Reviews on the internet are now standard. They are a crucial element of some of the internet's largest websites – Amazon and eBay, for example – and are an increasingly important part of the customer experience. This applies when customers are in the decision-making stage pre-purchase. It also applies when they want to tell the world about their experience. As reviews are now such a common feature, another reality becomes apparent – where there are reviews, there will always be negative reviews.

Handling negative reviews is, therefore, important for all businesses. Why?

• You are going to get negative reviews – you can't be perfect every time. In addition, your customers are much more likely to leave a review if they have a negative experience than if they have a neutral or positive one.
• Negative reviews will impact sales – negative reviews can affect how potential customers see your business which can then impact on your business performance.

In addition, negative reviews can impact on the traffic you get from Google. Google already uses review star ratings in its search results. It gets this information from online reviews on its own platform – Google My Business – as well as from third-party platforms including Feefo and Trustpilot. This is important for a number of reasons.

• If you don't have a good star rating, or if you don't have any star rating at all and other websites in search results pages do. Your listings won’t stand out, and Google users might not click through to your website. They’ll choose a competitor who does have start ratings instead.

• This lack of click throughs can then impact on your website's overall ranking in Google in the future. This is probably limited now, but the likelihood that Google will put more emphasis on reviews for their search algorithm in the future, is high.  Many SEO experts believe Google is either already using reviews as a ranking factor or is looking at ways of doing this in the future. Google is interested in a website's authority. It judges authority in several ways, customer reviews and sentiment within social media may well be an important metric to this judgement of authority.

Taking a Proactive Approach

We've established that you are likely to get online reviews and that some of them are going to be negative. How do you handle this situation? In short, it involves taking a proactive approach to online reviews. It doesn't matter how good your customer service strategy is or the steps you take to improve the experience of customers, you cannot ignore online reviews. A proactive approach is the only way.

A proactive approach to handling negative reviews requires two main elements:

1. Deal with negative reviews – this involves either contesting the review with the review website if you feel it is malicious or unfair, or responding to the reviewer directly in order to resolve their issue. In the first scenario, the objective is to get the review removed while in the second the objective is to get the reviewer to change the review once you have rectified their problem.
2. Encourage positive reviews - if you have a regular stream of positive reviews about your business on the main review websites, the negative reviews will not be as significant. You still shouldn't ignore them, but lots of positive reviews about your business will dilute the potentially harmful impact of a negative review.

This two-pronged strategy for handling negative reviews assumes, of course, that the products or services you deliver to customers are sound. In other words, you can only handle negative reviews if the majority of your customers have a good experience. If there are more fundamental problems in your business that are the cause of negative reviews, you should deal with them first before starting to tackle the issue of bad reviews. However, a good first step is always to acknowledge when there is a problem, and tell people you have a plan in place to address it.  

Let’s now look at the practical steps you should take to put the above strategy into action.

Contest the Review

Review websites, particularly the large and most popular sites, only want genuine reviews. This is because they vigorously protect the trust of their users.

As a result, these websites take steps to prevent reviews that are falsely negative or falsely positive. Most good review websites also have systems designed to detect competitor behaviour, i.e. one of your competitors leaving a bad review about your business.

Unfortunately, these automatic and internally managed systems don't always work and some malicious and unfair reviews do find their way onto these websites. If this is the situation you are in, you will need to look on the website to find its appeal process. This normally involves contacting the site and requesting it removes the review.

It is important to note that this process is rarely easy. Review websites normally have policies that favour leaving the review on their site rather than removing. The onus is on you to prove the review is unfair or malicious. This can be difficult if you don't have proof. Here the steps you should take:

• Look through your records and/or speak to your team to identify inaccuracies in the customer's version of events
• Look for evidence in emails, social media messages, social media comments, or anywhere else that can back up your view
• Clearly explain why you think the review is unfair or malicious

One thing you should remember, however, is that review platforms are not interested in arbitrating between you and your customer to help resolve the dispute. All they care about is whether the review is an accurate account of the experience. You have to prove it is not – simply asserting it is not will not be enough.

A strong marketing strategy should drive traffic to websites with the specific purpose of the user taking some action. For example, you might want to convert traffic into more sales, sign up for a newsletter, or download a mobile app. Whatever course of action you expect visitors to take, it’s important that your website is optimised to achieve these conversions.

Many SEO marketing strategies just focus on getting more traffic to a website. However, Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) is important because it makes sure that you get the most from your website’s visitors. So, do visitors find your website only to navigate away very quickly? Or, do your website users spend a lot of time browsing your site but fail to take the action you want them to take?

In this article, you can learn how your website can benefit from conversion rate optimisation (CRO). You will also find out how to implement the best CRO strategies to boost the success of your marketing strategies.

Why is conversion rate optimisation so important?

Conversion rate optimisation is important because it fine tunes your website to convert visits into leads more effectively. Most visitors to your website have a limited attention span and unless they can see in a few seconds what they are looking for, they may look elsewhere.

CRO also helps you make the most of your marketing budget to maximize profits. For example, imagine that you can double your conversion rate. This means that your cost-per-acquisition is basically cut in half. This ultimately boosts your profits and gives you more resources to use in driving more visitors to your website.

In the end, a solid CRO will give you the edge over your competitors because you deliver a much better experience to your website users.

Conversion rate optimisation vs boosting traffic

If you already have a good number of visitors to your site, you won’t necessarily convert more leads by trying to increase website traffic.

Let’s say that you have 10,000 monthly hits on your website and you have a conversion rate of 1%. This means that you are generating 100 leads from which you may have 10 new customers. If you boost visitors to 15,000 a month but still have a conversion rate of 1%, that is only 15 new customers. But, getting 5,000 new visits to your website represents a huge SEO effort that could be very expensive.

However, a fine tune up on your website to improve CRO to have a conversion rate of 2% will increase leads and give you 20 new visitors from the same amount of traffic.

Conversion rate optimisation strategies to generate more leads

What are the best CRO strategies to improve user experience on your website and generate more leads? Here are some conversion rate strategies that have proven to work for many websites.

Use text-based Call To Action

It has been usual practice to optimise conversion rate by putting a ‘Call To Action’ in a banner link at the bottom of the page. However, this practice may not give you the best CRO you are expecting. The reason is that many internet users have ‘banner blindness.’

To increase the number of visitors clicking on links to your landing pages, you should use text-based CTAs. Putting the anchor text in an H3 or H4 heading may prove to be more effective than using a banner or button link.

Improve overall user experience

To boost your CRO, it’s very important that your website is optimised to give users the best experience. This means optimising pages so that they load faster, structuring your site so users get quickly to where you want them to go, and having as few pages as necessary.

In order to do this as effectively as possible, here are some questions you can ask yourself to improve user experience:

·         What kind of user am I targeting?

·         Does my website offer solutions to problems my targeted audience is facing?

·         Does the content and layout immediately capture their attention?

·         Are the CTAs clear and enticing?

Use pop-up forms for lead flows

Another way to improve CRO and generate more leads is to use well-designed pop-ups. These should instantly convey a benefit to the user and be easy to complete. All you really need is a clear call to action. Many marketers have found that lead flows generate a higher click through rate than just a CTA.

Optimise landing pages

Once you have done the hard work and got visitors to your website and coming to your landing pages, you don’t want to lose them because the landing page is poorly optimised. So, having a well-designed and highly converting landing page will boost your CRO.

Some elements that effective landing pages should have are:

·         a clear headline to grab attention

·         a hero image that reinforces the headline

·         clearly identified benefits to the user

·         testimonials from other users of your product

·         a clear call to action

One way to make sure that your landing page works well for your marketing strategy is to run A/B tests. Setting up and testing two different landing pages will help you see which one converts better.

Reduce bounce rate

Doing a quick analysis of your analytic reports will highlight if you have a high bounce rate. Users that quickly click away from your site are a great potential to improve your CRO. After all, they have landed at your website, but for some reason, they don’t stay long.

By implementing some of the CRO strategies in this article, you will automatically engage more users and reduce your bounce rate. What else can you do to reduce bounce rate? Here are some tried and tested methods of improving user engagement:

·         Develop a visually appealing website.

·         Make sure your website is easy to use and there are as few distractions as possible.

·         Target the right people and let your website deliver on users’ expectations.

·         Have a clear call to action.

Add a messaging tool

Many websites have boosted their CRO by adding a messaging tool. Providing the option for users to chat in real time with a real person can help to boost sales. Using a messaging tool on certain pages helps users to quickly get the information they are looking for and this will improve the chances that they stay on your page for longer.

Optimise blog posts that perform well

Your analytics tool will help to identify blog posts that have the most traffic to your site. You can boost your CRO by leveraging the traffic you are already getting to these posts. So, why not revisit some of your earlier blog posts that have high volumes of traffic and optimise them better to capture more leads.

Alternatively, you may have blog posts that already convert well. In these cases, you should look at improving your SEO strategy to drive more traffic to those specific pages.

This way, you can optimise blog posts to perform better and improve your conversion rate.

In conclusion

Conversion Rate Optimisation boosts your return on investment and is more cost effective than just driving more traffic to your website. CRO allows you to optimise the traffic you already have and provide a much better user experience on your website. However, every website can always be tested and tweaked to improve CRO.

So, make sure that conversion rate optimisation is the hub of your marketing strategy and you will see a boost in your profits.