Best Place for Reviews in 2014

[ajwyse]

Honest, genuine & unedited customer reviews are something that I'm going to focus on for multiple companies that I work for in 2014.  My question is where is the best place to push my customers to leave reviews for the company?  On the company's website?  Google+?  Google Local?  Bing?  Yahoo?  Yelp?  Facebook?

Obviously the answer is all of the above, but if you had to rank the top 3 places to get reviews that would help the company's SEO rankings & online visibility, what would your top 3 be?

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Abe,

So, for the trophy shop, my 6 point list, above, is a good blueprint. For the virtual sites, however, Google+ Local is not an option as these business models will not be eligible for local inclusion. Important to understand this difference.

[ajwyse]

Miriam, the electric wheelbarrow site and the sump pump site are not local businesses, but the trophy shop is.  That being said, the goal for all 3 are the same.... which is getting more national online sales.  Why?  Because all 3 are based out of the "cornfields" of a very rural area.  All three sites dominate our local region, but that really doesn't do much for those sites simply because there aren't that many people in our area.  All 3 sites also have a decent national presence on Google & other search engines, but I'm just looking for ways to improve.

Real customer reviews are one way that I'm looking improve our overall rankings and I just wasn't sure where to encourage customers to leave those reviews.... but after thought & discussion on this board, I think I'm going to just try to get them to leave those reviews on these places in this order:  1. Main Site  2. Google Local  3. Google+

Video descriptions of our items is another major way that I'm looking to help improve our websites and our overall rankings.... along with all of the other SEO items that Miriam listed above.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Abe,

I want to double check here that we are talking about local businesses in all of these cases. Do each of these businesses you've mentioned have:

1. In-person transactions with customers?

2. A physical address at which mail is received and a local phone number which matches this address?

While a trophy shop is a typical local fixture, I wanted to be sure that the electric wheelbarrow and sump pump concerns are actual, physical local businesses.

For the moment, let's assume that they are. In such a case, the niche nature of these three businesses should make it fairly easy to become locally dominant. My bet is that competition would be modest for all three businesses. So, a moderate amount of work in the following areas should yield good results:

1. The development of an excellent, optimized website

2. The building of citations in various places

3. The earning of reviews

4. Earning of a modest amount of links

5. A content develop strategy designed to make each business the most active authority in its local region

6. Social outreach on a modest scale

You're not working with personal injury attorneys in Los Angeles, here, so my broad assessment would be that a moderate effort in all of the above should generate quite a bit of visibility for these businesses, provided that they are local and not virtual.

[ajwyse]

Thanks so much for the replies.  Please keep them coming if anyone else has any other thoughts!

I do work for a couple websites, they're all niche categories:  1. Trophies & Awards  2. Sump Pumps  3. Electric Wheelbarrows (Very Niche!)

I think for the most part I'm going to focus with onsite reviews, Google Local & Google+ Reviews.  It's my personal belief that those items will do the most for me moving up in the SE rankings, which is where most of my sales come from on those websites.  If anyone has info that says otherwise I'd love to hear it.

Also, if anyone happens to have any specific ideas for moving up in the rankings for those categories that I listed above, then I'd also love to hear that as well.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Abe,

Good question. While I believe that the two most important places for most local businesses to earn review are Google+ Local and Yelp (because of their obvious dominance), these are not necessarily the best places for you to request reviews, namely because it's forbidden by Yelp's quality guidelines to solicit reviews, as Keri has mentioned.

When you have the opportunity to steer a customer towards leaving a review, a Google-based review is likely to have the most ranking-oriented impact, if the customer already has a Google+ account. If he doesn't, there's a chance the review may be filtered out.

If the customer is an active Yelp user and leaves you a Yelp review without being asked, then this can have a good impact on conversions. I know many local business owners swear by Yelp as a major driver of phone calls.

Clients in certain industries may see next-best benefit from niche directories, rather than generic ones.

I highly recommend that you read Phil Rozek's extremely awesome post/infographic comparing review sites in 2013.

http://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/2013/10/24/comparison-of-local-review-sites-where-should-you-focus-now/

I think you'll find it's just what the doctor ordered!

[KeriMorgret]

Be aware of the TOU of various sites. For Yelp, you can't ask people to leave reviews for your business.

[Oren.]

Where do you want to rank?   What kind of business is it?  Where do you get a lot of your traffic from currently?  Where do people in your industries have reviews?  If you were your customer where would you look?  If it's a restaurant, coffeeshop, etc. many people search on yelp.  Mechanic, Lawyer, Plumber, Google Local is hugely helpful.  Bar, concert, event, Facebook or Foursquare could be a good bet.  Also keep in mind where reviews can help your placements on the engines.  Yelp should go to both, facebook may only go to bing, google local probably won't go to bing and vice versa.

Be sure not to post the same on more than one or you could get slapped with some duplicate content.  I like some on the site as well for good measure.  Also -- you'd be better off letting reviews come naturally than mandating customers go to a particular service, or you may get faced with a penalty.

See what your competitors clients are doing and what successes they are (or aren't having) and go for them.  Different industries are searched for in a variety of ways.

[S_Curtis]

I would always say own the content and stick in on the company site. You can always add social share buttons if you want to distribute it. The power of reviews is that customers will add keywords you never thought of ... or at least didn't have time to add, so you want those on the company site to get long tail searches.  You can also police offensive or spam reviews which you can't if it is on a 3rd party site.

[Asjad]

Hi,

I will add yellowpages to the above list.

And here are my top:

1- Google Locals.

2- Yelp

3- yellowpages.

And If you are also looking in Australian industry then Hotfrog and truelocals as Well.

Thanks