Why You Need To Own Your Customer Reviews

You work hard to make your clients happy and earn awesome customer reviews.

So why let someone else own and control that review content?

The value of reviews goes far beyond five stars. Reviews have the ability to increase your SEO, drive more traffic to your site, and build customer trust in your brand.

However, if you don’t own your customer reviews, you miss out on these benefits…and more.

Don’t miss out on your review content’s value.

Here are 5 of the biggest risks of letting someone else own your review content.

1) Your SEO will suffer

SEO is complicated and relies on a variety of factors, which is why it’s impossible to directly correlate organic traffic increase to any single factor.

However, we took a look at 500 sites across multiple verticals whose only common denominator was that they all started using reviews.

Over the course of three months, you can see the impact reviews had on their SEO.

Reviews have serious SEO benefits. When you don’t own your reviews, you’re giving all that SEO juice to another company.

You’re allowing another site to rank higher than you in search engines – using your content to do so!

When search engines crawl the web, they look through a site’s content to rank them in results. If your content is on another company’s site, search engines won’t see it when they crawl your content.

When you own your own reviews, you not only have the content on your site, but you can also add a minisite, or a static webpage with all the data generated from product reviews, that makes it even easier for search engines to crawl.

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Owning your content is vital for both eCommerce and local SEO strategies.

2) You’ll miss out on high-converting organic traffic

Reviews are super powerful for building long-tail keywords. These longer keywords have very high purchase intent because people searching for them are often very close to purchasing a specific item.

Stores that rank well for many long-tail keywords see that the results are often greater than just ranking well for one big keyword.

Why?

When people write reviews, they may say something like, “These are the most affordable tennis shoes I’ve bought in years!”

While your site may be optimized for big keywords like “tennis shoes,” “budget tennis shoes,” and “comfortable tennis shoes” in search engines, maybe you never thought to optimize for “most affordable tennis shoes.” After all, you can’t rank for everything.

Luckily, this review content allows you to show up at the top of search results for tons of long-tail keyword phrases like this. People searching for such specific items tend to have high conversion rates because they know exactly what they want.

By putting your review content in someone else’s hands, you won’t get the sales from all these long-tail searches.

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3) Your traffic will wander away

Not only are you missing out on organic traffic to your site, but you’re also letting potential customers go to another site before yours.

Your goal should be to appear at the top of search engines and get traffic to your site. Using another site to host reviews means that traffic goes to them first, not you.

Also, when your reviews are on another site, you’re allowing customers to see you lined up right next to tons of your competitors. You want customers to come to your site, to see your brand, and to assess you and only you.

You don’t want them to possibly happen upon your company in a list of 50 other stores and then compare and contrast in their head which is best.

You should always bring traffic directly to you, without any detours in the process.

If you own your customer reviews, you can have complete control over where they’re displayed, how they’re displayed, and how you can leverage the content for marketing. You can use reviews to drive even more traffic by repurposing the content in social ads and more.

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4) Your reputation will be out of your control

When you allow another company to have your reviews, you lose the ability to access the valuable data about those reviews and use it to help you make smarter business choices.

You also put your reputation at risk – you can’t control fake reviews or fight back against inaccurate claims.

When you own your review content, you can know confidently the reviews are genuine.

Additionally, you can moderate reviews to make sure that only verified reviews are being posted and that negative product reviews receive a response, thus focusing on how to make customers happy and take-in their valuable feedback.

You don’t risk your reputation being tarnished by a competitor or having a review associated with your brand name filled with inappropriate comments or curse words.

5) You put your customer reviews at risk

In case we haven’t said it enough: your review content is extremely valuable. By letting someone else own your content, you also let them own the value of that content.

You need to be able to export reviews in case you switch to a different review platform, and also able to import all your past reviews so you never lose that valuable data.

Sure, you can re-post the original reviews on your site, but how can you (or shoppers) trust their authenticity?

The only way to vouch for your customer reviews confidently is by owning the content yourself.