Tag Archives: reviews

Wondering Where Your Old Yelp Reviews Are & Why Your Rating Plummeted Overnight? Here’s The Answer

It’s no secret that customer reviews are important to ALL businesses. People vale customer reviewers as much as personal recommendations. However, old reviews may not be as important as the new ones as reported in our earlier article. The freshness of the review matters a lot.

So it came as no surprise when Yelp decided to update their automated recommendation software to show only fresh reviews. The software moved the older reviews to not recommended category, hence taking it away from the public eye. As a result, many business owners were shocked to see a sudden plummet in their business’s ratings.

We tried to gather as much information as possible about the update, and here are our findings:
Everyone was impacted by this update since it was a cross-platform update.
Not all 5 star reviews were filtered, it just moved the older ones to the “Not Recommended” category.
It doesn’t matter if you advertised on Yelp or not or if you were Yelp Elite, everyone was similarly affected.
Reviews that were on the platform for several years were filtered.

For a little clarification watch this short video where Yelp explains why some reviews are filtered and some aren’t.

Takeaway:
You can’t do anything about the filtered reviews. They are gone forever so you should start focusing on getting new reviews instead of getting upset over the older ones.

If Yelp played an important role in your overall marketing efforts, then you should start focusing on getting new reviews from your satisfied customers. You will have to come up with creative yet simple ways to generate new reviews, like adding the link to your business’s Yelp profile into the receipt email or on the checkout page.

Furthermore, you can also allow users to “check in” when they are in your location. Adding Yelp Review Widget on your site is also one underrated way to get more reviews. You can also embed some of the best reviews on your site to not only generate trust but also to prompt customers to check your business profile on Yelp. And last but not the least, keep your Yelp profile updated.

Finally, we highly recommend you to check out our proprietary “Review Widget” which helps you get positive reviews on Yelp. Not only that, it automatically filters out negative reviews being displayed on your website thus enabling positive customer experience.

For more SEO tips and the latest updates in digital marketing, contact us to learn more!

Reviews Boost The Bottom Line of Your Business – Study

A recent study shows that more review stars translate into higher paid search conversation rates. Businesses with an average of 3.31 stars managed to get 10.42 percent conversion rate, whereas, businesses that had 4.5+ stars achieved a remarkable 12.83 percent conversion rate.

The study also revealed that the response rate also affected the paid search performance. Businesses with higher response rates saw an average conversion rate of 13.86%. While the those with lowest response rates had to settle for a conversion rate of 10.42%.

Engaging with customers & responding to their questions, comments, and reviews is directly related to improved conversion rates. This type of high-touch customer interaction builds trust among users.

Reviews not only help you improve your local search rankings, but also paid search ranking, and conversion rates. So if you are not focusing on reviews, now is the time to do so.

To help you get more reviews for your business, we highly recommend our review widget. It’s a small piece of code which is placed on your website that helps you get positive reviews on Google, Yelp, and Facebook. In addition, it helps to filter out negative reviews, thus ensuring a positive experience for website users. Need more details? Please connect with us.

BE CAREFUL HOW YOU COLLECT REVIEWS – GOOGLE UPDATES ITS REVIEWS GUIDELINES

Google is struggling hard to keep reviews trustworthy. They are trying to weed out fake reviews and bring in more genuine reviews, but they have a long journey ahead. As reported in Google My Business forums, recently, a Kentucky law firm allegedly ran a contest on Facebook, offering people zoo tickets in exchange for positive reviews.

This didn’t go down well with other law firms and businesses and they reported the incident to Google. As a result, Google updated their reviews guideline from:

“Don’t offer or accept money, products, or services to write reviews for a business or to write negative reviews about a competitor.”

to this:

“In addition to Prohibited Content guidelines, text reviews are subject to the following additional requirements:

· Don’t use reviews for advertising purposes. This includes, but is not limited to, posting email addresses, phone numbers, social media links or links to other websites in your reviews.

· Don’t include promotional or commercial content.

· Don’t offer or accept money in exchange for reviews.

· Don’t solicit reviews from customers in bulk.”

Reviews are important and they are almost as effective as a personal recommendation, but be careful how you collect them!

To help you get more reviews for your business, we highly recommend the review widget offered by SEO Solutions. It’s a small piece of code which is placed on your website and helps you get positive reviews on Google, Yelp, and Facebook. In addition, it helps to filter out negative reviews, thus ensuring a positive experience for website users.