By now, you’ll have probably noticed an increase in the number of reviews for sites, products and businesses when you look up, say, ‘Restaurants, Muswell Hill’ in Google Maps. In keeping with their mantra of ‘most relevant, most useful content’, the Google Maps product team has introduced something they’re calling a ‘sentiment analysis’. The upshot of this is that reviews of establishments from blogs, local portals and local news are now appearing alongside, say, a citysearch rating. Along with their introduction of property listings into search returns, this represents a real effort to increase the utility of Google Maps and to make them not just something that tells you how to get somewhere, but what you might enjoy doing when you are there.
So, where does that leave us? Given that it’s fairly safe to assume that Google will want to roll this out to their main search returns, what are the search engine marketing implications of this development? Inevitably, I’m going to bring this back to user generated content…
- See this as an opportunity. If you’re an e-commerce site, especially one that sells geographically specific items, like flat rentals or, or if you have a website for a bricks and mortar store or venue, this represents a great boon. You no longer have to be Amazon or whomever to get product reviews to appear in search returns. The sentiment analysis seems to use indicators like star ratings or review like language. This is exactly what having user generated reviews and ratings on your site gives you. At a stretch, a healthy testimonials page will help, too. As my colleague Hannah so succinctly pointed out this morning, the greatest web commerce success story of them all, Amazon, uses the power of reviews on their site. They’ve done ok, I’d say..
- You can’t hide from your reviews. As all reviews of your product, service or website are going to be made more prominent to everyone (as opposed to just those searching for them), it’s vital that you address them. How do you get yourself decent reviews? Without wanting to teach people how to suck eggs, good products, good customer service and good communications are the way forward. How do you get to this point? Find the people who don’t like you. Search for your bad reviews. Embrace them! Love them as the free market research that they are. If content is king, perception is his chief of staff.
- Develop and Leverage the power of your relationships. Do some research and find out which blogs are writing about your field, and establish relationships with them. For once, the usually retrogressive music industry has been blazing a trail on this one for years. By giving away free and advance tracks to influential bloggers, record labels and bands establish create a culture of positive disposition, so even if a record is terrible, there’s a decent chance they’ll get off with a kinder review. Is there a way you can harness this? Can you give an interview, or write a guest post, for a review site in your sector? As well as making the blogger / writer in question actually like you a little more, you’re removing a filter of opinion between you and your customers; you get to address your audience, current, past and potential customers, directly.
In general, then, fantastic. The companies that benefit most from this will be the ones that recognise this for the opportunity that it is and embrace it to the full. This is search engine optimisation in almost its purest form – your trying to optimise search returns so that they say good things about you. And who doesn’t want that?
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