NiceJob Studies Review Data to Help You Grow Your Business
Getting Google reviews is an important part of operating a local business.
Online testimonials boost Google rankings, give your website more visibility and help you book more jobs to increase sales!
And understanding what motivates people to write reviews can help you adjust your business practices to increase those star rankings.
At NiceJob, we’re here to help.
We’ve gathered important statistics about online reviews and looked at our own data to help you learn what’s important about reviews and how you can get more 5-star reviews.
For instance, we address questions such as:
- Why do customers write positive reviews?
- Why do customers write negative reviews?
- How many people trust reviews?
- How are reviews impactful on a company website?
- What topics matter most to customers when they review a business?
(We even got a little greedy and looked at how companies that use our reputation marketing software to get reviews perform compared to businesses in general.)
With this information, you can benchmark your efforts against other companies and know what areas of customer service to focus on for your business to get positive feedback.
All statistics without citations are original data pulled from NiceJob’s internal database of online reviews.
For our methodology, we analyzed approximately 780,000 reviews from over 10,000 companies based on topic keywords and distribution trends to unearth some exciting info!
So let’s get started!
Why You Should Know Your Company’s Reputation
Reviews are a reflection of your business reputation—and reputation is everything. Your reputation tells your future customers what your company is all about!
Therefore, it’s important to understand your reputation and what generates positive online reviews.
For instance, your reputation impacts customer perception. The more positively people perceive your business, the more likely they’ll buy your services.
Knowing your reputation also helps you pinpoint areas to improve your business.
When you know what drives 5-star reviews for your company and what’s important to customers, you can optimize the relevant areas of your business to grow.
Lastly, once you understand what makes a stellar reputation, you can develop your company’s own reputation and leverage it with reputation marketing.
This means sharing reviews across different platforms and sales materials to help close deals and start dominating your region!
Take a look at our guide if you’re wondering how to check out a company reputation for more info, but the rest of this article will also provide lots of tidbits to help get you started!
Online Review Statistics: Basic Overview
To start, let’s go over some of the basics to highlight key findings right off the top!
Why Online Reviews Matter
- 97% of customers say reviews impact their buying decisions (source: NiceJob)
- 90% of customers think reviews are more important than what a salesperson tells them (source: NiceJob)
- Potential customers read an average of ten reviews before committing to a company (source: NiceJob)
- People think reviews are, on average, 12x more credible than a company’s own sales copy (source: NiceJob)
- Website visitors are 74% more likely to contact a company that shows customer reviews online than a company that doesn’t (source: NiceJob)
- Online reviews make up 15.44% of the impact for a company ranking in a Google Local 3-Pack and 6.47% for ranking on Google Search (source: Moz)
- Having at least ten customer reviews compared to none increases a website’s traffic from search engines by 15-20% (source: BigCommerce)
- Advertisements with reviews can increase click-through rates by 300% and decrease cost-per-click & cost-per-acquisition each by 50% (source: Neil Patel)
NiceJob Review Statistics: How Do We Stack Up?
As experts in reputation marketing, NiceJob prides itself on helping business owners get customer reviews so they can save time, increase revenue and scale their company.
So this begs the question, what kinds of results do our clients experience when they start automating their review collection?
- 32% of businesses have more than 99% of their reviews at five stars
- 57% of businesses have more than 95% of their reviews at five stars
- Only 2% of businesses have less than half of their reviews at five stars
- Only 3% of all reviews for NiceJob clients are two stars or less—compared to 5% for businesses across the board
- The average star rating of reviews for NiceJob clients is 4.77—compared to the across-the-board average of 4.42
These last two points really illustrate the benefits of using a review marketing tool like NiceJob.
Specifically, business owners can expect better odds of receiving less 1- and 2-star reviews and a higher average star rating of closer to five stars than four stars.
Why Do Customers Write Negative Reviews
We get it. Being on the receiving end of a negative review really stings. Maybe it doesn’t sting as much as being a New York Jets fan, but it’s still disheartening.
Sometimes Google reviews don't show up. But other times you get a negative review that might look fishy, and if that ever happens, you’ll want to know the ins and outs of how to report fake Google reviews.
But many negative reviews are legitimate. Just know that when you receive a bad online review, it’s often not intended to be malicious.
Our research indicates that a lot of the time, unsatisfied customers experience a miscommunication with the business where they perceive a lack of customer service.
Whether this lack is real or imaginary doesn’t matter—what matters is that the customer sincerely believes that it’s real and that’s why they’re upset.
In such situations, it’s often best to engage constructively with the customer to try to remedy the problem.
In a majority of cases, responding to an unsatisfied customer professionally and respectfully will lead to better results for your company than either arguing with or ignoring them.
Be sure to check out our guide on how to respond to bad reviews to help reduce the impact of negative reviews on your business!
Keep in mind, less than 5% of unhappy customers will take the time and make the effort to leave you a negative review.
This means that with most unsatisfied customers, you don’t know why they’re unsatisfied, or worse yet, you might not even know they’re unsatisfied at all.
Not having that information makes it hard to improve your business and fix any problems. So negative reviews could serve as a learning opportunity when you react constructively.
Most Common Topics in Negative Reviews
To further understand exactly why some customers write negative reviews, let’s look at what the data tells us. What are the reasons people write bad reviews?
What this means is that we studied all of the 1- and 2-star reviews in our database and cross-referenced them for common reasons and topics associated with negative reviews.
The topic of customers receiving unreliable service from a business dominates the list of reasons for writing a negative review, appearing in 37.52% of all bad reviews.
This topic is followed by poor results (36.60%), unprofessional service (36.50%), uncommunicative (36.00%) and unprofessional people (35.83%).
These topics beat out other ones such as limited experience (31.57%), slow to respond (29.83%), dishonesty (29.72%), high costs (28.51%) and difficult to get a hold of (23.87%).
What this data shows is that customers care about professionalism and high quality more than anything else.
Especially if they perceive your service to be reliable, you can be sure that they likely won’t leave you a negative review!
Most Common Topics in Positive Reviews
So what does the flipside of the data tell us? Does it confirm our hypothesis that providing reliable service is the key to success (and more 5-star reviews)?
To answer these questions, we looked at the most common topics that customers discuss when they write a 5-star review of a business.
Again, we see experiential and qualitative topics at the top of the list.
Professional service appears in 32.29% of all 5-star reviews, followed by professional people (30.90%), great results (30.16%), experienced (29.49%) and communicative (28.42%).
Topics that didn’t make the cut include providing fast service (25.50%), affordability (20.96%), being easy to contact (19.67%) and your workers showing up on time (18.00%).
This data demonstrates that customers care more about professionalism and reliability than more tangible metrics, such as price, response times, turnaround times or connect rates.
It shows that providing excellent customer service will do wonders for your business and your online reviews.
How to Get More 5-Star Reviews and the Reputation You Deserve
So what’s one major takeaway from these online review statistics?
Focus on making the customer the most important person in your business and everything else will fall into place.
Impart professionalism and reliability as important values to your employees. It’s that simple.
Now the next step is showing the world how professional and reliable your business is.
The more you can communicate these traits to potential customers with online reviews and star ratings, the easier it will be to rake in more sales and increase your revenue.
So if you want to own your neighborhood and be the top service-provider in your region, check out NiceJob’s reputation marketing software to get more reviews.
