The growing importance of reputation management in business growth needs no introduction. If you want a single statistic to showcase why every business person and their dog encourages great reviews more than ever, it’s this: 85 percent of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.
That statistic is from a recent piece of research conducted by my team at BrightLocal. We wanted to see which of the main players in “local” reviews (i.e., reviews for individual businesses rather than global brands or products) was gathering the most reviews, and at what rate.
We started the process by gathering review data from approximately 50,000 US-based businesses using our platform. This aggregated and anonymized data represented a broad sample of local businesses from many different categories.
Then we looked at a few key data points, but primarily at how many reviews each business generated between 2012 and 2017 by review platform.
In 2012, online reviews pretty much became a “thing” for local businesses, and as you’ll see below, it was the year the battle between the review platforms really kicked off.
Google reviews grow
Since the data in this chart reflects our users, we decided to visually illustrate growth trends instead of showing numerical totals.
In a landscape where ratings are visible everywhere — and often more trusted than branded messages from local businesses — it should be no surprise that most of the review platforms have been massively stepping up their game in recent years.
There’s certainly a chicken-and-egg question about whether people trust reviews more these days because they see them more often or whether businesses push for more reviews due to the increasing trust in them, but that’s another subject.
The first thing we can take from this is that Google is the only platform we analyzed that has seen exponential growth in local business reviews submitted to it since inception.
From 2013 to 2014, the number of reviews grew by 80 percent. The next year it grew by 114 percent, and from 2015 to 2016 this growth sped up to an incredible 278 percent.
