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
-
How to get gold star reviews on SERP's
Hello I have always wanted to know: How to get gold star reviews on Google in search results! Please look at the screenshot to see what I am talking about. Please can someone share with me the knowledge required to make this happen - it would be perfect for my e-commerce website! GLkOK
Algorithm Updates | | xdunningx1 -
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 -
More pages or less pages for best SEO practices?
Hi all, I would like to know the community's opinion on this. A website with more pages or less pages will rank better? Websites with more pages have an advantage of more landing pages for targeted keywords. Less pages will have advantage of holding up page rank with limited pages which might impact in better ranking of pages. I know this is highly dependent. I mean to get answers for an ideal website. Thanks,
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz1 -
How is best to use Permalinks for Wordpress /category/postname or /postname
Hello , I have a question Regarding the Permalink structure form Wordpress ,I am trying to figure out what would be the best structure of the blog post link ,for the moment I am using the structure example.com/postname and I changed the structure to example.com/category/postname ,redirected with 301 the old links to the new links and I thought about it and wanted to ask , I would really appreciate if you could tell me what is best form SEO point of view to do. Regards,
Algorithm Updates | | anitawapa0 -
Whats the best thing to do after rebuilding a site to get old rankings back ?
A website changed its platform from the old one to magento ecommerce. In webmaster tools google says that yesterday was the last time that crawled the site, but the old rankings for keywords are gone , traffic went down big time and now i'm not sure where to start working in order to bring everything like it was. any advice ?
Algorithm Updates | | footballearnings0 -
What is the best way for a local business site to come up in the SERPs for a town that they are not located in?
At our agency, we work with many local small business owners who often want to come up in multiple towns that are near to their business where they do not have a physical address. We explain to them again and again that with the recent changes that Google in particular has made to their algorithms, it is very difficult to come up in the new "blended" organic and Places results in a town that you don't have a physical address in. However, many of these towns are within 2 or 3 miles of the physical location and well within driving distance for potential new clients. Google, in it's infinite wisdom doesn't seem to account for areas of the country, such as New Jersey, where these limitations can seriously affect a business' bottom line. What we would like to know is what are other SEOs doing to help their clients come up in neighboring towns that is both organic and white hat?
Algorithm Updates | | Mike-i0 -
Best Way to Determine Age of Site
What's the best way to determine the age of a site? Where by it's beginning I mean when it went through the Google Sandbox and has been a functioning site every since. Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | BobGW0
