Welcome back, today what I want to talk about is why what your reputation is right now, isn’t going to matter in six months. The reason is, is because people don’t pay attention to reviews beyond six months. At least 84% of people, consumers, do not look at reviews beyond six months, they don’t view them as relevant. What I wanted to show you today is that Bright Local does a study every single year about consumers and how they interact with reviews. One of their questions is, for a typical local business, how recent ie. new, does an online review need to be to be relevant? What you’ll see is about 15% want to see it within the last two weeks, 29% want to see it within one month and 25% want to see it within two to three months and another 15% within three to six months. If you add all that up, what you’re looking at, is that 84% of consumers want to see that the reviews are within six months.

That makes sense, right? A small business can have turnover, they can have a change of management, change of ownership in six months. What they want to know is hey, what’s the experience that I’m going to get when I go in there today? I don’t care about what happened in that business, two, three, four years ago, what I care about is hey, what happened last week, what happened last month? When they’re looking at these reviews, that’s what they’re trying to glean is what is my experience going to be? That’s why they’re reading the reviews.

Making sure that, as businesses, we’re consistently getting reviews on these review sites for our business is a big indicator to these consumers, to people who are going to buy our products and services that hey, we still offer the amazing customer service that we always have. Why do I say it doesn’t matter beyond six months is because you can totally change how your business is represented by paying attention to this for the next six months and getting yourself new reviews. That’s the ones they’re going to look at and typically, what will happen on these review platforms, is they will show your reviews chronologically. That doesn’t always happen, sometimes they mix up the order of a couple depending on quote, unquote, what they think is a “relevant” review.

Most of the times, it’s chronological and I’m just giving another example here of a naturopathic business in Seattle and as you’ll see, most of these are all from this month or last month. We’ve got a couple here from August, some from July, all from 2016 here at the first, we’re looking at almost 12 reviews, until we get back into 2015. These are all the ones, the first ones that somebody sees when they’re looking at a small business so it’s important that you’re continually getting these reviews because that’s what people are going to be looking at is the most recent reviews to judge your business. That’s why they don’t care about what’s happened in the past.