How Local Reviews Affect Your SEO

In the world of local business, reviews are considered lifeblood. In fact, online

reviews are revealed to be the topmost factor consumers consider before making a

purchase. Today, online reviews particularly those from Google My Business (GMB)

can greatly impact your business’s local SEO ranking. According to research, Google

is even labeled as the number one site for ranking and reviews, which only proves

how much important it is to pay attention to your GMB profile.

Online reviews are viewed as unbiased opinions about your business since reviews are

crowdsourced information, meaning they aren’t something that came from you as the

business owner or anyone paid to promote your products or services. Because of this,

Google has come forward with its decision to factor in reviews in determining the

SEO rankings of websites.

Although Google isn’t outright revealing the rationale behind its search algorithm, there are some things you can learn about how they use reviews in its search results. Below are three insights about reviews on Google My Business and how they will affect your SEO.

Review content is important

Now that Google has decided to scrap off Google Plus and has added more local-

oriented features to Google My Business, GMB reviews are rapidly becoming a more

important factor for SEO. As a matter of fact, reviews that include keywords are the

number two SEO factor for deciding where your local business shows up in the ‘local

pack.’ Local pack refers to the box seen at the top of the search results under the map.

It displays the nearby local businesses that best match with the searched term.

Research has revealed that your business is likely to show up in this local pack if you

have reviews that include keywords you’re ranking for and the city that your business

is located in.

Engagement involves two parties

Chances are, you’ve had your fair share of articles telling you the importance of

engagement on social media. What some of you don’t know is that engagement is also

equally important to Google My Business. Instead of being content to customers

liking your social media posts or commenting on your photos, you have to aim for

customers reviews on your GMB profile. Likewise, you can also return the favor by

responding to customer reviews and answering their questions on the Google Q & A.

in addition, Google itself also recommended businesses to interact with customers by

responding to reviews that they give about your business.

This hints that your responses are likely to impact your SEO rankings. On the off chance that it won’t

make a great difference on your rankings, your responses could change the way

customers feel about your company, turning a bad review into a good one.

Reviews equal clicks and clicks equal visibility

Apart from the purpose of augmenting your SEO, reviews and ratings are also the

topmost factor consumers consider when selecting between local businesses. what’s

more, more than 50% of consumers even chose to dismiss companies that have less

than 4-star rating. Suffice it to say, the better your reviews and ratings are, the more

chances your business has in picking your business over your competitor. On top of

that, having good reviews can boost your website traffic, which in turn, increases your

SEO rankings, thus, creating a positive feedback loop.