I recently attended a webinar by BrightLocal that presented some recent statistics and tools related to online reviews.
Online reviews are important to get, keep getting, and to manage. This is a time-consuming task and many business owners opt to pay someone to manage their web presence for them. Web management may include managing any of the following: online reviews, blog content, social media presence, online event promotion, website updates and upgrades, backlinks, SEO (in general), and web servers.
If you don’t have someone managing all of these components of your web presence, it can be difficult to know where to start. I believe that online reviews are a great place to start because:
- Reviews are becoming increasingly relevant as people look to the web for business information.
- They are something that needs to be built over time.
- There are tools and services available so you can avoid the overhead of paying someone to manage your reviews.
I wanted to share two slides that were presented at the webinar I attended. The first slide shows the Local Business Reviews Ecosystem. In this slide we see how various business directories are out there and how they feed each other:
In terms of importance, most of the panelists considered yelp, Google+, and yahoo! to be the most important places on which to be reviewed. I was surprised to learn that Citysearch is actually working online roulette strategy one of the easiest places for clients to leave reviews and it actually feeds a host of other review sites.
The next slide I want to share is a breakdown of review and reputation management services. I’ve yet to look more closely into each of these, but I wanted to give everyone a chance to do their own research if interested. Some of these services are overkill for a business with a small web presence. In particular, I have heard good things about getFivestars, so I’d check that out first.
Finally, much of the webinar was inspired by the exhaustive 2013 Local Search Ranking Factors report released by moz.com. Check it out here: http://moz.com/local-search-ranking-factors
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