Displaying your company's reviews online: When, where, and why

Should your business reviews be on your website for new and returning visitors to see? If you’re already receiving glowing testimonials that could encourage someone to purchase from your company, perhaps. However, if you currently have several negative reviews online, displaying them on your website could obviously do more harm than good. 

Now, we know what you might be thinking. Why would anyone ever display their negative reviews in the first place? Odds are they wouldn’t. At least not unless they were able to turn that negative review into a positive outcome. 

Nevertheless, embedding reviews to be visible on your website isn’t something you want to go about haphazardly. There is more to managing one’s reputation online than simply sharing your excellent reviews when trying to win the chance to sell your goods and services. 

The cold truth about how reviews affect business

Your local business reviews tell potential customers a lot about you. Firstly, if there are lots of good reviews, it’s social proof that your company is reputable, trustworthy, and delivers on its promises. When a company receives positive feedback, it’s understandable they would want to shout it from the rooftops, and therefore display those kind words from past customers on their website.

On the other hand, the more negative reviews your company has, the less likely someone is to want to purchase goods and services from you. This is especially true if you’re not responding to the negative comments about your business. 

In fact, if you’re not acknowledging the positive reviews either, you’re sending a strong message to the world that you don’t really care about what people think of your company. If you don’t have an online reputation management strategy in place to manage both positive and negative business reviews, it could cost your company untold amounts of revenue.

Properly manage your reputation before pulling back the curtain

The first step in managing your business’s reputation, is to start responding to any and all reviews that are currently live about your company. Sign up with a trustworthy, and independent third-party review platform like Hellopeter to make quick work of this task.

When to display your reviews on your website

Once you start responding to your reviews, you’ll find it’s much easier to garner even more of them, and build up a solid reputation for your company. Then, after you’re in good standing with the community, it’s time to flaunt it to anyone and everyone you can, but without being overly pretentious.  

The easiest way to display your reviews on your website is with Hellopeter’s Widget Library. We make embedding the code as simple as copy and paste. 

Where to display your reviews on your website

The best places to display your business reviews are:

• Your company’s about page
• A dedicated testimonials page
• The shopping cart or sales page

Additional places you may want to consider displaying reviews are:

• In blog posts, where appropriate or relevant
• Your contact page
• Thank you pages

Why you should display business reviews on your website

New visitors to your website are already sceptical of your business. Seeing positive local business reviews can put them at ease. Additional benefits of displaying your company’s reviews online include:

• More reviews can mean more sales 
• ReferralCandy reported, “85% of consumers read up to 10 reviews before they feel they can trust a certain business.”
• 3dCart reported, “one product review can result in a 10% increase in sales and 200 reviews can result in as much as a 44% increase in sales.”

• Your reviews make your website more visually appealing
• SRM Articles said, reviews “increase website vibrancy.” They went onto say, “visuals can provide more information and deliver the intended message appropriately.”
• A customer reading reviews on your website can increase dwell time
• Dwell time is the amount of time someone spends on your website, and according to Backlinko, when your dwell time goes up, your website may enjoy a boost in search engine rankings. The more reviews your prospects are reading, the longer they will hang out on your website. 

Display your reviews on social media too

In addition to your website, social media is another great place to display your local business reviews. Again, this should only be after you’ve gathered and responded to several reviews online. Sharing on social media helps build brand awareness, and gives you the opportunity to reach a larger audience.

In our opinion, Facebook is the best platform to share your company’s reviews. The reasons for this are:

• It’s still the most popular social media platform. Hootsuite reported that “Facebook is the world’s third-most visited website that has 2.41 billion monthly active users.” That’s a huge number of potential prospects for your business! 
• You can link directly to your website’s homepage or a product page. Simply add your links and a quick description to images of reviews you have shared to drive more traffic back to your own site
• People on the platform have more available spending money. Sprout Social said, “Facebook use is prominent among high-earners, and even surpasses LinkedIn, which reaches just 49% of users making more than $75,000.” In fact, “74% of Facebook users are high-income earners.”

Bottom line: Your company needs more business reviews, and once you’ve built up a solid reputation you should display those reviews for the world to see. 

Hellopeter can help you with your online reputation management strategy. Learn the true value of online reviews with our free guide.