Myth or Fact: Do Google Reviews Help SEO?
Do Google Reviews help SEO? The short answer is yes that Google reviews, so long as they are positive, do assist with SEO by helping to improve search engine rankings. Positive reviews indicate to search engines that the recipient of the reviews is trustworthy and authoritative. In an era in which competition on the Internet has gotten harder and harder, especially for smaller companies, overseeing online reviews helps to differentiate a business and improve its visibility in search engine results. Authority and trustworthiness are rewarded by search engines through improved search results. Your response as a business owner is key on helping keywords trigger to Google Bot to see you are relevant for X service or product.
Why Positive Google Reviews Matter
SEO requires examination of extensive search details, including content creation, link building and reviews generally don’t get much SEO attention. However, they certainly should, and especially for local businesses. The Local SEO Guide confirms the value of positive customer reviews for local businesses. For larger national businesses, the value is also indisputable. In fact, 88% of customers believe in online reviews as much as they do personal recommendations. Shoppers nearly always check online reviews before visiting any business, and 95% of shoppers say that reviews affect buying decisions. Google itself has confirmed this. In a recent survey of Google ranking factors, it was found that the importance of reviews has increased substantially over the last several years. Reviews now rank at 15.44% in search engine importance and #13 among 50 top ranking factors. The value and importance of positive reviews in SEO are clear.
Reviews Allow Customers to Learn About Products
Customers use online reviews to learn about products. When a product is new, there is a very good chance the customer will do a Google search to learn more. Positive reviews are likely to lead a customer to choose a provider of the product, and even to become a buyer.
What is the Best Way to Manage Reviews?
So long as a business is successful, review management should not be too difficult. Make sure that positive reviews are collected and reported online, and positive results will follow. Always display positive reviews on a website. There are various website development tools that can be used for this. Communicating with customers, encouraging reviewing, and collecting reviews makes good sense and will lead to receipt of positive reviews. Attempt to gather an email address at the time of a sale and then send a request for a review. Unfortunately, not all reviews will be positive, but even negative reviews are useful and should be collected. Communicate with negative reviewers from a customer service perspective in an effort to resolve complaints, and with resolution of complaints, a negative review may very well become a positive review. Allow us help you manage your Google My Business and reviews online, we can help you grow your entire digital marketing strategies.
Answer: Fact
Why SEO Plays a Central Role in your Digital Marketing Strategy
At this point, having a solid digital marketing strategy is a must for business owners. Your digital marketing strategy is what you will leverage to attract and retain more customers. Often times though, many business owners find that the strategy they spent so much time creating doesn’t work as effectively as they thought it would.
With that said, it’s not always that your strategy is wrong but that you don’t understand SEO and the impact it has on your digital marketing strategy overall. For this reason, we’re going to explain what SEO is and why it’s important in improving your digital marketing efforts.
What is SEO?
Simply put, SEO stands for search engine optimization and is a process that involves gaining new traffic to your website from organic search results. Search engine sites such as Google have primary search results that show up when someone needs an answer to a query.
Google focuses on delivering accurate results to its audience and is therefore constantly ranking content for relevancy. With that said, in order for your business to rank high and land on the primary page, your content needs to not only be relevant but is actually useful to the audience.
Even more, all of your content needs to be optimized for the search engine so that sites like Google can actually find it. Doing your SEO effectively will help Google determine the usefulness of your content and give your content rank.
SEO and Digital Marketing
In reality, you’ll never be able to maximize your digital marketing efforts without incorporating SEO. SEO is what helps you bring in organic traffic outside of paid ads and helps you foster real relationships. In addition, this leads to increased visibility and brand authority, which ultimately leads to brand loyalty.
SEO is comprised of so many fractions that help drive traffic to your website. For instance, SEO focuses on keywords, optimizing content, off-page SEO such as backlinking, and local SEO. All of these things work together to ensure that your digital marketing efforts are strengthened and you can garner real traffic.
While paid search is always good and should be a part of your digital marketing strategy, SEO plays a huge role in how successful your business is. SEO helps your business remain searchable in an over-saturated digital world.
Businesses that are focused on their digital marketing strategy should not ignore SEO in the process. There is always going to be a new marketing strategy that businesses find useful. However, one thing that will remain the same is that SEO plays a central role in how well businesses garner new customers.
Simple Guide to Breaking Down Facebook Ads
Facebook ads are used by many companies to reach a wider audience and gain more business online. If you’re thinking about utilizing Facebook advertising for the first time, there are a few things you should know before setting up your ads.
Step 1: Determine What Your Objective Is
Facebook offers a number of different objectives that are broken down into three different categories: awareness, consideration and conversion.
The awareness category is simple: if your goal is to make more people aware of your business and services, this is a great option to choose. If you want to make an ad describing some of the services you offer and want to get more eyes on your page, you should choose an awareness objective, like brand awareness or reach.
Consideration is a step further than awareness. This objective gets people to start thinking about your business and potentially look for more information about it. There are a range of options in the consideration objective. A popular option is website traffic, which leads the user from the Facebook ad to your website so they can learn more about your business. A few other popular options are engagement, video views and lead generation.
The last objective category Facebook offers is conversion. This is taking the consideration goal and turning it into a sale. This objective works well when you’re selling a product or service online and you want the prospective customer to make a purchase or fill out some type of form.
Step 2: Find Your Audience
After you’ve selected an objective for your Facebook ad, the next step is to figure out who exactly you want your ad to reach. You can choose geographic location, age and gender to reach your desired audience.
After you select the appropriate audience, you can be even more specific with your audience through detailed targeting. Detailed targeting allows you to zero in on certain behaviors, likes, job titles and more that Facebook keeps track of to reach an even more defined audience.
Once you put in all of that information, a budget, and a start and end date for your ad, Facebook will show you how many people you’ll reach on a daily basis and the total amount of people you can reach by running your ad.
Step 3: Create the Ad
Now that all of the technical aspects are out of the way, you can create your ad. Here, you can select a photo or video as well as create a caption and headline for your ad. You want to make sure that the text you use captures the attention of your audience. Keeping things short and straight to the point is a good route to go if you’re not sure what to do for the ad.
Feel free to get creative with your ad and make sure that it captures the essence of your business. If you would like to learn more about social media marketing or digital marketing, feel free to contact our team today.
Facebook Review and Ad Results
After you’ve finished your ad, you can submit it for Facebook to review. Facebook has an advertising policy, so during the review stage, Facebook checks to make sure your ad isn’t violating any of their policies. You should read up on Facebook ad policies before creating your ad to make sure your ad will start running right after the review.
If your ad is in violation of the Facebook policies, Facebook will let you know the reason your ad wasn’t approved. You can either go back in and edit your ad to comply with the policies, or if you feel as though Facebook made a mistake, you can request for them to take a second look.
Once your ad is approved, it’ll start delivering and you’ll be able to track your results!
