Best Place To Aggregate Customer Reviews?

[DarrenX]

There is a plethora of choice today for aggregating customer reviews. BBB wants to collect ratings from our customers; there a commercial options that put me in more control; yelp wants to rate me locally.  Google...

Given that I have some ability to steer customers toward my preferred review site, which one should I use?  From an SEO perspective, have you noticed whether some these sites carry more weight or credibility than others?

I realize it may depend on the type of business we are. In this case I represent a software company and their customers are USA/global, rather than local.

[BeardoCo]

When it doubt Google.  Syndicating all your reviews with a plus profile will only help your SEO strategy.  The only time I would prefer another review site is if it was specific to my industry like urbanspoon for restaurants or angies list for contractors.

[MattAntonino]

My strategy has always been to point them at whatever suits your industry (amazon for product reviews, tripadvisor for travel/tourism, Google and Yelp for local biz, WeddingWire for wedding vendors, etc.)  Then make a page on your site that is site.com/reviews and syndicate your reviews to that page.  When someone Googles me + reviews, I want MY site coming up so I can highlight what I want when I want.  It's just good reputation management.  They can still see the rest further down the page but if I can come up #1 for highonseo reviews I sure want to.

[WilliamCarr]

It really depends on the industry and location.

Check out these two resources. I know some of them don't accept reviews, but this should give you some info.

http://getlisted.org/resources/local-citations-by-category.aspx

http://getlisted.org/resources/local-citations-by-city.aspx

[Francisco_Meza]

I think this is a great perspective. In addition, I think there is great potential with G+ reviews if you can get them.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi DarrenX,

You've gotten some very good feedback here. In sum:

1. Let your customers review you where they want to. A diverse review profile is good insurance against massive review loss (which happens in big waves on Google). If you lose some reviews at one site, at least you still have some at other sites.

2. When you have a chance to gently steer a customer toward a review site, Google+ Local is always going to be a top choice, because they dominate all local business verticals. Yelp is the obvious runner-up, given how much prominence Google currently gives their pages, but it is against Yelp's policies to ever ask for reviews, so you have to be careful there. Then, depending on your industry and geography, as members have said, you will find that certain directories happen to attract more reviews than others. See where your competitors are prominent and keep those directories in-mind.

The above is best practice advice for local businesses. However, you indicate that your current client is virtual rather than local, and develops software. I am not experienced with your industry, but would suspect that product review and technical publications/websites would be your target review sources. Maybe things like: http://reviews.cnet.com/?

I think the key here for you is to figure out where your customers are. Where do people go to find software reviews? That's where you need to be prominent.

[DarrenX]

Really great links. Thanks!

[DarrenX]

I appreciate the synopsis and the good feedback.

In our case, we feel that we have a very strong ability to guide users to the site of our choice.  Local seems like a misfire for a global software company.

Since there doesn't seem to be a loud consensus that we should be working with any specific site at the moment, I think we'll send reviewers to BBB, since customers sometimes tell us that is an important trust signal for them.