No matter what kind of business you have, customer reviews will affect the sales and profits. Getting the right reviews can help you boost your revenue. Conversely, getting the wrong kind of attention can hurt your business. The reason being simple – on an average of over 90% of customers check customer reviews before they purchase products. Moreover, more than 80% are convinced by the past experience shared in the reviews and make their decision based on them.

Another important factor to consider is that customer reviews not only travel through advanced means of digital marketing. They can travel when someone is talking to their friends or simply walking in public. Once the customers find out about the product or service you are offering. They will most probably search for customer reviews online. If you have bad reviews on your website, your customers will most likely go to your competitors instead. Here are 6 mistakes that you are making with customer reviews that are costing you money. 

#1 – PrioritizingUnimportant Review Sites

In a nutshell, there are probably 2-3 review sites that run the market. The rest are simply there to keep the audience entertained. Therefore, don’t pay attention to every single review that gets passed. Your priority should be to focus on the review site that matters the most for your business. As soon as you have set a list of all the important sites, you can focus on providing fresh reviews to these websites. 

The next question is how you can be sure about the sites that are important for your business. The three, big review sites include Google and Facebook. Depending on the kind of business that you have, different websites will hold different values. It is a good practice to consult your customers about the site that is important to them. Focusing on these websites only will save you and your team from wasting time and energy. A business that is focused on London carpet cleaners will most likely be on Google reviews.

#2 – Fewer Star Ratings

While you may ignore customer reviews on random review websites, the one thing that you cannot ignore is a low star rating. A low star rating can hurt your sales more than anything. Before you move ahead with anything, make sure that your average star rating is high. If your competitor has a star rating above 4, then it should be your aim to improve your star rating to at least 4 or above. The question is, how can you improve your ratings? A good practice is to pre-screen your customers before asking them to write reviews for you. Here’s how:

For example, if you are in love with the services of your local beauty parlor and you let them know. They will most likely ask you to write a positive review for them. Conversely, if there is a bad experience under your management, then you would want to take care of the damage before the customer even gets access to your website or Facebook page. At the same time, customer reviews pave a path for you to improve your customer service and your products. Moreover, if you make the right improvements for one customer. You will most likely be making them for a lot more customers. 

#3 – Not Enough Fresh Reviews

Even if your review site has a 5-star rating, it might not just be enough. Unless the reviews are recent, they aren’t doing your business any good. Outdated reviews might just not be a great idea to display at all. So, what is the average number of days for you to have fresh reviews on your website? A good check on your fresh reviews is that you need at least one review in 7 days.

#4 – Reviews that Have Been Filtered 

Another common mistake that is costing you money is filtered out reviews. The problem that arises is that most of the review sites can detect reviews that are not genuine. They not only detect fake reviews, but they can also filter them out. However, the problem doesn’t end there. They are not accurately filtering out the genuine from the fake ones. Unfortunately, some of the biggest websites like Google have inaccurate filters.

You might even lose a genuine review from a happy customer! Certain fake review signals that are used for detecting “fake reviews” are:

1. A sudden increase in the total number of reviews received.
2. Reviews from people who have been giving reviews in the past (paid reviews).
3. Reviews that are too positive. 
4. Reviews that are too negative. 
5. Reviews that are too short. 
6. Reviews received from an area that is not close to your business.

#5 – Less Number of Reviews

Not having enough reviews can cause a problem for your business. Another issue with reviews is that you can’t get too many of them either too less. Getting too many reviews will challenge your authenticity and the site you are using might even flag them as “fake reviews”. On the other hand, too few reviews will challenge the credibility of your business. Therefore, make sure that you are generating just the right number of reviews from your customers.

#6 – Incomplete Review Profiles

Having incomplete or invalid review profiles can impact your business negatively. There is a chance that you might not even rank high on search engine results. At this point, it won’t even matter how many positive reviews you have. Since they will not even appear on the results page. Therefore, make sure that you have completed the information on your brand’s profile. If you want an edge over your competitors adds pictures, it will give your business that extra advantage.

Wrapping Up

So, this was our take on what type of reviews by customers can prove to be lethal. A piece of advice for all those struggling with their ranking on the search results page. Make sure that you are using identical information on all the platforms that your business is using. This means using the same telephone numbers, addresses, website URLs, etc. Google utilizes this information to identify your website and creates the link between different social platforms that your business is based upon. 

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