Today there’s an abundance of review sites and platforms, from general sites like Google to industry-specific sites like Open Table. The question many businesses have is, What review sites are best for my business? Let’s get some answers.
This infographic shows the most popular reviews sites on the internet:
While Yelp has been the standard bearer for years, it’s been surpassed (overall) by Google and Facebook. This is because Google and Facebook have huge online audiences and reviews are easy to leave on each platform. It’s also because many business owners resent Yelp because their filtering process often leaves them with lower ratings than they think is fair.
However, you don’t want to limit your business to just Facebook and Google. In many cases, there are industry-specific review sites that may have a big impact on your marketing, including:
- Trip Advisor – Restaurant, travel, and hotel industries
- Open Table – Restaurants
- Heath Grades – Medical services
- Zillow – Real Estate
- Houzz – Interior design and home contractors
- Capterra – IT and software solutions
These, of course, are just a few of an unknown quantity of review sites that exist right now. We are (unfortunately, in many ways) in the Wild West period of review websites. This is leaving most business owners confused over not only how to get more reviews, but where their reviews are. There’s nothing like doing a search for reviews on your business vertical and location to discover a new, unknown review site with content about your business – that you have absolutely no control over.
So what sites should you be driving your happy customers to so they can write you stellar reviews? Let’s answer that question.
Start Big
At this point, one thing is for sure. You want to get reviews on Google and Facebook. These are a must for all businesses.
Google reviews happen via the local business listings, and (separately) are also part of their Local Service Ads program. Google states that more reviews on your Google My Business page will help your rankings, and they also play a role in how Local Service Ads are ranked.
Facebook gets so much online traffic that people will go to your Facebook business page to check reviews – just because they’re there. Facebook doesn’t use a 5-star rating anymore, but rather just ask for a recommendation (or not). But users still leave comments about their experience with you. You get a red star if recommended, a grey one if not.
It’s really easy for people to leave reviews on Google or Facebook, so definitely build your profile on these sites.
Yelp is a different animal. It’s certainly helpful to get positive reviews there, but they have a strict policy against soliciting reviews. If their system thinks you’re asking clients to leave reviews, it filters them. Set up your profile on Yelp and monitor the content there, responding to any negative reviews. But other than that, just let people review you there of your own accord.
If you sell on Amazon, you need to get product reviews. Many Amazon shoppers leave reviews of their own accord, so if you give it time you’ll start to see reviews there.
Beyond this, start focusing on industry-specific reviews sites as we discussed. Create a list of about half a dozen sites where you actively monitor reviews on a regular basis.
Also, look in your website analytics to find out what review sites are driving your referrals. For example, on marketing360.com, we know that Capterra is our top converting referral site, and we’re also getting conversions from getapp.com:
We’ll monitor these review sites and make sure we get new reviews on each of them on a regular basis.
Use Top Rated Local®
By far the best tool for monitoring all your reviews online is Top Rated Local®.
This tool aggregates all your reviews and gives you an overall Rating Score™ based on not only your ratings, but the number of reviews you have across multiple platforms.
So for Marketing 360®, we can easily see the review sites we’re on:
When you know where your reviews are and which platforms are strong traffic referrals for your website, you can prioritize where to monitor content and request more reviews. Another cool feature of Top Rated Local® is that when someone leaves a review, a pop-up automatically requests that the user leave another review on one of the other sites you have verified reviews on: 
One day, the wild west of reviews will settle, and there will be just a small handful of sites people use to check verified business reviews.
Until then, keep an eye across the internet for reviews about your business. Like it or not, this content will impact your lead-generation and sales.
