Why? The review or comment offers key information that most brands are wasting because they do not realize that they could take advantage of them. In this sense, it is important to note that, for example, 97% of consumers affirm that reviews influence their decision to buy, according to Angie Jiménez, the Vice President of Operations for Extendo.
This means that brands need to redouble their efforts to follow up and answer reviews, since 95% of buyers read them before making a decision to buy a product.
Basically the practice of reading the reviews on the brand’s page is the counterpart to looking back years ago when we asked for word of mouth recommendations. If we did not know the brand, we would ask those who have been clients or consumers and with this feedback make the decision
The topic becomes more relevant if you take into account that 88% of consumers trust in online reviews as much as personal recommendations.
- Here we can briefly explain the concept of eWom, Electronic word-of-mouth communication (E-WOM)is any positive or negative statement made by potential, actual or former customers about a product or company which is made available to multiples of people and/or institutions and is spread over the internet (Cheung et al, 2010).
Reviews improve positioning
Another benefis in following up on the reviews, offering punctual answers and to deliver an automated handling system, is that this practice helps to locate the brand in better search positions, since the use of the users’ natural language makes an echo of the searches that they make themselves.
This two-way communication between clients and brands can feed from the file that Google creates for your business and that is available in the search engines, even though the brand was not requested or known to exist. This file can be open for the same business or for a very digitized client. It is here that most businesses are careless and do not claim ownership and then claim that they cannot manage the comments or at least respond to complaints.
From the smallest to the largest business, absolutely all can have their own Google My Business profile. The file appears in the extreme right of the search engine and includes the brand’s most important data like the name, service topics, address, the option to add photos, description, telephone number, opening hours and reviews.
You can count on this complete file to help the brand in quickly providing contact information relevant to the client such as opening hours and telephone numbers and allows the management of a communication channel with the clients to respond to positive comments which are left as much as negative ones. It is a free service and relevant when you are speaking about local SEO
Local SEO allows a website to increase traffic which is generated free of charge by potential clients; also support the knowledge of the brand to appear in the local search results with a clear reference to geographical location. The routine tasks associated with local SEO included finding key local words, optimizing the Google My Business profile of the company and creating NAP appointments. The last of these corresponds to places in which the name, address and telephone number of the brand are listed.
The three pillars of a local search are related to proximity (where Google thinks that the user is found in relations to the address of a business in the moment of the search), prominence (how important Google thinks that the business is in relations to nearby competitors) and relevance (what relationship there is between the result and the words used to carry out the search).
- What is a LORA?
Local Operation Response Automation is a platform which gives an automated form of support to marketing teams to maintain more direct communication with the clients using GMB.
- How do they work?
It is a software as a service that makes intensive consumption of the GMB’s API to extract the data and it can facilitate the access to the information, the automation of answers and the visualization of the data in a friendly control panel.
- What benefits do they offer a brand?
Support the growth of the brand’s SEO positioning thanks to their capacity to massively respond to comments, as well as also increasing the content-publications.
Improve brand perception through an effective management of the answers to reviews left by the clients.
Facilitate access to the data statistics from all the offices in one place with the opportunity to take this data to carry out different types of statistical analyses. Especially if you have many offices and hundreds or thousands of reviews to manage.
- What information are we allowed to obtain?
Looking historically and at real-time reviews, client evaluations of different criteria: store, geographical location (province), the configuration of automated answers that comply with the established rules for the client, search for comments and the analysis of feelings in the clients’ reviews.
