Harnessing the Power of Positive Reviews

It’s something we have said many times before and it’s even our tagline here at whirLocal.com, but what does it really mean to “Harness the Power of Positive Reviews.” We all know that great reviews are essential to building a solid reputation, but reviews, while critical, are only one piece of the puzzle towards owning your local search. As the following chart from Mike Blumenthal shows, multiple pieces work together to enhance the core of a company’s online marketing efforts; getting found.

That’s why at whirLocal, even though our message is reviews and testimonials, you’ll always hear us talk about Directory Listings, Google Places, Blog Posts and Social Media. In fact, our process is built on a proven integration and interaction of these elements that work together to boost your company’s search engine ranking and online reputation. Each one created or claimed, optimized and integrated to drive traffic back to the core as part of every whirLocal Review Engine we build.

Would our review system work without integrating Facebook or claiming and optimizing your business listing on Bing? Sure it would, but why would we give our clients only one slice of a whole pie. Looking at the chart below, we can easily see that reviews and testimonials are given equal weight to claiming directories, building links and setting up social accounts. Would you buy a car with one of its core features missing, say, the driver’s seat? Probably not, it’ll still run but getting to work every morning would be almost impossible. This same logic applies to local search. Setting up your social media accounts will help your business get found. So too will having a system in place to gather reviews on your website. But what about an integrated comprehensive search solution? Consider the power of sharing your great reviews on Facebook and Twitter, using each customer generated review to build search engine links and citations and a service that claims and optimizes critical search directories. That’s what whirLocal does and that’s how we “Harness the Power of Positive Reviews” to drive business to your core.