There are plenty of articles out there verifying the importance of online reviews to a customer in their decision making process. You don’t have to go too far to find that stat either. Last month we published an infographic about the path to car buying, and we found that a majority of car buyers (45%) trust online reviews the most in their decision making. We took it a step further this time, and checked out how influential these online reviews really are. And what greater signal than the fact that people are searching for them?
People Search for Online Reviews
Think about that for a second. From our network of over 14 million websites across the globe, we see a tremendous activity of people searching for all sorts of online reviews.
In the past 30 days only, we found over 1,000 different types of searches for reviews! As we went through and categorized them, we found people searching for general to very specific product reviews. Here’s a glimpse of some of the major keywords.
For a broader perspective, we clumped the reviews into bigger categories to get a better sense of what types of online reviews people were searching for.
Games accounted for about 40% of searches. By a big margin, product searches came in second (14%). This category had anything and everything product-related; from snow blowers to vacuums, people were looking for specific make and model reviews to general product category reviews.
Movies, small business, and medical reviews also made the top 10 list, which isn’t surprising since we already know people are interested in knowing what others have to say before choosing a service or product to use.
What’s the Takeaway?
- Because people are searching for online reviews all over the place, it’s worth your effort to spend time talking to those users and show good customer service. You’ll never know what prospective new customer might read that review.
- Encourage your website visitors to leave reviews of your products either on your site or on a major review site. If they purchased or have visited your site before, you can nicely prompt your visitors with a Lightbox or Welcome Bar that gets them to the review page.
- Consider spending time creating in-depth content reviewing products, events, restaurants, small businesses—anything that works with your content strategy!