How Reviews Help Local SEO and Rankings

How PinMeTo can improve your Google Ranking by Responding to Reviews

Does reacting to Google reviews really help our local SEO? This is the question many marketers might wonder. And what is the significance of reacting to Google reviews? It's about time we open up the discussion of how reviews can help local SEO and rankings.

Nowadays, 88% of shoppers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. If you consider it, how much more likely is it that you would visit a business if you know it had a great rating compared to one you know nothing about?

Reviews impact the search results of a business more than most brands actually realize. A staggering 97% (pretty much everybody) of consumers agree that reviews are crucial to making a buying decision. With that said, review management should be a burning issue for all businesses that work with real-world visits.

Towards the end of last year, Darren Shaw of Whitespark released the discoveries from his yearly Google Local Rankings Survey. The aftereffects of the survey found that reviews represented 15.44% of how Google positions a local business. This is up nearly 5% from 2015 when Google estimated surveys at just 10.8% of how they rank a business.

The Official Stance on Responding to Reviews by Google

By responding to reviews and comments you’re not only building trust with your customers, you’re also building trust with the search engine itself. Google ranks businesses higher if the owner publicly responds to complaints and praises. If reviews are left unanswered that hurts the rank of that location.

Google My Business’ support page states that you should “interact with customers by responding to reviews that they leave about your business. Responding to reviews shows that you value your customers and the feedback that they leave about your business.” This statement is then followed by “high-quality, positive reviews from your customers will improve your business’s visibility and increase the likelihood that a potential customer will visit your location.”

How to remove fake Google Reviews

Using PinMeTo´s feature “Listen and Respond” to handle reviews

PinMeTo monitors, notifies, and lets you respond to new reviews, ratings, mentions or comments found on the major social, search and review sites. It's an all-in-one easy-to-use dashboard for your reputation management across all locations and teams. This should be the go-to tool and a “must-have” for most businesses that deal with customers on a daily basis. The famous expression “word of mouth” has now become “word of mouse”, which means that customers not only tell their 4 best friends, they tell the whole world by writing it online.

“A happy customer tells a friend; an unhappy customer tells the world. ”

— Unknown

And you should be there to respond either if its a positive or negative review.

Responding to a negative review can generate a positive outcome either way. According to statistics 33% of customers who received a response from a company after posting a negative comment choose to turn around and post a positive review instead and 34% actually deleted the original negative review.