Opinion

Reviews are important, but how do you boost them in search?

With a burgeoning number of review sites and astroturfing appearing online, Miki Clarke looks at how brands can make sure genuine reviewers get cut-through in search.

As children we’re told if we don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. But in this social media world in which we now live, the opposite seems to apply.

We have witnessed exponential growth in search terms with review suffixes, not only in Australia but in the US and UK as well. This is not surprising in the land of electronics, travel accommodation and restaurants, but it is also happening for online dating sites and even dog food.

This search behaviour is only set to continue, according to Google Trends:

Graph source: http://www.google.com/trends/explore? q=review#q=reviews&geo=AU%2C%20GB%2C%20US&cmpt=geo

Graph source: http://www.google.com/trends/explore?
q=review#q=reviews&geo=AU%2C%20GB%2C%20US&cmpt=geo

That one negative experience could be one out of a million other satisfied customers, but a potential customer who comes across that review won’t know that. As for positive reviews, if customers are simply getting satisfactory service, why should they go onto a site and share that positive review – especially if it is for something as mundane as insurance – much like tipping someone for just doing their job.

This means review sites are not surprisingly full of zero- or one-star ratings but, strangely, also many four- or five-star ratings, which then begs the question: who is right? According to Econsultancy/Gartner predicting that 15% of social media reviews will be fake by 2014.

In the US, last month, the New York State Attorney General announced that 19 companies had agreed to cease their practice of writing fake online reviews for businesses and pay more than $350,000 in penalties, following a year-long undercover investigation into the manipulation of consumer-review websites.

This polarisation will no doubt continue until similar cases reach UK and Australian shores and continue to cause confusion among customers. However, companies do have several options available to them to legitimately influence reviews:

  1. Identify sites that already rank for your relevant “review/s” terms and try to encourage satisfied customers to rate you or your products (approach with caution because if the review site is already full of largely negative reviews, it could alarm your satisfied customers).
  2. Host reviews on your site, but make a point of including average and negative reviews – censorship is not something any brand wants to become known for. This is the preferred option if people are predominantly searching for your brand name plus “review/s”, since you will naturally have a higher chance of outranking any existing sites in natural search. This also provides you with fresh content, which search engines love as it gives them a reason to crawl your site more often, and also presents the opportunity of marking up as structured data and generating ratings- rich snippets as shown here:tim tam reviewThe positive reviews should also help conversion and prevent users from leaving your site in search of reviews elsewhere. As a bonus, the customer service and product teams can use negative reviews to address the issues raised.
  3. Build your own independent review site, hosted on a completely different domain. This may be more relevant if customers are more likely to search for your products rather than your brand terms, or if your brand is not well established in the category.

Lastly, natural search rankings aside, it goes without saying that to generate positive reviews your company’s services or products actually need to meet customers’ needs. If negative reviews are commonplace, and represent a high proportion of your customer base, you should probably ask why this is and you may be better off addressing the cause rather than the symptoms.

Miki Clarke is senior SEO manager for MEC Australia.

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