Customer Reviews

Sources of Local Business Reviews

on July 23rd, 2008 by Michael D Jensen

Online Customer Reviews for Local Businesses can be found in dozens of local search engines and directories. Some local search sites will re-use customer reviews from other sites to provide a thorough selection of reviews for users. This diagram, “Sources of Local Business Reviews” highlights the biggest players in local search and the connections between each with regards to online customer reviews.

Sources of Local Business Reviews

This diagram is not intended to cover every source that feeds reviews into local search sites, but to highlight the most prominent players and review contributors in local search.

Local businesses benefit the most by pointing their customers to review sites that have the most pull in the popular local search engines. For example, besides the four most popular local search sites themselves, InsiderPages provides reviews to both Yahoo! Local and Google Maps, as well as MerchantCircle.

Ratings by customers in online reviews can influence local search rankings, but the ratings may be limited to certain sources. For example, Yahoo! Local does not include the ratings of other sources (which include lots of smaller niche review sites), only ratings from Yahoo! users leaving a review at Yahoo! Local. Pointing customers to these primary sources may provide the best impact.

While online customer reviews are not sole determinants of rankings, reviews can make a significant difference very quickly in non-competitive local searches, both in the universal one box results as well as the full local results.

Check back periodically for updates to this diagram, and feel free to contact me with suggestions and updates.

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Unbiased Reviews, Except More Reviews = More Money

on July 22nd, 2008 by Michael D Jensen

One of my favorite topics in local search is Online Customer Reviews. I think its a fascinating element of local search ranking algorithms as well as for attracting customers to your local business.

I haven’t been to epinions.com for a while, frankly because their reviews are always sparse. The first thing that stood out to me on the homepage was this giant fake bill (see below), advertising how they’ll pay you $10 for 10 reviews (the more you write, the more money you make). Then I saw the headline above it “Unbiased Reviews by Real People”.

epinions-unbiased-paid.jpg

I’m a huge fan of incentives for getting online customer reviews, but here’s why I don’t think this falls into that category:

This ploy will attract people who want a quick buck, not actual customers. Who wants reviews from people who have never used it? This is my complaint about the iPhone AppStore where anyone can leave a review for any application, even a $65 application they’ve never bought. Sure it’s hard to control for most sites whether you’ve used the product or been to the business (except in Apple’s case), but going out of your way to incentivize ANYONE to review, especially in volumes, will significantly hurt the quality of customer reviews.

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LeaveFeedback.org, a Free Service for Local Businesses

on March 27th, 2008 by Michael D Jensen

A new service I just launched for local businesses is LeaveFeedback.org. It addresses one of the problems in local search where local businesses have difficulty getting their customers to go online and leave feedback at a local search site like Yahoo! Local, Google Maps, Yelp.com, etc.

LeaveFeedback.org helps on both ends of the problem. The local business motivates customers with a coupon that is valid if they go online and leave an online review. The customer is automatically directed using the coupon code to one review site out of several the local business has confirmed as their business listing.

The benefit to local businesses is (1) more online customer reviews gives them a leg up over the competition and (2) ratings from online reviews can contribute to the ranking of local businesses in local search sites like Yahoo! Local. More customers, better rankings, and a discount for your customers. Win, win, and win!

One of the problems we are seeing now is that local businesses are just not aware of “local search” yet. It’s new, even to us local search marketers! So my guess is LeaveFeedback.org is a year or two from actually getting some decent attention from local businesses. Somehow we need to get in front of these local businesses and inform them about local search and how it can grow their business.

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