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How Negative CBD Reviews Can Affect Your SEO

August 29, 2022

Introduction

CBD Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comprises various best practices that boost your CBD website ranking on search engine result pages. Remember that SEO is pivotal as it helps your business gain more visibility and draw quality organic traffic. Most essentially, it improves the chances of converting visitors to loyal customers. While many factors are involved in search rankings, online CBD customer reviews remain extremely valuable to augment your SEO efforts.

This article provides comprehensive and valuable information about the influence of negative CBD reviews on the SEO of CBD websites. Let’s dive right in.

Role of Reviews in SEO

Reviews are comments, opinions, evaluations, reflections, or testimonials that customers share concerning the products or services they have used or experienced. Reviews largely influence the reputation of online businesses and are also a key search ranking factor for websites. Moreover, notable search engines like Google utilize signals from online customer reviews to rank certain websites by ascertaining their authority and trustworthiness.

For instance, many contradictions have surrounded the CBD industry’s legality over the years. Thus, many customers get cynical as to whether CBD-infused products are legal or if they provide their so-called wellness and health benefits. Consequently, a growing number of CBD customers rely on online CBD reviews before making purchasing decisions.

Above all, focusing on putting in place a review acquisition strategy for your CBD business is crucial to maximizing your CBD SEO. Below are some roles of reviews in SEO:

1. Reviews Improve Website Visibility

Web analytics indicates that online reviews make up the fifth most significant parameter for SEO. So, reviews are essential as they boost your website ranking. Staying focused on improving your CBD reviews will help generate good ratings. That way, search engines will detect your highly rated CBD website, making your business rank higher on result pages.

2. Good Reviews Increase Organic Traffic

Online reviews are vital in every business’s SEO, including local ranking. Once your CBD website ranks high on the first result page of a search engine like Google, you can be sure of getting more quality CBD organic traffic drawn to your website. The higher click-through rate, alongside your quality web content, and the well-designed website layout, will help boost your sales. Besides, web surveys indicate that accruing quality reviews boosts sales by 5 to 9% within a short forecast period.

3. Quality Reviews Generate Long-tail Keyword Traffic

Long-tail keywords comprise three to four phrases specific to a brand, product, or service. Most times, these highly specific search terms appear within web user reviews. For this reason, some online businesses leverage the power of online customer reviews without adding detailed keywords to improve SEO. Thus, when target CBD customers input these exact or closely related keywords in search engines, you will have the edge over competitors as they’ll likely find your CBD website.

4. Online Reviews Increase Social Sharing and Brand Trust

Generally, social media platforms constitute a great means of establishing a solid online presence. The internet is vast, and many online reviews find their way to these platforms. Frequently, online businesses needlessly spend a dime on advertising their products or services on social media as satisfied customers do more of the talking. Moreover, you will agree that most consumers prefer recommendations from friends and family. Hence, this widespread social sharing of reviews will promote your brand, solidify confidence in your customers, and ultimately drive more sales.

Positive and Negative Reviews

Categorically, online reviews are either positive or negative. You can probably deduce what these review types are about from their names, but there’s much more behind the curtain.

Positive reviews are comments shared by clients or customers satisfied with your company, products, or services. This class of reviews helps reassure existing customers to continue patronizing your business while progressively promoting trustworthiness to prospective clients and influencing their buying decisions.

On the other hand, negative reviews reflect a customer’s unpleasant or poor experience with your company, product, or service. Thus, bad reviews can impact your business. Also, some threadbare companies lose revenues and web traffic, including existing customers, due to negative reviews.

Even so, keep in mind that both negative and positive CBD reviews can boost CBD SEO. It’s normal if you find this concept confusing. The reason is not far-fetched. Most people think only positive reviews help businesses and that negative reviews cause damaging outcomes. However, that is not always the case.

Trust us when we say your CBD business may need some negative reviews. We will shed light on this as we focus on negative CBD reviews. First, let’s discuss the positive effects of negative reviews.

Beneficial Effects of Negative Reviews

Negative reviews are unavoidable in most business settings, and the CBD industry is no exception. However, the good thing is that negative CBD reviews are not as common as you would think. This is because a measurable number of customers would rather ignore commenting than share bad reviews even when they have undergone an unsatisfying experience. In other words, the likelihood of amassing positive reviews is much greater than getting negative reviews.

Aside from this, not all negative reviews oppose SEO efforts. There are a few ways bad CBD reviews can profit your CBD business in the long run. Take a look at some beneficial impacts of negative reviews below:

  • Negative Reviews Boost the Total Number of Reviews

Typically, accumulating a large number of reviews is an effective SEO strategy. Besides, search engines tend to rank websites with a higher number of reviews as top recommendations when web users search for specific terms. Negative reviews will add to your CBD business’s total number of reviews. Hence, your larger CBD business reviews, coupled with a reasonable rating, will enhance your business’s visibility and increase quality web traffic.

  • Bad Reviews Adds More Authenticity in Consumer’s Eyes

Too many positive reviews can put off sensitive customers, thinking that your products or services are too good to be true. In addition, most consumers would trust a 4.5 to 4.7 rated business more than a 5-star company. This is because the rate at which online businesses result to falsifying or buying fake reviews has become rampant. These companies bribe specific customers for positive reviews and use this fraudulent activity to showcase fake authenticity.

For this reason, achieving a good CBD review rating comprising a few negative reviews will add more authenticity and credibility in the eyes of your target customers. Thus, bad reviews can help drive more clicks, convince potential customers, and grow the customer base buying your CBD products.

  • Negative CBD Reviews Boost Engagement Numbers

Customer engagements and interactions also play an important role in SEO. Responding to negative reviews is most likely the best way to engage your customers. Besides, it would be best for your customers to share or engage your company with bad reviews rather than having no engagement. Therefore, the more interactions or engagement numbers you have with your CBD customers, the better it is for your CBD company.

Aside from this, you can get to show people that your company can manage and resolve a bad experience. Despite the poor reflections or reviews, people will see you trying to rectify the negative issues through proper engagement. And this reassures your existing and prospective customers that you care about their thoughts and experiences.

  • Bad Reviews Can Connect Related Keywords to Your CBD Brand

Online CBD reviews, including negative comments, sometimes incorporate keywords relevant to your CBD brand. Target keywords in reviews are extremely beneficial to your overall CBD SEO strategy. These phrases or terms will automatically boost your website ranking, draw more attention to your business, and further support other SEO efforts as they integrate industry-specific keywords. But then, you must ensure that the keywords in your reviews are on Google Verified Review Partner sites and software to make the best of this approach.

  • Negative Reviews Give Personal Insight About Your CBD Brand

To a large extent, only the customers buying and using your products or services can best describe what they think of your company. Feedback from general CBD consumer surveys or anonymous critics will not necessarily give you the right details on what your company needs to resolve.

Instead, the online reviews directly from your customers will give your CBD business insights into some crucial problems and frustrations they face when interacting with your website. They may include slow website speed, payment processor issues, invalid links, etc.

As such, you can leverage negative reviews as valuable sources of information as they can pinpoint what your CBD company is doing wrong. They can also help identify the areas you need to improve your services or develop high-quality CBD products to enhance your customers’ experience.

Dealing With Negative Reviews – Should You Delete Negative Reviews or Respond to Them?

As disconcerting as it may sound, replying to negative reviews can provide substantial benefits, and receiving them from time to time is normal. Even today, some well-established CBD companies receive bad reviews and complaints from their customers. It’s an excellent idea to respond to your CBD reviews, both good and bad.

Not to mention, customers love it when they can share their thoughts or opinions and get affirmative replies. As a result, engaging and responding to CBD negative reviews will help keep your customers coming back for more. At times, a good response can further benefit your business, encouraging your customers to change their points of view or delete their negative comments.

Additionally, accumulating too many negative reviews on your CBD business website can cause damage beyond expectations. You may have to delete some negative reviews in the long run. The only bad reviews you should delete, if possible, are spam reviews or fake negative reviews. A straightforward way of doing this is by classifying all your reviews, then selecting the ones that need to be deleted or disputed.

Tips To Handle Negative CBD Reviews

Negative CBD reviews can be detrimental if you fail to manage them properly. Therefore, you must implement an online review supervision strategy or plan to manage your CBD reviews. In the same vein, you can choose to hire an SEO-specialized agency to manage your reviews.

Below are a few top tips to guide you in handling negative CBD reviews:

  • Monitor Reviews and Set Alerts

To resolve negative CBD reviews appropriately, you must closely monitor them on all platforms. This includes your website, business page, and social media accounts. If you’re too occupied to monitor your reviews from all platforms concurrently, you can use set alerts to get notified when they get delivered. You can also use tools like Review Tracker to streamline the process of monitoring your customer’s reviews.

  • Respond Quickly

It would be best to act quickly on all your negative CBD reviews by responding as soon as they are delivered. In situations where you cannot reply instantly, you can compose catchy messages telling them that you will respond as soon as possible and use them as automatic replies. With this strategy, you can muster large engagement numbers that will positively impact your SEO and brand reputation.

  • Apologize and Offer a Solution

Showing that you care goes a long way in winning customers over. Once you get negative CBD reviews, acknowledge the issue, then apologize. Further, you should express your intent to help and offer a solution. Depending on the severity of the situation, you can offer a refund, discount vouchers for future purchases, or other goodwill to keep the customer.

Conclusion

Negative CBD reviews are inevitable. Even though they reflect a customer’s poor experience, they can amplify your SEO efforts. Today, more CBD customers depend on reviews when making their purchase decisions. Hence, this article examined the influence of negative CBD reviews on the SEO of CBD websites and various tips to handle negative reviews.

Online CBD reviews essentially influence your business reputation. Thus, neglecting the management of negative reviews may result in an unwanted outcome. It remains pivotal that you pay attention to what your customer’s reviews say, how to respond accordingly, and delete unwanted negative reviews. Therefore, when review concerns arise, an SEO agency can help manage your CBD company reviews to improve your search engine rankings and minimize the damage caused by amassing too many bad reviews.

At Digital Octane, we provide outstanding CBD website design, development, and SEO services. If you are interested in improving your website SEO, you are in the right place. Do well to reach out to us.

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