The first thing to say is you should consider two types of visitors when adding customer reviews to your website. Firstly potential customers and secondly the search engines. Believe it or not but there are actually benefits for both types of visitors which helps make customer reviews very important. We will look at each in turn and then you can make your own mind up:

1. Your potential customers

Firstly, ask yourself the question, what do customer reviews do for you when you are shopping online? If you answer this you will automatically see the benefits that you can get from them.

It has been see that by adding customer reviews to your website it not only increases sales but actually reduces returns as well. This is all because it helps users to make a more informed choice. If you have a product on your site and a few people have said what a great product they think it is then people will trust it a lot more.

Personally if I can read customer reviews it really helps me to make up my mind on a product and also makes me trust the online shop more as I know they have satisfied customers. After all the business you are in is to sell as much as possible so anything you can do to help that should definitely be considered.

2. The Search Engines

Probably the most important part of your marketing campaign will be search engine optimisation. This means you should always be looking for things that make you stand out and that can help your rankings in the search engines. Without them you will definitely have problems making sales.

The question is what benefit can customer reviews really have to your search engine rankings? Well the most important thing to know is that the search engines are always looking for content that will benefit the searcher. They will see customer reviews as a real benefit to online shoppers. Let's look at it this way, suppose you have 2 online shops and they both sell the same book for exactly the same price and they have both been set up well for SEO. Now suppose one has 3 customer reviews and the other has none. Which shop do you think will be seen as most useful to the searcher? Clearly it is the one with the reviews for the reasons we discussed earlier. So adding reviews will give you a greater chance of appearing higher in the search engines.

On conclusion, it is clear to see that customer reviews can only benefit your business. Although it may cost more to set them up in the beginning in the long run you will see the benefit by the increased sales you have. However remember if you do set them up you should try and prompt your purchasers to give you a review otherwise you might not get any. At first this might take work but once they start you will get them a lot more often.