The Power of Online Reviews
Peter Brissette • November 1, 2016
Hello, Peter Brissette here, and I have a new video for you here this month. In this video, I want to talk about a new survey that was just completed in September from a company called Bright Local.
It is a local consumer search survey, focused on how consumers are using reviews right now, and their thoughts about reviews. I’m going to share my screen here, so that I can point out to you some of the highlights of the survey results.
One of the first stats is that eighty-four percent of people trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation. Now I think this is significant because a personal recommendation, a referral, is the number one, most-trusted form of advertising; the most-trusted form of marketing that there is. Nothing is trusted more than that. Based on this question that was asked, and how the survey responders responded, they’re saying that most people, eighty-four percent, trust reviews just as much as that personal recommendation. That’s a big deal in my mind, because there is so much trust given to a personal recommendation. I think this is significant to the fact that reviews are very highly trusted in general. It’s one of the most important activities that you can do to help demonstrate to someone who doesn’t know your business; that’s not familiar with your business; on what kind of company you are; that you are a trustworthy business; that you can be trusted; and your reviews are a reflection and demonstration of that. This is a significant statistic.
The next one that I thought was interesting is that seven out of ten consumers will leave a review for a business if they are asked to. This is our mantra when we talk about our ReviewMeMarketing system to clients. There are really two things that you have to do: First, you must make it easy for them. So part of our tools and training that we do is to help you be able to do that; make it easy for your customers and clients to leave you reviews.
Secondly, you must ask (for reviews), and you have to systemize the way that you ask. This is pretty evident, and I totally concur with the stats that they’ve found. I’ve found this to be pretty similar, that most people will leave reviews if they’re asked, and if you make it easy for them to do that. Do you want more reviews for your business? You’ve just got to ask.
Next, we see that “Ninety percent of consumers read less than ten reviews before forming an opinion about business.” There are a couple of different ways you can look at this: You can look at like “Well, I’ve only got five reviews, so I don’t need anymore. Done. I don’t need any more than that.” But another stat we’re going to share here says that’s not the case, that, if you just have five, and never get any more, it’s not going to be as effective for you. It does mean that the reviews that they do see, the reviews that they do read, doesn’t require more than ten for them to form an opinion about your business. So if all you have is a few reviews, and a couple of those are bad, that’s going to be a challenge for people to trust your business. However, if you do have some bad reviews, but they’re from awhile back, then that’s not as big of an issue. We’re going to talk more about that.
Fifty-four percent of people will visit the website after reading positive reviews. You want to get more reviews (traffic) to your website to your website, have positive reviews. People are going to check out your website, because they want to learn more about your business. They’re obviously interested. They’ve trusted you enough to take the next step, to try to look more into your business to find out if you have the service or the product, whatever it is that they happen to be looking for.
Seventy-three percent of consumers think that reviews older than three months are no longer relevant. We were just talking about that, about the number of reviews that people look at, less than ten, typically, when making a decision about a business. But they also look at how old the reviews are. Are these reviews recent or not? If they’re recent, within the last ninety days, they’re going to have the most impact, be the most relevant. If you just got a negative review, it is a challenge. The best thing you can do? Get ten more positive reviews as quickly as you possibly can. Build up those positive reviews. As time goes by, and as the quantity goes by, it’s going to move that negative review down the spectrum and cause it to have less impact on how people are making decisions about your business.
Seventy-four percent of consumers say that positive reviews make them trust a local business more. Again, most people trust online reviews, and it helps people trust local businesses more for the most part.
Fifty-eight percent of consumers say that the star rating of a business is the most important. That overall average, that overall aggregated score that you have for your business, whether that’s three stars, three and a half, four, four and a half, five, that overall star rating is that quick glance, that zero moment of truth, “Z-mot”, as Google calls it, that zero moment of truth, where I have an instant to try to make a decision about your business, and one of the quick ways that people do that is looking at that overall star rating that your business has.
That’s what I wanted to share with you today. Just some quick stats from recent surveys on how people are interacting with reviews. It just tells me that reviews are continuing to be more and more relevant, that you need to be working on your online reviews, and we’re here to help you do that. If we can serve you in any way, please reach out to us and let us know. Thank you, and go Broncos!
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Video Transcript: All right, hey guys, Peter Brissette here, Digital Marketing Dude, and I wanted to share with you something new about Google reviews that you want to be aware of. So Google now will allow users to update their profile, their name on their profiles, so they can be more anonymous. So they're not entirely anonymous, but if they want to use an initial on their last name or shorten their first name, you know, if it's Jennifer and they just want to put Jen or whatever, Dogmom1234. They can change that on their reviews. So that change here just recently was updated means a couple of things. I just wanted to go through this article real quick and talk about that. So what exactly changed in the review system? So Google now allows any user to set up custom display name and profile image, which will appear on all reviews, photos, videos, and contributions across maps and search. It's also retroactive to all the other reviews that they have left as well. So you don't need to have a different Google account to protect your identity. You can just update your profile information. So in practice, what this should mean is that customers can leave reviews under a nickname instead of their full name. All past, future Google Maps contributions, adopt the pseudonym, applies across Q&A, images, and videos. So Google still knows the account behind the review, only the public name is going to be different. So it should allow, in some industries, folks to be able to leave reviews where maybe in the past they haven't. For example, legal services. So in legal services, can you imagine if you were charged for a crime and your attorney helped you and kept you out of jail or whatever it was, and you went on to post, hey, I got charged with shoplifting. And thankfully, my attorney helped me out. You may not want to put your name on that and have it out there. So things like that, mental health is another big area, various medical or health care practices, a lot of health care practices, I think this could affect. Definitely addiction treatment and recovery, financial advisors, and some sensitive home services. The big question is, does this is, The Increase fake review risk. Most people don't think so. Again, this article is from taprocard.com. They certainly don't think so because it's still a real account. It's not like it's a fake account or something like that. So I think it's still going to produce good reviews, but it should increase the number of reviews. And that's really why this matters for business. You should be able to get more reviews. What you want is more frequent reviews, more recent reviews, and that will help build trust from potential customers. And even with all the AI hype and everything that's going on, it's going to help you with your SEO in maps and search, in particular from phones. So how do businesses adjust the review request strategy? How One thing that can be added when you're requesting reviews is to mention if you'd like extra privacy, Google now allows you to leave reviews under a custom display name. And so that can be something that you add in there. I'm also going to put a link here in the post on how to change your Google display name so that you can see that and be able to offer that for your clients as well. So I just wanted to throw out this quick little update. If you have any questions about this, I want to talk about how your reviews are being managed right now. If you're using our services or someone else and would like to talk about that, please reach out. Thank you again, Peter Brissette, Digital Marketing Dude. Visit our website at dmdude.com. Here is the link to the original Post: https://taprocard.com/blogs/article/google-anonymous-reviews-update-2025 Here is a link that explains how to change your display name on google. https://support.google.com/maps/answer/15294714?hl=en
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The last question that should we follow our competitors on social media? Sure, why not. You know, you want to see what they're doing and see what's happening there. You know if you're going to be active and you're really trying to use social to build your business then having a good idea what's what your competition is up to is probably important. And you know sometimes what I find with so called competitors is that we you know often times find people that we can collaborate with. It doesn't necessarily mean they are competitors so we work with a number of other marketing agencies and provides some services for them for their clients that they don't necessarily do, but they hire us to do it for them. So like I work with other marketing agencies, so they're not necessarily, you know, your competitor and everything. So but yeah, see what's going on you know, investigate, read up on them, see what they're doing, check out their websites, see what they're ranking for. You know, the more you understand the competitive landscape, the more you know what you should be doing and what you need to do.
And the last question that we have is, can you say more about running a test on TikTok yeah, I so I'm not on TikTok I'm not using tiktok. I wind up watching a lot of TikTok videos on Facebook and the Facebook reels. I think it's fascinating. I find it very interesting. But it's not a platform that I've taken the time to jump on at this point. Again, based on where I'm at with strategy and so forth, it's not a fit for me. But anytime you're using any platform, if you're going to do something, you want to come up with some means of measurement. How am I going to measure success? What does success look like? Is it I, you know, posted a video and I got a thousand views. Is that success you know or is it actually driving traffic and are you tracking how much traffic and then are you tracking what happened to that traffic? Did they fill out a form, did they make a phone call? Like what's the, where do you want that to go? So we really need to step back and think about that whole process. Of creating content, I'm pushing this through to, you know, to my website. And this is what I want to have happen. This is what I wanted the results to be. And then how am I going to track it? How am I going to measure it and do that so anytime you're spending, anytime you're doing something new in particular. Or you're spending any money you need to track it all the way through. All the way through.
The next question that we have is if you have a GoDaddy web page already and are having some issues, are you able to switch over somehow? You can build your website on any other platform and then just you just change the domain where the domain points. So yeah, you can do that anytime. Thank you, Peter.
Next question is how powerful are paid plans to things like Google Adwords or whatever it is called now regarding driving traffic, how can you possibly compete when you don't have the cash to put towards such programs? Yeah, so that's where you gotta get creative. So again we're small businesses and we don't have you know, unlimited funds to you know, just throw a bunch of ads up and you know compete with some other big companies so. Again, this goes back to what are the things I can really do better, because chances are your website is getting some traffic and it could be getting good traffic, but if your messaging isn't clear on your website, you're not getting them to take the next step. They're not making a phone call or filling out a form. So where I can put energy and effort is in that messaging and that and being very clear about who I'm working with, the problem I solve, how I solve it. So that whoever does come across my radar, I have a much higher chance of converting that person then someone else. So you know it's not the best product that always wins, it's who's the best communicator. And so that's why I talk about what you own and what you can't can control and making sure that is dialed in. And doing what it's supposed to do so that if you do go I, if I'm dialed in and I know everything is working well with my website and it's communicating clearly now, I can spend a small amount on ads and drive a small amount of traffic knowing that I'm probably going to get a decent amount of conversions because my messaging's on point and so I don't have to spend as much as the big guy. But I can be more effective because I've spent time working on the stuff that really matters. Thanks, Peter.