Online Ecommerce Site Reviews – Do you need them ?

Hi there. My name is Chris from SEO Traffic Lab, and I’m one of the new media account managers here. Today I want to speak to you about customer reviews, and if you are an e-commerce store owner, five reasons why you absolutely must have them on your site.
So, customer reviews, there are two types. If you think about the first one, product reviews, that you’d see on product pages. The second is bigger picture reviews. If you think of eKomi and Trustpilot, they’re sites that are customer review systems that you can build in the site. They are the bigger picture. It’s more the delivery and the overall service than the product, more about the business.
 
So, customer reviews, is fundamentally online word of mouth. It’s one of the best forms of marketing. People tend to switch off to advertisements hence how when you walk down the high street you kind of switch off towards the stimuli that surrounds you. If you think of Amazon as well, the products that do well when you search yourself, you tend to navigate towards products that have good reviews and give an overall picture of products and performance of the business as well.
It’s worth bearing in mind at this point that if you have a bad image offline or a bad product, there’s a good chance you are going to have a bad image online as well.
So the first point I want to talk about is buyer confidence and trust. What reviews do, fundamentally, is confirm that the buyer is making the right choice to look for this product and to buy that product. If you see a product with 200 reviews and the average review is 4 and one-half out of 5, you’d think 200 people can’t possibly be wrong, and as a buyer it minimizes your risk. E-commerce store owners should be aware of that.
Customer reviews, what they do secondly is increase your click-through rate. With rich snippets, which we’re going to talk about in a further blog, what you can do is have the customer reviews to be seen when people search for the query before they go onto the site. This improves that, because they’ve got a better idea of what’s going to go on that particular page, increases more traffic to the site, and ultimately conversion rate as well. People understand what’s on the page and the products even better.
On a third point I want to speak about is new and fresh content. A lot of store owners, what they do is take the manufacturer’s description and will use that within their product description. But there’s going to be dozens of other companies doing the same thing. So what Google then has to do is filter out all of this duplicate content. Everybody has the same page, so lots of businesses have the same pages. So if you can make that unique and your customers updating the product reviews, this is gonna to be unique. Google doesn’t want to show 1 to 10 of all the same product reviews, so by your customers effectively updating your site with fresh content, you’re able to optimize for longer-tail content, because they’re using words that are longer tail, and people would use to search.
The fourth point is– and you’re probably wondering why it’s on there– is the power of negative reviews. If you have a negative review, it’s an opportunity to really show how well you can then improve the service. The customers know that your products and services aren’t going to be perfect all of the time. That’s obvious. But if you have an unhappy customer and you can take them to a place where they are happy, it shows you’re a very real business. And people appreciate the honesty as well, and they can see that.
Finally, what customer reviews do is build up your overall trust, and will build repeat business in the future. It kind of cements your place in the market where people don’t even have to read the reviews as such about your business, the bigger picture reviews that we spoke about earlier, because they’ve been there prior. They know you’re a trusted place and they are happy to purchase from you.
One final point, and it’s more of a bonus, is effectively, if you have customer reviews, people will understand what is on your pages and your products so you’re going to get less complaints and less returns. So effectively you’re going to have more time on your hands and your store is going to become more profitable.
So thank you for listening. My name’s Chris from SEO Traffic Lab. If you have any questions, please leave a comment below and I’ll get back to you straight away. Thank you.