The success and prosperity of your business or website are determined by the level of trust that people have with regard to your products and services. Customer feedback influences your consumers’ purchasing decisions greatly. A simple, well-written review may make or break your company’s reputation.

Let’s take Kudzu for an example. They went out of business back in November of 2018 (most business owners still have not realized this, as we still get asked to add a link to their Kudzu reviews). Some business owners were paying for ads on Kudzu in order to show up on top and some business owners were also paying for a website through Kudzu. Once they closed down their website, all reviews and websites were gone.

This is why it’s important to put reviews on your own website. It gives your business a lot of credibility. Google is the leader in reviews, but what happens if they ever do away with the review section of “Google My Business” just as they did away with their Google+ pages? All of your hard work in gathering reviews will be gone forever, whereas, you could simply direct individuals to your own website to leave a review and then ask them to leave a review on Google later.

We have seen business owners accidentally delete their Google listings and lose all reviews, so have a backup plan for your reviews. Keep them safe by storing them on your server or backing them up on the cloud.

Plus, it’s much better to direct traffic to your own website than to a third party website to leave a review. This gives you the opportunity to do damage control for bad reviews. You want to drive as much traffic to your website as possible and organic traffic works best in order to boost your rankings!