5 star reviews may not be enough anymore. The content in your reviews matters more than ever.

Reviews from all Review Sites end up on Google

You may have noticed that Google now acts as an aggregator of reviews from several different trusted review sites. Google scrapes this information from the sites, puts it in one place and gives anyone who searches for your company a pretty accurate representation of what is being said about you online. If your business relies on local traffic then you know how important Google local/Google Maps is to your bottom line.

So how does all this tie in? What does Google local aggregating reviews have to do with the actual content in your review?

The Proof is in the Search

Type in some simple long tailed keyword searches for a service or company in your area using some adjectives that the average consumer may use (great, worst, cleanest, rip off, etc…) You will find that Google is crawling the content in your reviews. These personalized, buzz-word-filled reviews are showing up in Google Places with the adjectives the user typed in highlighted. And depending on the superlative you enter, the results change drastically. Let’s look at some screen shots of Google Maps…

As you can see, the results for these searches vary greatly, and all that was done is the words “great” and “rip-off” were substituted. You should also notice the words that were bolded in the searches as well as the stars the businesses have.

In the “great steak house Austin tx” search, the words “best” and “great” were bolded, and the stars of the results were 4.5 and 4 stars respectively.

In the “rip off steak house Austin tx” search, the word “rip-off” was bolded in the first review, and the content in the second review is not that flattering. The stars of the results were both 3.5.

You’ll find results similar to these for all service industries across the country. Google is crawling the content of these reviews and grading your business on what your customers are actually saying about you, not purely on the amount of stars they click on.

As if the importance of customer service wasn’t at an all time high, now there is another reason to drill it into your company. Don’t let a customer have a bad experience and let it ruin you.