Best Place To Aggregate Customer Reviews?
-
There is a plethora of choice today for aggregating customer reviews. BBB wants to collect ratings from our customers; there a commercial options that put me in more control; yelp wants to rate me locally. Google...
Given that I have some ability to steer customers toward my preferred review site, which one should I use? From an SEO perspective, have you noticed whether some these sites carry more weight or credibility than others?
I realize it may depend on the type of business we are. In this case I represent a software company and their customers are USA/global, rather than local.
-
I appreciate the synopsis and the good feedback.
In our case, we feel that we have a very strong ability to guide users to the site of our choice. Local seems like a misfire for a global software company.
Since there doesn't seem to be a loud consensus that we should be working with any specific site at the moment, I think we'll send reviewers to BBB, since customers sometimes tell us that is an important trust signal for them.
-
Really great links. Thanks!
-
Hi DarrenX,
You've gotten some very good feedback here. In sum:
-
Let your customers review you where they want to. A diverse review profile is good insurance against massive review loss (which happens in big waves on Google). If you lose some reviews at one site, at least you still have some at other sites.
-
When you have a chance to gently steer a customer toward a review site, Google+ Local is always going to be a top choice, because they dominate all local business verticals. Yelp is the obvious runner-up, given how much prominence Google currently gives their pages, but it is against Yelp's policies to ever ask for reviews, so you have to be careful there. Then, depending on your industry and geography, as members have said, you will find that certain directories happen to attract more reviews than others. See where your competitors are prominent and keep those directories in-mind.
The above is best practice advice for local businesses. However, you indicate that your current client is virtual rather than local, and develops software. I am not experienced with your industry, but would suspect that product review and technical publications/websites would be your target review sources. Maybe things like: http://reviews.cnet.com/?
I think the key here for you is to figure out where your customers are. Where do people go to find software reviews? That's where you need to be prominent.
-
-
I think this is a great perspective. In addition, I think there is great potential with G+ reviews if you can get them.
-
It really depends on the industry and location.
Check out these two resources. I know some of them don't accept reviews, but this should give you some info.
http://getlisted.org/resources/local-citations-by-category.aspx
-
My strategy has always been to point them at whatever suits your industry (amazon for product reviews, tripadvisor for travel/tourism, Google and Yelp for local biz, WeddingWire for wedding vendors, etc.) Then make a page on your site that is site.com/reviews and syndicate your reviews to that page. When someone Googles me + reviews, I want MY site coming up so I can highlight what I want when I want. It's just good reputation management. They can still see the rest further down the page but if I can come up #1 for highonseo reviews I sure want to.
-
When it doubt Google. Syndicating all your reviews with a plus profile will only help your SEO strategy. The only time I would prefer another review site is if it was specific to my industry like urbanspoon for restaurants or angies list for contractors.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Review Microdata if the product does not have a review
We have many products that do not have reviews and are causing warnings in googles microdata. Is there anything you can do for products without a review so you don't get errors for aggregate review or review??
Algorithm Updates | | jforthofer0 -
How to hide our duplicate pages from SERP? Best practice to increase visibility to new pages?
Hi all, We have total 4 pages about same topic and similar keywords. These pages are from our main domain and sub domains too. As the pages from sub domains are years old and been receiving visits from SERP, they stick to 1st position. But we have recently created new pages on our main domain which we are expecting to rank on 1st position. I am planning to hide the sub domain pages from SERP using "Remove URLs" for some days to increase visibility to new pages from main domain. Is this the right and best practice to proceed with? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Do the header tags must be placed from top to bottom order?
Generally tags will be placed starting with h1, then h2, h3 and h4.... Some of our pages starts with h3 and h1 is placed after couple of h2 and h3 tags. Is this a bad placement which hurts in SEO?
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz1 -
Reviews - Google & Third Party
Hi We have reviews on our product pages & service reviews on Feefo, but how important is it to also drive customers to review your company on Google? I'm guessing we should be doing both, but it proves difficult when you already ask them to review your company through a third party? Any tips moz?
Algorithm Updates | | BeckyKey0 -
Second rebranding, what's the best approach?
Our client rebranded in 2007 and it worked very successfully from an SEO persepctive. They put in place page-to-page 301 redirects and the new website replaced the old one in the SERPS very quickly in similar positions. The market has changed and they now need to rebrand again so they are moving to a third domain. So in 2007 they redirected DomainA to DomainB and now are moving to DomainC Domain A was in existence since 1996 so a majority of the link profile is still directed to DomainA and is passing through it via 301 to DomainB. Is the best approach 1. to just redirect DomainB to DomainC, leaving the DomainA links pass through a second set of 301 redirects?
Algorithm Updates | | G-DC
or 2. would it be better to change the redirects on DomainA to go directly to DomainC (the theory here is that each 301 dilutes the value of a link so taking out a hop could be better)0 -
Which Google Snippet to use? Products or Review
A "product" page that includes "user reviews/ratings" and "comparison prices", which Google snippet do/should you use? Thanks in advance
Algorithm Updates | | righty0 -
What is the best way to organize a catergory for SEO purpsoes?
I work for a organic vitamin and supplement company and we are looking to rank for our categories by making more specific categories. For example we are going to try to add under the category "vitamin d" some smaller more relevant (longer-tail) categories like "spray vitamin d" and "vegan vitamin d" and try to rank instead for these searches and also searches containing words that we already have more authority from Google like "natural" or "organic". I know that putting the product pages a level deeper will only hurt us so I want to avoid that but I'm wondering if anyone has some advice on how to organize categories for longer tail keywords that we actually have a chance to rank for. Any help to figure this out would be greatly appreciated. Here is our page as it is currently, like I said we want to create sub categories that are effective for SEO, but also make searching and navigating the site easier. http://www.mynaturalmarket.com/Vitamin-D.html Thanks, ThatKwameGuy
Algorithm Updates | | ThatKwameGuy1 -
What's the best way to discover which search terms competitors are highly-ranked for?
I'd like to know for which search terms competitors appear in the top 10, but I haven't found an efficient way to do so. Any help is appreciated...thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | actionagainsthunger0