Getting positive Google reviews on our online profiles is one of the best activity we can do for our SEO and branding. The Google algorithm is so complex that a good local SEO has to look at almost every aspect of the business’s marketing, from the website and ads that the business controls to external article, links, social media, online directories, and more. Customer reviews and ratings are essential items in the SEO’s tool belt, especially for optimizing local businesses. 

 Google Ratings and Google reviews are a huge conversion factor, more influential for getting users to click through and make a purchase than business citations or most other elements of local SEO. If our search result has 4.5 stars and 18 reviews, that’s strong social media network that our product or service is trustworthy.

Any positive online review of our business is good to have, only those left in particular places affect our rankings in Google’s local search results. Reviews left on your Google+ Local page are the most important ones, with reviews on authoritative sites, like Yelp, Yell, and Scoot being secondary to those.

Reviews left on our Google+ local page are, by far, from a ranking perspective, the most important ones, as Google feels that they can trust them more than reviews left on 3rd party websites. They’re also the ones that potential customers are most likely to see, as there’s a direct link to those reviews from the search results page.

There are three main benefits of getting customer reviews; to improve the visibility of your business on Google. In regards to the latter, the importance of accumulating genuine and honest reviews of your services online is ever increasing. Although you may have all the other elements of your local search strategy covered, the power of review data should not be underestimated.

A client review that has an established account with Google and that is active on social media can have a significant impact on rankings. We believe that the future holds major changes in how the search engines evaluate and rank websites and customer reviews will be the largest driving force behind keyword rankings. If you’re going to encourage your clients to leave reviews, make sure you aren’t attempting to game Google with fake, paid, or over-the-top reviews. These type of tactics will harm your website in the near future.