Online reviews – a growing factor in website conversions
Date: June 25, 2014Category: Author: David Hall
One of the significant trends in Internet marketing is the growing importance of online reviews. The increasing numbers of lawsuits over those reviews are evidence of the importance some businesses are attaching to them.
Here is a graph showing the results of a survey by Bright Local and Search Engine Land. Notice the question: “Do you read online customer reviews to determine whether a local business is a good business?” So we’re not dealing with online businesses like Amazon but with local businesses like dentists and restaurants.
Then, here are the results of another survey question about how much people are trusting online reviews. So not only is the use of online reviews increasing, but the trust people have in those reviews is increasing.
I’m particularly struck by the qualification some people put on the reviews: “Yes, if I believe the reviews are authentic.” The number of people putting that qualification on their reviews usage increased by almost 50% in the two-year span of the surveys. People are coming to realize that some businesses are trying to manipulate reviews, and they are looking out for that.
Here at Infinity Dental Web, we are predicting that this trend of the increasing importance of online reviews will increase.
We decided to do a couple of studies of our own about how reviews are impacting dentists. In one study, we surveyed a sampling of patients who found the practice on the Internet. How many of them, before asking for an appointment, consulted reviews first? The results were around 40 to 50 percent, depending on the practice. Practices providing more complex services seem to be more dependent on those reviews, where practices concentrating on basic bread-and-butter dentistry seem to be less dependent on those.
Here’s something practical you could do with those numbers, in analyzing the effect of reviews on your ability to attract new patients. Lets say you ask patients who are coming to you through your website how many of them are first checking your reviews. And let’s say you find that only 15 percent of them are checking those reviews. The conclusion that I would draw is that your online reviews are killing you. Here is the rationale: Based on what we know of online behavior, 40 to 50 percent of your prospective patients are actually checking the reviews. The reason you’re only seeing a fraction of those people is that they are deciding to go elsewhere.
Another study we did was to see where people looked for reviews. We found that they strongly tended to check only the reviews that were right in front of them, which generally were the Google reviews. It was fairly infrequently that they even noticed links to other review sources on the business listing page, and when they did, they would choose reviews services whose names they recognized, like Healthgrades or Yelp.
So what is the take-home lesson here? Pay attention to your reviews – your prospective patients are.