The Power of Reviews
No matter your industry or business type, encouraging online reviews should be a top priority. Reviews are crucial, as 89% of consumers say they try to read reviews before they buy a product or service. On top of that, 79% of people say that they have as much trust in online reviews as they do in personal recommendations.
In other words, encouraging reviews is an essential part of earning trust and growing your customer base. Once you have encouraged clients to leave reviews, you should consider including those reviews on your website. This is done by embedding the reviews on your website. We’ll go over the benefits of doing so in this article.
What Are Embedded Reviews?
The term embedded reviews simply refers to reviews from a third-party page that also appear on your website. So, if you embed Google reviews, you make it so reviews that appear on Google also automatically appear on your website.
This is a simple way for service area businesses and those with physical locations alike to ensure that potential customers can easily find reviews about your business.
Benefits of Adding Embedded Reviews to Your Website
Embedding Google reviews on your website will help you in several ways. The following are just some of the most important benefits.
→It encourages purchases.
The most obvious benefit of embedding reviews on your website is that it encourages customers to buy from you. After all, reviews serve a similar purpose to product recommendations from family or friends. They help move people along the sales funnel. If they are already on your website, visitors don’t even have to go anywhere else to be pushed along the sales funnel.
→You provide social proof.
The biggest advantage of adding reviews to your website is that this gives you social proof. As a refresher, social proof is the way that people adjust behavior based on what others say and do. It is why Google reviews and influencer marketing work so well.
Just like other types of user-generated content, reviews are an excellent example of social proof. You may also hear it referred to as social confidence.
→It increases trust in your brand.
As with reviews that appear elsewhere on the web, displaying Google reviews on your website increases the trust in your brand. This, in turn, boosts your overall reputation and helps you attract customers.
→It adds new content to your website regularly.
Remember that one of the local search ranking factors is how recently your website was updated. When you embed Google reviews on website pages, you add new content with minimal effort.
This boosts your local SEO rankings. As a bonus, it also keeps your website fresh and interesting for visitors.
→It improves website engagement.
Incorporating reviews on your site is also a great way to boost engagement on your site. If visitors stop to read your embedded Google reviews, this will also increase their time spent on your website. That increases their chances of purchasing from you and can reduce your bounce rate.
Furthermore, the simple act of reading reviews will make web visitors feel connected to the people who left reviews. This helps build a sense of community and may give customers the desire to engage with your company in other ways.
→It subtly encourages happy clients to leave reviews.
You may not realize it at first, but when happy clients see reviews, they are more likely to leave their own. Some may just feel the social pressure that comes from seeing other reviews. Because so many other people left reviews, they will feel the need to do the same.
Others may like the idea of seeing their name on your website, and leaving a Google review gives them a way to do that.
It also shows customers that you see and value their feedback. This is great not only for getting more reviews but also for encouraging other forms of feedback. For example, customers may be more likely to fill out surveys or send comments or suggestions if you have website reviews.
Where should I put embedded reviews on my website?
While every company should display Google reviews on their website, there is no best spot where every company should place them. You have several options of where to put the reviews.
As you consider where to include them, think about the customer journey. You specifically want to consider where reviews would have the most influence and be most visible.
The following are some of the most popular options of where to embed Google reviews:
→ A carousel on the home page
→ Sidebar of your About Us page
→ On the services page
→ In the shop or product pages
→ A separate page dedicated to reviews
→ Blog posts to address poor reviews
→ Blog posts to highlight positive reviews
Where you decide to add Google reviews to your business website will depend on your goals. For example, if you want them to reach clients when they are most likely to convert, consider embedding product-specific reviews on your brand’s products’ pages.
Remember that your website platform will likely let you embed Google reviews in multiple locations of your website. Your widget may even let you choose which category of Google reviews to embed, such as product-specific ones or those about your company.
Get more reviews with Podium
While it is smart to embed reviews on your site, this is only possible if you have Google reviews in the first place. Podium can help you get more reviews by making it easier for customers to leave reviews and encouraging them to do so. Podium even offers analytics to help you glean insights from the reviews. Once you have additional reviews thanks to some help from Podium, you can use the above method to add them to your business page to convert more customers.
