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
-
Which is the best way - to have all FAQ pages at one place, or splitted in different sections of the website?
Hi all, We have a lot of FAQ sections on our website, splitted in different places, depending on products, technologies, etc. If we want to optimize our content for Google's Featured Snippets, Voice Search and etc. - what is the best option: to combine them all in one FAQ section? or it doesn't matter for Google that this type of content is not in one place? Thank you!
Algorithm Updates | | lgrozeva0 -
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 -
Local Data Aggregators For Canada
Hi Mozzers, I've seen David Mihm's list of data aggregators for local search for the US (infogroup, localeze, acxiom) but I'm in Canada. Does anyone know if someone has sourced this?
Algorithm Updates | | waynekolenchuk1 -
Best practice for cleaning up multiple Google Places listings and multiple Google accounts when logins were lost.
We are an inbound marketing agency, most of our clients are not relying on local seo. I have a pretty good understanding of it when starting fresh but not so much in joining a "movie in progress" kind of scenario. Recently we've brought on two clients who have had their websites in place for awhile, have made small attempts at marketing themselves online over the years and its resulted in multiple Google places listings, variations of the company names (one of them changed their name), worried there are yet more accounts out there they aren't aware of, etc (analytics, and others from well intentioned employees and past service providers - no internal leadership at the company level). In reading Google help forums I'm seeing some recently having their accounts suspended when they try to clean things up - in one case a person setup a new Google account thinking he would start fresh and in trying to claim listings, get rid of duplicates, etc. his account was suspended. What is the CURRENT recommended course of action in situations like these? With all the changes going on with Google, I don't know which route to take and have combed the Internet reading articles about this (including Google's resources) - would like some current real world advise.
Algorithm Updates | | rhgraves651 -
Getting Listed in Google Places
How do I get listed in Google Places if I don't have a physical address? EG: I am a medical health insurance company in Colo Springs, Colorado, but service 20 cities? What is the best procedure? Getting a mailbox at Mailboxes, etc. or UPS Store?
Algorithm Updates | | GregWalt0 -
Best Practices for Page Titles | RSS Feeds
Good Morning MOZers, Quick question for the community: when creating an RSS feed for one of your websites, how do you title your RSS feed? Currently, the sites I'm managing use the 'rss.xml' for the file name, but I was curious to know whether or not it would, in any way, benefit my SERP if I were to add my domain to precede the 'rss.xml', i.e. 'my-sites-rss.xml' or something of that nature. Beyond that, are there any 'best practices' for creating RSS feed page titles or is there a preferred method of implementation? Anybody have any solutions
Algorithm Updates | | NiallSmith0 -
Top of Google Places but not Organic
Hi There, My website www.drivingbrighton.co.uk is number 1 for Google places for my area, however I'm not on page 1 of google organically. Is it possible to do this, or does Google not let you have a places and organic links? Any opinions welcome! Ant
Algorithm Updates | | Ant710