There is so much you can do to improve your local business search engine ranking. Some business owners go with the content marketing route. They publish dozens of articles in different domains, sharing them all over their social media channels. Others prefer the local backlink building technique, where the goal is to climb to the first page of Google’s search results, by getting other websites to link to their own site. Others prefer to invest in advertising like Facebook Ads and Google Adwords. And then there are others that do a little bit of everything.

The problem is that most of the time you never know if a marketing strategy will work. At the risk of sounding like a cliché, every business is different. Let’s say you have a home repair service, and you’ve heard that many people in your industry have gotten great results from Facebook Ads, so you hire someone to start a campaign for you. A couple of months later and hundreds of dollars later, you got some leads, maybe some new customers, but you never got your investment back.

What happened? It could be many things. You didn’t target the right audience, or the budget wasn’t enough, or the market was saturated, who knows. But the point of this article is not to talk about the uncertainty of common marketing strategies.

This is about how local reviews guarantee better search engine ranking.

Better Reviews = Better SEO

Reviews are the secret weapon of local businesses because they remove the biggest obstacle to try your products: social proof. No one wants to spend their money on something that hasn’t been tested. So when they see that other people have bought from you, and they leave good reviews, they get confirmation that your business is worth their time and money.

So even if you are a new business, and you are competing against long established brands, you can still beat them at the SEO game. Just get as many reviews as you can.

Imagine what your restaurant or home repair service would look like if you had a 4.1-star review after 50 people left a review of your business. You don’t have to have a perfect score. You just need to have a score. So even if you’ve been open for business for only a few months, if you get people to leave reviews for you, you take a major shortcut to getting your brand’s name to the top.

A Solid Online Review Presence Can Change the Game for You

Online reviews are the only marketing method that works for everyone. That’s because people trust reviews they find online as much as personal recommendations. And the more reviews you have online, the stronger your average becomes.

There are too many online review sites. We don’t want to overwhelm you with options. So simply go with Google Reviews, Yelp, and Facebook. Most people look into these anyway, so there’s no need to reinvent the wheel.

By going with Google, Facebook and Yelp reviews, you cover the places where most of your clients are most likely to interact with your brand. If people find you on Facebook, they’ll see your strong reviews. If they do a Google search, they’ll see your Google reviews right away and your Yelp reviews on the second or third search result.

Real Time Reviews makes it easy for your customers to leave reviews. The platform sends them a text message asking for a review, which 98% of them will open. Once they open the message, 70% are likely to write the review. Is there another marketing tool that gives you those odds? And remember, the more reviews you get, the stronger your brand becomes. You cannot lose.

In the words of Larry, CEO of Skyboss, a Real Time Reviews customer, “It works because it’s simple.”

Are you ready to improve your business’ search engine ranking? Just sign up here and we’ll show you a full demo of the platform you’d be using.

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