website by completing in-depth keyword research. We base this on data and understanding your products on a deeper level.
Following this, we create a Keyword Gap Analysis, Content Workbook and Topical Authority map.
This is a combination of finding keyword opportunities that are relevant to your product/service that your competitors are ranking for. This further increases your visibility online, increasing your traffic and your sales.
Following this, we internally link your website to ensure a seamless customer experience.
The second part of the creation process is the innovation stage. This is all about blogs and the creation of our CATalyst framework.
You can see how this is all starting to link now and why it is a longer-term strategy.
This targets keywords that can yield juicy results for you. Decisions are backed up via data.
You can create all this content, but if nobody is going to find it, what’s the point? This is what the promotion stage comes in.
Securing links to your website increases its domain authority. Google has come out and said the sheer importance of good, high-quality, relevant links.
You can achieve this through outreach and PR. Warning, there may be a requirement to pay for these kinds of links, but it is worth the investment.
With monthly reports and consistent analysis, our client’s SEO strategy is constantly improved during their time with us. We react quickly to updates and changes, keeping on top of the rapidly changing trends in this industry.
A good SEO strategy can transform your business. There’s a running joke in the SEO industry that the best place to hide a dead body is the second page of Google and this it holds true.
Statistics show that the top three positions secured two thirds of all clicks on Google. The top result receives 31.7% of traffic, the second position gets 24.71%, and the third position gets 18.59%.
That is a lot of potential revenue lost.
With the holiday season around the corner, the opportunity is even greater with SEO. There will be an increase in demand and traffic for businesses to capitalise on and this is due to several factors:
The holiday season sees a surge in online searches for gift ideas, holiday deals, and seasonal products. Optimising your website allows you to capture this increased traffic and convert it into sales.
The holiday season is one of the most competitive times of the year. With many businesses competing for customer attention. SEO helps you stand out among competitors by improving your visibility on search engines, making your site more likely to attract potential customers.
You have the opportunity to get your website to rank for high volume searches, e.g. Black Friday deals and Christmas gifts for men, during seasonal high intent searches.
Many consumers search for local businesses to fulfill last-minute needs or take advantage of local pickup options. Optimising your local SEO, including Google My Business, ensures you capture nearby shoppers searching for your products or services.
SEO helps position your content, such as gift guides, product reviews, and how-to articles, in front of potential customers. This content can guide consumers through the buying journey, providing the information they need to make a purchase decision. It also adds as a great internal linking source, so you can promote products with juicy profit margins.
These are just five of the many reasons WHY SEO is so important during the holiday season. But don’t forget, retention is so important after spending all that resource in acquiring new customers.
Focus on improving the User Experience to increase AOV and customer lifetime value for true growth of your eCommerce store.
Customer reviews are feedback from individuals who have used your product or service. These evaluations are typically shared on social media, review sites like Yelp, e-commerce pages, and through direct channels like surveys or email. Some individuals also use video testimonials to give more lengthy feedback about their experience with your brand.
Customer reviews play a crucial role in influencing other consumers’ purchase decisions. A 2024 survey from BrightLocal found that 75% of consumers regularly read customer reviews before purchasing a product or hiring a company. Furthermore, nearly 50% of consumers trust reviews as much as recommendations from their friends and family.
Reviews provide a form of social proof that a consumer can use to determine the credibility and trustworthiness of a brand. Reviews from real customers are often perceived as more authentic than traditional marketing. Customer reviews can play a role in every part of the customer journey, from helping shoppers discover new brands and products to convincing a shopper to click “buy.”
Positive and negative reviews alike have a direct impact on someone’s purchase decision. The average customer is willing to spend more than 30% at a retailer with excellent reviews. The result: online reviews were estimated to influence $3.8 trillion of global e-commerce spend in 2021; that number is only increasing.
Customer reviews can also provide valuable feedback for businesses, highlighting areas for improvement and reinforcing what they do well. Companies that respond promptly to negative reviews or constructive criticism can still salvage a sale — and actually increase customer loyalty. BrightLocal’s survey found that “88% of consumers would use a business that responds to both positive and negative reviews, compared to just 47% that said they would consider using a business that doesn’t respond to any reviews.”
Continue reading the Part II of this series to unlock best practices to boost your SEO with customer reviews.
