How To Buy Online Reviews
Online reviews are fantastic way to highlight the quality of your business, establishing your credibility and building your brand. Reviews encourage consumers to give your business a try and provide you with an excellent opportunity to engage with customers.
However, it can often be difficult to obtain the positive reviews that your business needs to stand out from the crowd. That’s because many customers are reluctant to leave reviews, either because they are time-poor or because they don’t enjoy writing them.
Many business owners would think that the easiest solution to this dilemma is to simply buy online reviews. Makes sense, right? You could easily generate dozens of positive reviews, which might attract thousands of new customers to your business.
Well not quite… There is a lot of risk associated with buying online reviews. In this blog post, I’ll share those risks and explain the alternatives that are available.
Why Buy Online Reviews?
Online reviews are a powerful tool for generating new business and building your brand. That’s because consumers place a lot of trust in online reviews and enjoy reading them to learn more about businesses. Just take a look at the following stats to see the importance of online reviews:
- 86% of consumers read reviews for local businesses (including 95% of people aged 18-34)
- 91% of 18-34-year-olds trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations
- Including reviews on your website makes searchers see the business as more trustworthy
- Consumers read an average of 10 online reviews before feeling able to trust a local business
- The purchase likelihood for a product with five reviews is 270% greater than a product with 0 reviews
How To Buy Online Reviews?
You should never buy online reviews.
Buying online reviews is a bad idea because it is accompanied by several dangerous pitfalls. These pitfalls occur because of the way reviews are generated.
Most paid reviews involve a person creating a fake account and writing a fake review of your business. This is problematic for several reasons:
Consumers are Internet savvy and will smell out fake reviews
Consumers have become highly skilled at determining if the information they read is authentic or not. If they see a business has received dozens of glowing reviews that are poorly written or non-specific, they will quickly identify them as being fake.
This effect can make fake reviews backfire on your business. Consumers may believe that these fake reviews have been written by your business, which makes you less trustworthy and less credible.
Review Sites Are Very Good At Identifying Fake Reviews
Review websites have developed advanced algorithms which can detect when a fraudulent review has been posted. These fake reviews are then quickly flagged and deleted.
This means that many of the reviews you pay for will be removed before anyone can read them. This makes the exercise of buying online reviews completely pointless. Additionally, if your business has too many fake reviews posted, the review platform may remove your listing.
Paid Reviews Don’t Add Much Value
Most paid reviews are very low quality. They are non-specific, short, and not well written. This means they provide little benefit to the reader and don’t discuss your business in detail.
Real reviews written by happy customers, on the other hand, are usually highly-detailed and talk about your business specifically. This helps prospective customers understand what your business offers and why they should choose you.
Ok… So What Is The Alternative To Buying Online Reviews?
The best alternative to buying online reviews is to use techniques which encourage users to leave reviews and make it easy for them to do so. There are several techniques for achieving these goals including:
- Target satisfied customers
If you know a customer was extremely happy with your product or service, personally ask them to leave a review. They are far more likely to leave a great review compared to other less-satisfied customers. - Remind customers that you want reviews
Whenever you make contact with a customer, remind them that you would appreciate a review. Ask them in newsletters, invoices, SMS messages, emails, and on your website. - Reward people who leave reviews
Incentives like discount codes and access to special sales can encourage users to leave reviews.
You can also obtain more reviews by working with an online reputation management company like We Love These Guys. Our company can help you obtain hundreds of authentic 5-star reviews written by real people.
We obtain these reviews using a variety of innovative strategies and technologies which encourage your customers to leave reviews. By making the review-leaving process easier and more obvious, your business can obtain hundreds more reviews and will no longer need to buy online reviews.
To learn more, contact We Love These Guys on 0207 018 1949 or via info@welovetheseguys.com.
