Reputation management is a vital part of the search engine optimization toolbox and building positive recognition for your brand. Having positive customer reviews and testimonials about your business, and responding to negative feedback in a timely and professional manner, can help give you that extra push to outperform your competitors.
Most Fortune 500 companies and major corporations already have custom reviews systems in place to address this very concern – and so should you.
At SEO Advantage, we make large-scale enterprise marketing services accessible to businesses of all shapes and sizes looking to gain a competitive edge and boost ROI from their online presence.
Customer Review Statistics:
- 72% of marketers say branded content is more effective than magazine advertisements. 69% say it's superior to direct mail and PR. (Source)
- 88% of consumers say that they trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. (Source)
- Buyers consult reviews early in the search, with 68% reading reviews as they build their shortlist. (Source)
- Reviews can have an impact of up to 10% on a business's search rankings. (Source)
- 40% of buyers form an opinion of a business after reading just 1-3 reviews. (Source)
Whether you manage a massive e-commerce platform or a small mom-and-pop shop website, our SEO experts can help design a custom reviews system for your business and implement it seamlessly into your site.
There's no question that customer reviews and testimonials are an essential ingredient to managing a company's online reputation. Reviews also happen to be one of the most effective marketing techniques out there.

1. Social Proof
Sales is all about timing. Your potential clients not only want to see that you have the product or service they need right now, they also want to read about other people like them who chose your company and were satisfied with their experience. Being able to display relevant reviews at precisely the right micro-moment can help seal the deal and turn a potential client into a buyer.

2. Customer Support
Our custom reviews system allows you to interact with your customers on a deeper, more personal level. The whole point of a reviews system is to allow a customer to communicate with and about a company. Hosting a custom reviews system on your website allows you to begin a constructive dialogue with customers and simultaneously market your support services to prospective buyers.

3. Keyword-Rich Content
Unlike other review systems, our custom solution is designed to build page after page of effortless keyword-rich content that not only helps build brand confidence and trust, but also powers your website for rankings. Our custom reviews system allows your business to include a detailed description of the product or service that future customers can connect with, and serves to build high value content that search engines are looking for from companies in your industry.

4. User Experience
Through our custom system, your reviews are sorted and segregated to deliver the best experience. Our system allows for tagging of each review into categories – whether it be by product, service or location. Reviews can then be sorted into these categorized pages, allowing users to browse through the reviews which are most relevant to them. For example, a legal firm can show reviews by their office locations, or it may serve them best to breakdown the reviews according to practice area categories.

5. Reputation Management & Control
Another advantage to implementing a custom reviews system rather than installing a generic plugin is that a custom system is the only way to truly have control over your reputation and branding. “Out-of-the-box” solutions and plugins have certain fixed aspects in place that cannot be changed, such as layout restrictions, requirements for how information is collected and stored, etc.
By developing a custom review system, we can give your business precisely what it needs in a way that can't be accomplished with a plugin or pre-established system. When you own your reviews, you can publish them in the way that makes the most sense for your business – i.e. building service pages, location pages, landing pages, etc.

6. Brand Confidence & Trust
When was the last time you purchased a laptop, TV or major appliance without considering the reviews of other consumers? Reviews can be a key reason why someone chooses your business over another. Your customers want to know about experiences others had with your products or services so they know what to expect. Studies show people place a lot of trust in what others think, so if your site shows 50 people who believe in your product or service then a potential buyer has very little reason to doubt that they're making the right choice.
Customer reviews are also a powerful SEO link-building technique, immediately boosting your website's credibility, authority and authenticity – in the eyes of both your human visitors and Google's search engine robots.

7. Traffic & User Engagement
Why lose traffic to review sites like Amazon, Google and Angie's List when you can provide your customers the ability to interact with your business on your own site?
Implementing our custom reviews solution not only attracts more visitors to your website, but also helps improve customer engagement metrics like average time on page, number of pages visited, bounce rate and other key indicators that affect your overall search engine rankings.

8. Technical Support
Being closely connected with the developers of the solution is yet another benefit of integrating our custom reviews system. For example, if there's a feature of the review solution you'd like to see that doesn't exist yet, you have a much better chance of requesting the feature as a client and having it implemented than you would using an off-the-shelf plugin. Also, as a client you know that the support for your custom software is always there. Most free review software/plugins become unmaintained after a while and begin to have security problems, incompatibilities, and permanent breakage, forcing a migration to something better.
When used right, customer reviews can be one of your most effective SEO tools. At SEO Advantage, our skilled team of online marketers, reputation management consultants and developers can work with you to develop a sophisticated custom reviews system that boosts rankings, engages customers and maximizes returns. Contact us today to find out what we have in mind for you.
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