One of the most important aspects of SEO is creating high-quality content. But what about responding to reviews? Does that help your website’s ranking as well? Experts are always pushing businesses to encourage positive reviews, but do they need to respond to them too?
What are Google Reviews?
If you haven’t seen Google reviews before, they’re user-generated reviews of businesses that appear in search results. If you click on the “Reviews” tab, you’ll see them alongside the business information. As you can imagine, these can be very helpful for potential customers who are trying to decide whether or not to use a particular business. Which local barber should somebody choose? Well, one has an average rating of 4.7 while the other has lots of negative reviews. Instantly, the customer knows which one to go to.
Of course, this also means that businesses need to be careful about what their customers are saying about them online. A few bad reviews can really hurt business, so it’s important to keep an eye on them.
Does Responding to Google Reviews Help SEO?
While some people will try to tell you that it doesn’t help SEO in West Palm Beach, the simple fact is that it does. For one thing, potential customers are going to see that you’re paying attention to what people are saying about you; this automatically builds trust and makes them more likely to do business with you. If there’s one thing we’ve learned about Google over the years, it’s that it loved trust and credibility. With this in mind, here are three ways that responding to Google reviews helps SEO.
Google Recognizes Keywords You Use – Firstly, when you respond to Google reviews, you’re effectively using keywords. If you’re smart about it, you can use relevant keywords that you want to rank for. Over time, Google will start to recognize these keywords and associate them with your business. This, in turn, will help improve your rankings for those specific keywords. So, use keywords in your response to customer reviews as well as in landing pages and other content.
Build Trust with Google – As we’ve already mentioned, Google puts a lot of emphasis on trust. When customers see that businesses take the time to respond to their reviews, it builds trust. And this trust is essential if you want to rank well on Google. After all, why would Google want to promote a business that its users don’t trust?
By responding to reviews, you tell Google that your business is active and engaged. In turn, this shows Google that your business is reliable, trustworthy, and worth promoting.
Increase Engagement Signals – To continue on this theme, responding to reviews also increases engagement signals. Engagement signals are a ranking factor on Google, and they tell Google how engaged users are with your site.
The more engagement signals your site has, the better your chances of ranking well on Google. So, by responding to reviews, you’re not only increasing trust signals, but also engagement signals.
Get More Reviews – Finally, responding to reviews can also help indirectly because reviews encourage reviews. Do more Google reviews help SEO? Absolutely – they’re a trust signal. Some business owners are hesitant to respond to negative reviews for fear of making the situation worse. But if you take the time to address the issue, you can turn a negative review into a positive one. In the future, more people will leave reviews and it snowballs.
If you haven’t already, start responding to Google reviews now to experience these benefits!
