Some of the biggest ambassadors you can find are your satisfied customers.

You can have a great online and offline presence, but if you’re not leveraging the feedback from your satisfied customers you’re leaving an important asset on the table.

With 92% of customers saying that they trust “earned” advertising, it’s time to start making your online reviews a priority.  

Here are 14 powerful advantages of online reviews to drive traffic to your dealership and sell more cars.

1. Creates free advertising

Every review that you get online is, in its own way, a form of advertising for your dealership.

The more reviews you obtain, the more your name and products are exposed to readers which will increase awareness of who you are.

These reviews are unique because they can cover your dealership in a way that no other media source ever would.

They provide mass exposure that would never be possible through traditional marketing channels.  

Are you ready for that?  

2. Improves SEO

Search engines like Google are now taking into account how many times your dealership is mentioned in reviews.

f you are mentioned frequently, you will likely appear higher in the local search results than other dealerships that don’t have as many reviews or those who don’t pay attention to their SEO.

Google will even pull your rating onto the search results page, showing one to five stars before they even click to your page.  

3. Creates peer recommendations

It’s generally understood that anyone will trust the opinion of a good friend, but what about a stranger?

It turns out that for online reviews, they are practically the same thing.

According to a 2015 Nielsen survey of 30,000 internet consumers, 83% of people trust recommendations from people they knew while 70% trust any review posted online.

In all, every online review that recommends your dealership is a powerful form of marketing.  

4. Finds constructive criticism and suggestions

Online reviews are a great way to find questions or concerns that people might have about your dealership.

It can be a great opportunity to resolve customer’s problems and improve business practices that you had never realized before.

A major benefit of seeing the published complaint is the ability to respond to it publicly if you feel that it is necessary.

If you acknowledge and respond to the customer well, their negative experience could turn into a positive one.

Many customers have good suggestions on how things could operate, so review sites can be a free source of market research.  

5. Builds a closer relationship with customers

Online review sites, like other forms of social media, give you the chance to develop a closer relationship with your customers.

t gives your customers a way to talk about your business that they probably wouldn’t be able to otherwise.

If you respond to both the good and bad reviews it will demonstrate to these customers that you care what they have to say.

Often times the customers just want to feel that they are heard, and this can make the difference between a promoter and a detractor.  

6. Increases customer testimonials

If there are particularly good reviews about a specific part of your dealership, this can be a valuable asset.

If the good review you received was talking about your service department, you can take this review and weave it into your social media, or plug it into a newsletter for sales.

The key to this is making it look organic.

These testimonials are social proof or seals of approval for the next product promotion that will be landing in your customer's’ inbox.  

7. Creates case studies

Case studies take the testimonial aspect one step further.

They depict in detail how your services helped a customer solve a specific problem.

Tell their story from beginning to end.

Who are they?

What was their issue?

How did you help to resolve it?

Put in real numbers and pictures.

Reaching out to people that leave good reviews for your dealership is a good way to find potential customers to do a case study about.

The idea is to show people how you can solve other people’s problems in a satisfactory way and how it can solve their similar issues as well.  

8. Helps beat the competition

Almost every dealership is in the middle of an intense price battle between their competitors.

With the desire for customers to have a “no haggle” price experience, how are you going to win?  

This is one of the cases where online reviews can make or break you.

Your customers want to know which dealership will give them a better value for their time and money.

The problem is that they generally don’t want to hear self-promoting talk from you or your competition.

Who they really want to hear from is an impartial third party.

Your positive reviews on your site are this impartial third party that your potential customers are looking for.

This will give you a competitive advantage to help sway people to your store rather than the competition on the other side of town.  

9. Improves first impressions

Most customers don’t want to jump into archives of reviews to read everything that has been written.

They want to make a decision.

Chances are that they will read the first review that pops up, or the first hand full.

These reviews will provide the basis for their decision, one way or another.

Having a high percentage of good reviews to bad will generally help you create a better first impression.

The better the person sees at the dealership the better chances you have to receive another good review.

It’s a double edged sword though because the same is true for negative reviews and it’s a self-repeating cycle.  

10. Demonstrates social proof

Having a high number of reviews is ideal for your dealership because it indicates that you’re a “tried and approved” business.

It adds a certain degree of “social proof” even with a handful of reviews.

As the number of reviews you have increase, the more sense of legitimacy your business will have and the more trusted it will become.  

11. Adds more content to your website

If you’re receiving a lot of reviews on your products and services, or even the dealership as a whole, you can use this to increase the total amount of content on the site.

Imagine having service related reviews appear on the service section of your site or general dealership reviews on the homepage.

Encouraging visitors and website users to be as descriptive as possible in their reviews, which will increase the amount of usable content you have for your site.  

12. Increases click through rate on your search results

One feature that you can tap into is Google’s rich snippets in the form of reviews.

By using structured markup to feature your reviews, or if you get more reviews through Google directly, you can have star ratings and reviews show up for searches relating to your dealership.

If the average review is positive, or you have high average ratings, you can expect a higher click-through rate in organic search results.  

13. Increases your rankings

The quality and quantity of online reviews play an important role in how your business ranks in local search results.

To find information on your business, Google looks at review sites and third-party directories related to local business.

In general, the more positive reviews you have, the higher authority you’re going to receive, increasing the organic traffic that you will receive.  

14. Helps you learn from past experience

Every review that comes through holds important qualitative information, good or bad, that you and your consumers can learn from.

Consumers look closely at negative reviews so it’s important to have someone checking all of your reviews at least once per week to collect this information.

Create a process for them to report what they have learned and an action plan for this information to be acted upon.

Continual improvement is the best way to create a better experience for consumers in the future, which will, in turn, help you sell more cars.  

A word of warning...

With so many benefits to having good reviews and such damage that can be caused by negative ones, it can be tempting to create reviews.

Don’t do it!

Your dealership can get hit with costly fines for creating fake reviews, so it’s better to take the morally high road and stay safe, rather than sorry.  

Closing remarks

It’s hard to put a monetary value on each review you received, but an example might help get my point across.

For a consumer, the purchase of a car is a big decision, just like it is for a dealer to choose a new CRM, DMS, or SEM provider.

With so many decisions it can take a lot of time and effort to research different options and it can be very costly to make a wrong decision.

This is where DrivingSales Vendor Ratings comes in handy.

Vendor Ratings helps you shop for your next vendor solution by showing you reviews from verified dealership employees that will help you make the best choice for your dealership.

Click Here to contribute to the community by rating you dealership vendors or to shop for vendors.