Reviews are an extremely valuable thing to local businesses!

Supporting Local

There are a few reasons why online reviews are an extremely important asset to small/local businesses.

The main 2 reasons are influence and SEO

Influence

This one is pretty self explanatory and understood by most people.

Basically it means that potential customers or prospects will read your reviews and base their options off yours. Which is a great thing in theory because it helps people make a decision based on other peoples experiences. Essentially it’s trial and error without you having to be the one making the errors.

What makes this less than great in practice, is that most people aren’t very motivated to rant and rave when they’ve had a good experience. Usually the people who are most likely to leave a review are people who had a bad experience.

Don’t get me wrong, I believe that bad reviews are a good thing when they are deserved, but one of the reasons that reviewing local businesses is important is to balance out those negative reviews.

The more reviews people give out will eventually tell the whole story behind a company. Maybe they really do deserve those bad reviews, maybe they were just having a bad day/week. Whatever the case is, your reviews will make sure the truth is told.

SEO

SEO isn’t a term that’s used too commonly outside of web design and marketing. So I will try to explain it simply.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. A Search Engine is a site that you go to, to search for information/websites. Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.

Optimization refers to a business trying to make their business appear as high as they can in the search results that correspond with their business/services.

Where this gets difficult for small/local businesses is that it’s very easy to be outshined by nationwide and/or worldwide companies. Companies like Nike, Google, Amazon, etc. have larger marketing budgets than a lot of small/local business make in a year.

To level the playing field a bit google has started showing local businesses higher in search results based on your location.

So.. How do reviews help?

Well, the more positive reviews a company gets the more likely it will show up toward the top of search results.

In conclusion, it’s extremely important to review your local businesses.

Take a little extra time after leaving your favorite local business that look them up on Google and write about them.

And if you’d like to give us a review, you can do so here. We’d really appreciate it!