(Newswire.net — March 26, 2013) London, UK — With little fanfare, Google made a historic change on 30th May 2012 to how it lists local businesses in the search engine results.
Replacing the Google Places pages with its new Google+ Local, was the day that Google went social and from that day on everything changed for local businesses, unbeknown to many local businesses.
However, that’s now changing as more and more local businesses in London are beginning to see firsthand the effect of that Google change, as customers begin leaving reviews about their experiences right inside the business’s Google + page.
This is significant in itself as the new Google + Local page is now fully indexed and searchable online, unlike the former Google Places page, which was not.
This means that customer reviews, whether positive or negative, now follows that business’s listing everywhere online and can be easily found when a person searches for that businesses name or their product or service type in their geographical location.
Unfortunately, for many local businesses, this new internet development, which is here to stay, has just given them a further headache that they will need to address just to stay ahead and keep customers coming back.
The challenge for businesses is that happy customers don’t generally leave reviews because a good experience is expected. Which means that the most motivated customers who go out of there way to leave a review are disproportionality unhappy customers.
Scores of local London businesses are now struggling to find a solution to this daily inconvenience to avoid being penalised by prospective customers who might be turned off from using that local business if they find negative feedback, ratings and reviews.
And there’s good reason to be concerned.
Research by BrightLocal.com found that 72% of buyers trust reviews as much as personal recommendations. And Nielsen Global, one of the top rating companies globally, found similar results in its consumer survey in which 70% of consumers said that they trust opinions posted online. While online content such as editorials, newspaper articles and branded website content got just 58% trust score from consumers.
It seems that consumers look at online reviews as an indicator of how they might experience that product or service. And when a business gets a bad review or has no reviews, customers are generally distrustful of that business and will tend to take their business elsewhere. So customer reviews are a gauge used by consumers to see whether that business can be trusted with their money. Find out what your customers are saying about you online. Do you even have a reputation online when people search?
Online reviews are not new. Amazon and Ebay were two of the first pioneering companies to incorporate reviews as a core feature of their business models. But these are product-based reviews.
Google’s decision to make local business listings social indicators, opened every local business, whether product or service based, to consumer ratings and reviews.
Seeing this significant shift, Local Viral Buzz took an early lead in not just helping local businesses with managing reputation within the search engine results but also in actively using a business’s excellent 5 star reputation through careful management and control to actually market 5 star reputation all over the web to pull customers in like bees to honey.
“There is a very significant difference between reputation management and reputation marketing. Reputation marketing is about positioning a business as the market leader in front of potential buyers with a 5 star reputation.
It’s about building, managing and marketing an excellent reputation online in multiple places with compelling messages from customers themselves, which are findable by prospective customers when they are looking for your product or service.
Reputation management on the other hand is a reactive strategy, but reputation marketing is more proactive. You don’t make money managing, you make money marketing and that’s why reputation marketing gets a business’s phone ringing and customers coming through the door”, saying Graham Cardona, founder of Local Viral Buzz.
Local Viral Buzz provides local businesses with a comprehensive strategy for developing, managing, monitoring and marketing a 5 star reputation online, to position a local business as the obvious choice and market leader in front of customers looking to buy.
Graham Cardona is also extremely excited to announce that on top of the full suite of services for brand and reputation marketing for local London businesses, his consultancy has just added a smart social media dimension to their local business reputation service.
So now on top of an already world class reputation marketing strategy, he also deploys the viral power of social media to flood the local market with great customer reviews, ratings and endorsements, and with a significant twist!
(Article by Graham Cardona – a Brand & Reputation Marketing Expert & Founder of Local Viral Buzz)
www.LocalViralBuzz.co.uk