Why Online Reviews are Essential for Insurance Agents (and How to Get More)

In our new digital world, the research is clear, online reviews have become essential for today's insurance agent. More and more clients begin their search for insurance products online. In a hyper-competitive market, even those who are referred by current customers are likely to check out your online reputation before even committing to a conversation.

What do consumers see when they look for you online? Are they viewing multiple, current, five-star reviews with helpful comments? If not, keep reading.

It's perhaps maybe not that long ago that using an insurance web site was considered to be a cost of doing business, however, perhaps not fundamentally a means to create leads.

Today though, with the new generation of consumers and even a huge block of "traditional" consumers who consider themselves to be "with the times" in terms of doing business online, you must have an active, current, web presence that doesn't just sit there, it must add value. Brochure websites are really a thing of the past.

Google is struggling hard to keep the reviews trustworthy. They are trying to weed out fake reviews and bring genuine reviews, but they have a long journey ahead.

As reported in Google My Business forums, recently, a Kentucky law firm allegedly ran a contest on Facebook, offering people zoo tickets in exchange for positive reviews. 

This didn’t go down well with other law firms and businesses and they reported the incident to Google. As a result, Google updated their reviews guideline from: 

“Don't offer or accept money, products, or services to write reviews for a business or to write negative reviews about a competitor.”

to this:

“In addition to Prohibited Content guidelines, text reviews are subject to the following additional requirements:
•    Don't use reviews for advertising purposes. This includes, but is not limited to, posting email addresses, phone numbers, social media links or links to other websites in your reviews.
•    Don't include promotional or commercial content.
•    Don't offer or accept money in exchange for reviews.
•    Don't solicit reviews from customers in bulk.”

Reviews are important and it is almost as effective as a personal recommendation, but be careful how you collect it.

To help you get more reviews for your business, we highly recommend our review widget. It’s a small piece of code which is placed on your website and helps you get positive reviews on Google, Yelp and Facebook. In addition, it helps to filter out negative reviews too thus ensuring positive experience to website users. Need more details? Please connect with us.
 

A recent study shows that more review stars translate into higher paid search conversation rates. Businesses with an average of 3.31 stars managed to get 10.42 percent conversion rate, whereas, businesses that had 4.5+ stars achieved a remarkable 12.83 percent conversion rate.

The study also revealed that the response rate also affected the paid search performance. Business with highest response rate saw an average conversion rate of 13.86 percent. While the those with the lowest response rate had to settle down for 10.42. 

Engaging with customers & responding to their reviews is directly related to improved conversion rate as it builds trust among other users. 

So reviews not only help you improve the local search rankings, but also paid search ranking, and conversion rates as well.

So if you are not focusing n reviews, now is the time to do so.

To help you get more reviews for your business, we highly recommend our review widget. It’s a small piece of code which is placed on your website and helps you get positive reviews on Google, Yelp and Facebook. In addition, it helps to filter out negative reviews too thus ensuring positive experience to website users. Need more details? Please connect with us.
 

Anyone Can Become Knowledgeable About Reputation Management With These Easy Tips

When you are good at managing your business' reputation, you'll find your business does well. Lots of folks fail to fully understand how to manage their own reputation. Luckily, these tips can help you with your future business prospects.

Are You Seeking Information About Reputation Management? Then Check Out These Great Tips!

How important is your business to you? If your business is tantamount to your well being, you must make it as important for those you do business with. That means managing its reputation well. Read on for methods that can help you do that.

Follow through with your customers to keep your reputation good. This is especially the case if your business is larger. The customers need to feel important. Automated systems can be used for following up. Also, you can ask them to make feedback on the purchases they've made.

Be Proactive With Respect To Your Online Reputation

Being proactive helps you counteract negativity online regarding your brand. Ensure you have plenty of positive feedback since this can drown out the negative. Continue posting positive content until the negative ones slip into obscurity.

Have a good online personality. Posting status updates and tweets doesn't work without active communication between you and your followers. When someone takes the time to leave a message on one of your social media pages, it is important that your are quick to respond. If someone posts a question and you don't have the answer, tell them you don't know but you're working on getting the answer for them.

Try to make your unhappy customers... happy.

When you can turn a client's bad experience into something good, your customer will appreciate your show of care. Do this online, as well. You will show customers and prospective customers that you are willing to address any issue, which makes them more likely to do future business with you.

Private sales and promotions need to stay exactly that: private. This is important especially if it's for a complaint. You don't want those "freebies" getting around, because other people will want in on the deal, too.

Social Media

Keep an eye on social networks. Most customers will expect companies to answer questions on social media websites. Be sure you offer prompt responses for that reason. You can stand out from your competition since many businesses won't be quite as vigilant.

Monitoring Online Mentions 

Monitor your online presence. A displeased customer may talk about you online, and you can see this through a search engine result. Go over the search engine results to prevent anything negative about your business from making it to the top. You should generally do this a couple times each month.

Regularly perform Internet searches on your own company. If you find misleading information, work to get it taken off the Internet. If you show the site owner that what they are presenting is factually untrue and they are liable, most website owners will comply with your request.

Treat Your Employees Well

If you own your own business, be sure your employees are treated with respect. If this principle is disregarded, the fallout can be severe. If others know that you don't treat employees well, they may not want to do business with you.

You are now very aware of how important your reputation is to the success of your business. This means keeping your reputation pristine. Use this information to manage your business reputation and attract customers.