General

Studies have found that 88% of people find online reviews just as trustworthy as real-life recommendations and 63% of customers rather buy from a site that has reviews. On top of that, 90% of customers look at reviews before even considering doing business. This shows the importance users place on customer reviews and ratings which leads to the following benefits:

Google states that businesses that use Google Seller Ratings have seen a 17% rise in their click-through rates on ads.

Having the stars in your ad makes it visually apparent and helps it to stand out. The better your Seller Rating is, the higher up Google search results you will show.

Proudly displaying your customer ratings show that you are confident of providing satisfying products and services.

Good question! You would be justified in wondering where exactly these reviews and ratings come from. Google specifies the following methods they use to collect these reviews and ratings:

A free program that automatically asks users to opt-in to an email requesting feedback on their impression of your business.

This is an independent company that collates and analyzes customer service through multiple factors.

Google will from time to time collect and aggregate performance metrics and may also use this to gather qualifiers.

This is a market research platform Google use to gather data on certain domains and businesses.

This can come either from reviews and ratings found on your site or from other third-party review sites.

As you can see, the spectrum of sources for reviews is vast. This is to make sure you get as many reviews as possible (you need a certain amount to qualify) and that these reviews come from as many sources as possible (to make it harder to manipulate findings).

What are the requirements?

You need to either provide paid-for services or products to consumers or provide a marketplace through which people buy or sell services.

Google recently upped the number of reviews you require over the last 12 months from 30 to 150 unique reviews. This is to improve the service and give more accurate rating scores.

Google ads are meant to improve business, not harm it. As such, even if you are signed up for Google Adwords and have the Google Seller Rating extension installed, your rating will only be displayed if it’s above 3.5.

Your campaign must be opted in to Google Search by setting the campaign type to “Search Network with Display Select” or  “Search & Display Networks” or “Search Network Only”.

There are also some further requirements that users often aren’t aware of and leave them wondering why their rating doesn’t show up in their ads:

For now, it’s only available when searching in Google.com/co.uk/co.nz/com.au/.de/co.jp/.fr/.nl. Hopefully, this will be expanded soon.

You need to have been using Google Seller Rating for at least 6 weeks or more.

At least 10 of the reviews you have received has to be in the language of the Google domain you are searching in. For example, German if you are searching in google.de and Japanese for google.co.jp.

What are the requirements?

Most of your customers probably never bothered to write a review or rating. It’s just the nature of internet users. A good starting point would be to email customers who have bought from you before and ask for a review.

You can either do this manually or make use of a customer review and ratings system such as Wiremo that can automate this process.

You should carefully consider how customers are likely to use your online store or platform and what their journey of going through the purchasing process will be like. This will allow you to position and time requests for customer reviews and ratings to maximise the chance they will comply.

One popular place to put it is at the end of the buying process, to ask for their opinion. However, this might not pertain to the product itself as the user hasn’t received it yet, just the buying process. You can later send them an email request asking for a review once they have received the product or service.

Customers are unfortunately much more likely to make write reviews when they have complaints than when things went smoothly. This makes it extra important to listen to their concerns and provide a good experience.

Even after a complaint, great customer service can turn a bad rating into a good one! Also, make sure you regularly read and respond to relevant reviews so that customers feel it’s worthwhile to make them.

Let’s first start off with a widget itself. Although they are tempting, and easy, to confuse with other software terms such as plugins, it’s important to understand the differences that make widgets unique so that you can use them to your full advantage.

It might surprise you to know that you have probably, knowingly or unknowingly, have interacted with widgets many times before. If you are a regular internet user, you probably see or use them on a daily basis.

In a broad sense, a widget is a small part of the interface you are working with that performs a specific function or displays specific information. This could be some element on your desktop, on your phone or even inside an application.

Maybe the best way to illustrate what a widget is to talk about some common widgets:

We all know this one. These widgets are often a small block on the screen that displays recent and upcoming weather conditions in an easy to digest way.

These widgets usually display the running time and date and might allow you to quickly make notes or entries at specific times.

For the tech-savvy among you, customer review widgets should already be well-known or you might have already figured them out through our discussion of widgets. Customer reviews and ratings are a great candidate to be used as a widget because they are generally so simple and straightforward.

Most customer reviews and ratings consist of either a star-rating to give the product or service a score out of 5, a small description or both. It could even be as simple as asking a customer how likely they are to buy from you again or how likely they are to recommend you to a friend or colleague.

All of this can be perfectly captured, easily disseminated, and responded to via a widget. Today's internet surfers are quick to ignore or skip over anything they don’t understand, they think will take long or they aren’t familiar with. A widget overcomes all these challenges to give you a better conversion rate.

When it comes to having your own customer review and ratings you basically have two options: Sign up with an online customer review and rating service or install customer review software on your site that comes with widget functionality.

Usually, these systems are completely independent of the type of website so you don’t have to worry about any compatibility issues. It also means that you are able to display the widget wherever you like. If you are using WordPress, it will be even easier as most themes come with standardized widget areas.

If you go with external services, there are a lot of freemium options available that allow you to test out the system (or use it for free) within certain bounds. If you have a WordPress site, you should check the customer review plugins available whether they offer widgets and what is possible with them.

Most customer review and rating systems will come with widget functionality. You will be able to spread your widget to other sites by asking their owners to host it or just add them to pages on your own site. The system that you use should collect every user interaction with the widget and send that data to a central place where it is collected.

You will then be able to view this information to make business decisions based on the customer feedback.

The term customer review speaks for itself. It’s a way of allowing a customer to rate his or her satisfaction with your product (often through a star rating) and comment on the experience (usually through a short written piece). It’s almost impossible nowadays to even find an online store or marketplace that doesn’t use customer reviews and openly display them on their product pages.

You might be wondering why you need customer reviews in the first place. There are a few very good reasons:

Recent studies have shown that up to 90% of online shoppers view customer reviews just as much as personal ones. The same amount of customers also look at reviews before even considering doing business with you. If you don’t have any reviews, they will just move on to a site that does.

Customer reviews are a great way for you to continuously get feedback on customers experience with your products and services. It will help you identify real-world and relatable issues or see what you are doing right.

WordPress powers 26% of the web and has become the go-to platform for anyone who wants a new website fast and without extensive web development skills.As such, it has become almost synonymous with plugins that promise much of the same to this kind of users. There are already 50,000 free plugins in the WordPress repository and many more premium ones. Simply searching for “customer review” in the plugin repository already provides 563 results.

With this amount of plugins available, you might wonder what to look for to distinguish the best ones. Most plugins with a decent rating should do everything you need to but just in case you want some extra guidance we will provide you with this list.

This one should be a no-brainer. Any plugin worth its salt should provide a good interface with which the customer interacts. If it’s confusing, not obvious or would take longer to use, most users will simply skip it without a second thought. Try to see what it would look like before you make a decision.

This is another important feature. While it’s important to be transparent and honest and display good and bad reviews, some users will try to post reviews that are simply too vulgar or blatantly untrue to allow on your product pages. Most review plugins will give you the option to approve reviews before letting them be posted.

The “Buy Box” is an Amazon-specific term but applies to most online marketplaces. Multiple sellers can list the same product on Amazon. The Buy Box itself is the little box at the top right corner from where you can add a product you found to your cart. The seller that’s product features in the Buy Box has “won” the Buy Box by meeting certain performance requirements.

The most important factor in determining the winner is the overall customer review and ratings of the product. It’s therefore imperative that you make sure customers are happy with the product and the service they receive if you want to hold this trump card in your deck.

In case you don’t know what this is yet, SEO is short for Search Engine Optimization. It’s the practice of implementing techniques to get your site ranked higher in search engine results. As by far the most widely used search engine worldwide, this generally means focusing on Google’s metrics for page ranking.

It’s imperative for online businesses to be competitive and aggressive in implementing SEO strategies. If not, you will simply be drowned out by all the other noise, brands, and content on the internet. For a full explanation of all the ways in which reviews and ratings affect your SEO performance read this article by FORWARD marketing.

No one knows exactly what these metrics are but it’s well-known by now that customer reviews and ratings play a significant role. As a matter of fact, Brighton SEO reckons it makes up around 9.8% of your ranking.

"85% of consumers trust online reviews like personal recommendations" - BrightLocal

Just let that sink in for a moment… Think about it, how many times have you asked a friend, family member or colleague about a product and then based your buying decision on their first hand experience? For most of us, it would be quite often. Everyone takes the word of a business with a pinch of salt but as fellow consumers trust the experience and opinions of our peers.

If a business just flat out has no kind of review or rating system on their product pages or site, how are you to know what the customer experience is like? Wouldn’t you rather go somewhere where you can find comfort in others past experiences? Of course, you could also get negative reviews but you should rather focus on getting positive reviews than not having them at all.

We have all been guilty of this: We buy a product and we are very happy with both it and our buying experience. However, when the time comes to review it we either flatout ignore it or say “Meh, I’ll do it later.” only to postpone it indefinitely.

So, how do you drive more customer reviews? Let’s look at some ways you can achieve this.

All you have to do is ask, as they say. As simple as it sounds, soliciting customer reviews and ratings is still the most effective way to encourage customer reviews for your product. One of the most common ways to solicit reviews is via email. However, do this with restraint as it can quickly become very annoying to your customers.

It’s good advice to ask for a review as part of the purchase confirmation email that can be followed up a few days later with another request reminder if the buyer hasn’t provided a review and rating yet. You should compensate for delivery times if it factors in.

The best results are achieved if the emails have a personal touch to it. Send them from individuals' email accounts as opposed to a nameless company email and address them personally. Incentives should also be used very carefully as they can easily be misconstrued as bribes.

There is a plethora of customer review tools and widgets available at Wiremo that make it really easy to set up a review solicitation system on your account. These can be set up to either automatically prompt buyers for reviews or can be used to manually send out requests. 

It’s an unfortunate part of human nature that we are much more likely to go complain online about something negative than applaud something positive. If you go on Amazon or other review sites you will also see users giving companies a one-star rating even though there was only a very small fault and where a 3 or 4 star would’ve been more appropriate.

With such small margins for error, you can see how important it is to provide a flawless service, especially when it comes down to customer support. Many customers will still appreciate it and give a good rating (or change their previous negative one) if you take care of their concerns. At the very least, you might stop them from giving a bad rating in the first place.

This is easy enough to do using your own online store’s analytics tools. You can easily filter and view users who also bought and reviewed products similar to yours. You can then contact them directly to ask for a review of your product as well.

Another way is to identify frequent buyers that also seem to have a good relationship with your brand. Build a relationship with them. Having advocates such as these that loyally buy your products and now having them review each one they buy does immeasurable good for your reputation and trustworthiness.

This is probably the most obvious reason why customer feedback is so important. Sometimes things happen once a product or service is launched that simply cannot be predicted beforehand. It’s also very possible that you might’ve just completely missed the mark on this occasion when planning your goods according to your target market. Or maybe the needs of your customers just shifted with time. Continuous feedback is crucial to keep developing and evolving to meet your customer’s needs.

Collecting customer feedback in the first place already signals to existing and potential customers that you operate transparently and listen to your customer’s concerns. If they actually see changes made based on this feedback, it will greatly fuel public opinion and trust in your brand.

Now that we have established why and how important customer feedback is for your business and brand as a whole, let’s look at some of the most effective ways you can collect it:

It’s a well-known fact that word of mouth is still one of the most effective ways someone can be convinced to buy your product. After all, consumers know that in the end sellers and producers are motivated primarily by sales and profit and you can’t always trust marketing 100%. A study by BrightLocal found that 88% of users trust online reviews and ratings just as much as real-world ones.

However, other consumers have no ulterior motivations (except maybe in the case of affiliates). Few things will be as effective at persuading someone browsing your product to take the final step in purchasing it as a page full of good reviews and ratings.