Good reviews from customers can drive a business to greater success, but poor reviews can quickly destroy a business. If Trustpilot is “the world’s most powerful review platform”, then it’s important to know how it works, especially if your business receives a bad review.
Trustpilot’s Haley Norton joins us for this Concise Webinar to explain Trustpilot, and share tips for success and traps to avoid. We cover:
Here is a link to Trustpilot’s info mentioned in the webinar about how the TrustScore is calculated. (Opens in new tab)
Richard: Good morning and welcome everybody to this Concise webinar what do you need to know about Trustpilot. Joining me today is Gareth Lane and Haley Norton. Gareth as you know is from Concise Digital and Haley is from Trustpilot so we’re very pleased to have Haley here because Haley is the full bottle on Trustpilot and I’ll explain why. Welcome Haley.
Haley: Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Richard: Pleasure. Gareth?
Gareth: Hello this is the Gareth voice reporting for duty but the Gareth voice is going to be quiet today for a change so I will ask some tough questions at the end. How’s that?
Richard: There you go. Looking forward to that. Okay so today for people who haven’t been to one of the Concise Webinars before this is as you say a concise webinar. We try to run these through in 25 to 30 minutes tops. We run these without waffle, without sales pitches and we try to make them a 100 education with business information you can use. This session is being recorded and is available, will be available for viewing later if you want to re-watch. Also with Q and A we’ve got, we’re happy to take questions along the way and there will be time for Q and A at the end.
Let me just background why we’re doing this this session. This is what you need to know about Trustpilot is why we’re calling this and as you can see there’s the smiling Haley. This situation came about a few weeks ago when a number of our clients used Trustpilot but a few weeks ago one of our clients said that that he in fact had received a bad review on Trustpilot and asked me for help what to do in that situation. I gave him some advice and I thought well actually you know what? Let’s find out from Trustpilot exactly what to do in situations like that.
The guys at Trustpilot were very helpful and in fact I realized at that point that it would be helpful for us at Concise to develop a closer relationship with Trustpilot because it really is a very important part of what goes on the web. Concise as I say we have a number of clients using Trustpilot. Concise has now become a Trustpilot partner mainly because we want to be able to focus on being able to recommend the best advice to our clients and also to be able to work closely with Trustpilot to help implement Trustpilot properly and also to handle any issues as they came along.
In the time that we were discussing with Trustpilot I was talking with Haley and I said hey, we run these webinars. I think it would be really helpful if we were to share some of the information on Trustpilot with our clients and anyone else who wants to participate in these webinars. So that’s the reason for this webinar. This is not a session to sell Trustpilot to anybody. This is a session, an information session to try to explain what Trustpilot is, how best to use it, how not to use it and some tips to get best use out of it. With that I’m going to hand the talking stick over to Haley and say Haley, take it away. You’re very welcome to say whatever you want. Oh by the way everyone Haley’s got a lot of slides to rip through and so she told me she’s going to be able to do this in a concise way so Haley challenge is on.
Haley: Let’s do this. Thanks so much Richard and Gareth for having me and welcome to everyone else joining us today. My role here as you mentioned I’m the partner manager so I help our partners and the businesses they work with all over the world get seen, get sold and get better online. Today we’re going to cover off the following topics as you’ve mentioned so what is Trustpilot, who uses Trustpilot, how do you get reviews, what to do when you get reviews, the top tips for success and traps to avoid and everyone wants to know how much does it cost but we’re not selling you. We’re educating you so let’s get started.
First of all what is Trustpilot? We are the world’s most powerful review platform and we’re built on openness and collaboration so we are a community. Trustpilot, we help consumers to make better purchasing decisions and businesses showcase and improve their service so a little bit of a background. We are as you mentioned a pretty passionate bunch of people and we’re all over the world. We launched in 2007 in Copenhagen and we have offices now in London, in New York and Denver, in Vilnius which is in Lithuania for those playing at home, in Berlin and in Melbourne. There’s around 750 of us trustees and we represent around 45 different nationalities.
We’re pretty proud of achieving the following results too. I’m not just going to read from the slides. I will say we do have a ton of monthly impressions on our trustbox widgets online and we do have a global Alexa ranking of 316 as of July 2020 so it puts us in the top one percent of most visited websites from all around the world. We’ve had about 420000 websites reviewed and as you can see we’re almost about to crack 100 million customer reviews.
As you’re a digital crowd I thought you’d be interested in our domain authority. Domain authority is essentially how well your profile page would rank in search. Google’s is 100 that’s pretty much as high as you can get and Trustpilot has a domain authority of 93. We’re in the top 300 websites in Australia listed at 275 as of July and of course we can only do this with the help of consumers, businesses, partnerships and customers in conjunction with our review platform and our global SEO authority which is compared to key competitors.
There’s been a significant decline globally in trust recently and Trustpilot help businesses with their online reputation strategies and we help them to get seen, get sold and get better with Trustpilot in three main ways. Helping you understand your customer through easily collecting genuine reviews, making you money by increasing traffic and on-site conversion and reducing basket bounce and saving you money, boosting your SEO and cutting customer acquisition costs. More than just a rating Trustpilot stars signify to the world that a company has nothing to hide, loves its customers and shares our mission to create ever-improving experiences for everyone. The businesses that work with us can use their customer insights to improve their business and showcase that third-party validation directly on their website and in their marketing and at various touch points throughout the customer journey with the ultimate goal of driving growth.
As a business we’re lucky we’re in a position where we have such a strong why and to be a universal symbol of trust is not working towards something one day maybe. It’s a specific why and our people and our goals and our mindsets and our partners and so much more make it possible. Being that our mission is to be a universal symbol of trust everywhere you see that symbol you must know that you can trust our company and our product. We have to earn that trust and re-earn it over and over we can never assume we’ve already won on trust. For a trust symbol to be trusted it should work for both companies and consumers and be independent of both obviously and why? Because our vision has always been to help companies and consumers not one or the other and this separates us from other review sites. They’re about reviews as an e-commerce tool. We about that too obviously but above that is trust and open collaboration that creates trust.
Our values tell us how to earn trust and how we build our platform, sell our products when it gets to that, who we partner with, the language we use and how we work with one another day to day. Trust is why Peter, our CEO started Trustpilot and it’s the single biggest priority for our company full stop.
Who uses Trustpilot? Trustpilot is an open and transparent review platform so we’re open to all consumers and companies and independent of both. We don’t let the companies cherry-pick their reviews and we allow all consumers to voice their opinion as we found out last week. Didn’t we?
Richard: We did.
Haley: We present credible reviews back to consumers and companies. They really understand what their customers are saying. As a 360 degree review platform we help businesses collect service, products, photo and location reviews and sometimes the reviews come on their own. We’ll talk about that in a minute.
This alongside of us having superior SEO authority compared to key competitors means that many businesses work with Trustpilot as part of achieving their marketing goals and their business strategies. Our local team of partner managers, account execs, business development managers and customer success in Melbourne provide assistance with reputation strategies based on industry specific knowledge, technical on boarding and integrations and setup and once reviews are collected we guide businesses on best practices to display the reviews as well.
Due to the nature of what we do here at Trustpilot in Melbourne we work with all businesses from B2B to e-com to service-based businesses and pretty much everyone in between. Here’s a list of our mixed customers in the APAC region and as you can see it varies a lot. As we’re an open platform you can search for a company or category at trustpilot.com. Our businesses self-select their categories and consumers can search them on the consumer sites which house the service and the location reviews.
As such businesses can customize their profile pages so consumers can learn more about the business and when consumers click on the business page this can take them to specific places on their website. Consumers spend on average about five minutes on Trustpilot profile pages and you can set yours up for free or you can customize it like our customers have on the right.
Richard: Yes, I think it’s important just to mention that that Trustpilot doesn’t have to have a cost. It is something that is available to be used for free.
Haley: That’s right. Free, open for all, community. Yes, that’s right. Thank you. Here are some retail and e-commerce customers in APAC as well. Everyone’s burning question how do you get Trustpilot reviews? Sometimes reviews just happen don’t they Richard?
Richard: Yes, Richard has got a very, very simple approach to how do you get Trustpilot reviews: you either ask for them or people give them to you without you asking for them.
Haley: Exactly right and how do they do that? Well we will help you always with best practices on collecting reviews whether it’s free or paid. We recommend you just let people know that you’re asking for reviews so let’s cover off in a little bit more detail.
We’re an open platform as I said so anyone can leave a review if you have a domain so basically any business that has a domain can have a Trustpilot profile whether they do it or someone else does it for them and anyone can leave that review similar to Google or Facebook. The reviews are traceable with Trustpilot and you’d need to put in your credentials and there are other ways as well but at any point in the journey you can claim your free Trustpilot profile page and we can help you if needed to journey from free to paid if it’s of interest but you can go at your own pace which I think is important.
Whether it’s product reviews or photo reviews, service reviews or even location reviews you’re looking for. Obviously we work together Richard with the Concise team to help businesses start collecting reviews at any stage and doing things with them.
79% of consumers trust product reviews as much as a personal recommendation and I think this is important because we’re unable in many parts of the country and the region to see friends and family as much and so it’s important that we note people are going online to do this.
There’s five ways to invite customers to leave reviews and that way you can gather lots of valuable feedback so this is included in the free plan as well. It’s important to note. Firstly asking your customers to review you when you speak to them on the phone or you chat with them online just let them know that you’d like them to leave a review on Trustpilot. You’ve probably been asked to leave a review when you visited a restaurant or a tourist destination maybe not recently but sometime they ask you because it works.
Part two send an email after they made a purchase. In our experience there’s often a large pool of customers who don’t think about leaving reviews and sometimes all it takes to activate these customers is just to politely request so if you make it easy for them and remind them that their opinions matter and keep the review invitation emails short and simple and on topic they’ll be the most successful in getting customers to provide feedback about their experience. We even have an optimized email invitation template in our free plan to help you get started.
Also you can embed a link in your communications so if you think it’s too much trouble to just email everyone just make it easy for yourself and insert that link on your evaluation page and put it in your emails and just politely invite people to leave a review. Nice and simple. You can also use that link on your website um and that will send customers directly to your company’s profile page on Trustpilot where they can leave that review. You could get creative and include a postcard in your packages so you might consider making the most of our range of customizable stationery which is available and it’s super easy to put together a catchy and attractive postcard inviting people to leave a review. Then you can send it to all the people that you send packages to showing them how to go to Trustpilot in a few easy steps.
There’s around 28 different ways to invite with Trustpilot which is a lot so we’ll always find a way for every business to invite that matches their customer journey and their marketing plans. Those can be manual invites automatic or other. We can meet your needs of ways to invite.
Trustpilot is a Google review partner so that means that Google recognizes Trustpilot as a trusted source of transparent and legitimate customer reviews. Google distinguishes between invited and non-invited organic reviews. Invited reviews count towards Google seller ratings and uninvited organic reviews do not.
Google uses Trustpilot review data to provide insight to searches so that they can make better purchasing decisions. Through our partnership we can help with seller ratings on Google ads, Google shopping and Google search partners through to product ratings and shopping ads in Google search and shopping so let’s look at some examples of how our partnership and the collection of verified reviews feeding into Google can help businesses just like yours.
Collecting service reviews allows you to grow and show the trust in your brand and you can show and tell the story of your customers experience and turn their feedback into real business results. This highlights the importance of independent reviews. The criteria for achieving Google seller ratings on service reviews is a minimum of 100 verified reviews with a three and a half star average rating within 12 months per country. That’s what we’ll see if we click on the stars. What are the benefits of those Google seller ratings? Google tells us that showing seller ratings on your ads can boost your ads click through rate by up to ten percent so I’m sure lots of people would think that is an advantage.
Now let’s look at product reviews so they’re shown on your website and they give customers the opportunity to review specific products they’ve purchased from your business they’re not shown on Trustpilot instead you can display them on your business’ website typically next to a product in your online shop so customers can read them before making a purchase decision. The requirements to display those ratings in Google shopping are three reviews per product, 50 in the total product feed and you must regularly share all your product reviews with Google and with our product review integration you can add stars to your Google shopping ads to improve your click-through rate. Those Google shopping ads are according to Google to promote your online and local inventory, boost traffic to your website and local store and find better qualified leads. The shopping ads ratings are available in several countries.
I’ve got a question here. Does Trustpilot consolidate reviews from other sites? Could you pull reviews from Google my business, Facebook etc. or reviews on Trustpilot are their own? A customer would have to add review to Facebook and Trustpilot. We don’t pull reviews from other sources however we can integrate Trustpilot reviews through Facebook if someone has more than two thousand likes on their Facebook page they can pull through their review tab at their Trustpilot review tab onto Facebook and those reviews on Google my business and Facebook are organic reviews. The distinction is that when we’re feeding into Google we are collecting verified reviews so those organic reviews wouldn’t count towards any of those gains. Hopefully that answers your question. We’re not an aggregate site and we can pull our product reviews across as well from other platforms if needed and it’s just on product reviews not service reviews. Good question.
To be listed in Google shopping as I mentioned your company must have a minimum of 50 product reviews in your feed and for one of your products reviews to show up in Google shopping it needs at least three reviews one of which being from a customer that you invited.
There are also some important features that are not due to our agreement with Google which can help you stand out in search if you choose to use Trustpilot to help with your reputation management and I will note that this does apply if your reputation is good or bad which is important isn’t it Richard?
Richard: Yes it is Haley. Yes, it is.
Haley: Definitely so Trustpilot actually has a really good authority in Google search which as we said was important because you will stand out whether your reputation is good, bad, pretty or ugly because of how we rank in search. That’s not just us saying it as you can see we’ve been listed recently by moz.com which is a global SEO authority. You can see what they have said about us and we are in the top 500 up from I think 396 back last year and none of our competitors are there so I’m pretty proud of that.
Richard: Yes that is pretty impressive.
Haley: Now why are we focused on reviews so much? As I’ve said we focus on a lot of things here at Trustpilot but it’s because it can have some really good success stories. That does include improving click-through rates which is quite dramatic. Now Richard you asked me how that is possible it’s been done by conversion excel so I think that’s really cool to know.
Richard: Yes.
Haley: Awesome. I’m just loading the next slide. Here we can see how important having reviews is on influencing sales. Don’t just take our word for it. Spiegal Research Center had a look at this in how online reviews influence sales.
Now onto the other burning question. What to do when you actually receive those reviews good, bad or fake even. You’re obviously going to come across negative reviews from time to time and that’s okay. Customers actually will believe your reviews are authentic and credible so don’t freak out when you get a review if it’s not perfect. 77% of customers trust a site actually that doesn’t just have five star reviews so also a whopping 95% of consumers say they would be suspicious of fake reviews if there are no bad reviews at all.
Richard: And that’s a really important point if everything’s rosy then it’s a bit too good to be true in most people’s minds.
Haley: Definitely.
Richard: Yes because people are real. People realize that not every business gets everything perfect for everybody and it’s about how businesses respond to lack of perfection.
Haley: Good segue. Customers actually expect businesses to respond believe it or not. Over two-thirds expect a comment or a private message about their feedback. Your response obviously is important and the goal is to get the issue resolved and show that you’re handling it but also it’s the time to showcase your outstanding customer experience and as you can see here on the right hand side resolving those issues really has positive results for the future of your business. Some even delete or change the negative review. We see that a lot.
Reviews from your customers they provide valuable feedback for your business as I mentioned and replying really helps you build trust and engage in an open conversation because people see that. That’s why we advise business users to take the time to respond and communicate with both happy and unhappy customers and to be reading and replying to customer reviews as an important part of managing your customer feedback.
Here are our top tips to help you respond in a way that reflects favourably on you and your business. One, never argue with your customers. Take note of what’s being said then respond appropriately and professionally and consider providing the customer with your contact information to resolve the issue offline. Number two don’t go into too many details when responding. Just express your apologies and contact the customer offline and make it a personalized response to show empathy with their situation. Number three we all know nobody’s perfect and we’re going to learn from positive and negative reviews so take the reviews that your customers are giving you as some valuable feedback. If they’re positive they’re confirming you’re doing things right and with negative they’re giving feedback on areas you can improve.
Part four, as I said it’s all in the open. Open platform, it’s important to remember that consumers actually look at profiles. As I said they can spend up to five minutes on there and they’re paying close attention to how your company reacts and responds so it demonstrates in your response how engaged you are and how caring your company is. How you actively listen and respond you can create a sense of trust with that.
Then lastly, thank your customers regardless if they are happy or sad if you always finish on a positive you show that you appreciate their time and you’re approachable as a company and as people in that company. Replying actually wins you respect and credibility. It shows off your customer service and demonstrates you care and negative reviews is no reason to panic. We all know you can’t please everyone all the time but you can use the feedback in a positive way to learn and improve and reply, to build trust, fix problems and win more business.
Richard: Yes, I think customers want to know how businesses respond to problems that other people have so that they then get a sense of how that business is likely to respond to them if they have a problem. It’s such an important thing to bear in mind that people judge way before they have an experience directly. People are judging whether they want to deal with you before they even talk to you.
Haley: Definitely. We get some burning questions and those include should I reply to critical reviews even if I disagree? Can I win over unhappy customers and boost my brand with a good response and will the odd negative review make people trust my reviews more? The answer I’m sure you already know is yes. It’s usually yes that we tell them because businesses are surprised often to learn that bad reviews have positive effects such as giving them the chance to respond and show they care and companies that strategically reply to reviews benefit significantly.
Richard: I thought it was really interesting the article that your CEO wrote recently that one of the quotes from that was that one as I recall, one bad review replied to or responded to well is worth 10 good reviews.
Haley: Yes, definitely. I think that’s very powerful thanks for bringing that up. We know now that we can’t ignore oh I’m missing a slide. Sorry about that. There we go. So we know now that we…
Richard: Hang on. I think you might have gone the wrong way.
Haley: There we are.
Richard: There you go.
Haley: So we now know if you receive good reviews you should definitely be thinking about sharing them on social media which a lot of people don’t think of but what it does is you can share it on social media or website widgets some of which are included on the free platform. It showcases third-party validated content of your reputation so that way you’re trusted not just by what you say but what your customers say.
Richard: Yes.
Haley: Then what do we do if someone needs to flag or report a review. If there’s any review on your company page that violates our guidelines you can report it for five reasons which are listed here and the first one includes hate speech or discrimination, terrorism, threats or violence, obscenity or defamation. The second one we can remove things like names, phone numbers, addresses, email addresses and anything that could be used to identify someone but we don’t remove information that’s already in the public domain. Obviously advertising or promotional is not acceptable or is something not based on a genuine experience but being about a different business it could be about another domain, it could be about another business entirely or you might not recognize the reviewer so you can use our find a reviewer tool.
Obviously we take content integrity very seriously here at Trustpilot and we’re doubling down on that and so what will happen after companies report reviews is that there’ll be a ticket. Content integrity handles that ticket and the review is either put back online or kept offline after the investigation. If a review is reported that violates the guidelines the reviewer may be asked to edit it and if the review can’t be made compliant it may be removed.
Richard: But you don’t just remove bad reviews because they said something bad about a business you know and neither you should. Neither you should.
Haley: That’s right. Good segue as well so let’s just have a quick chat. We know that we can’t ignore the voice of the customer anymore and we know that it’s part of the journey of every single customer to check reviews and it doesn’t only just help them to make decisions but it helps to convert sales and also helps to establish trust so an overwhelming majority of consumers report checking reviews before making purchases and about 45% indicate they use reviews now more than they have in the past. Obviously this is only going to increase with the continued growth of e-com into the next decade. We’ve followed the numbers pretty closely and we can see that recently more people have gone online to get what they need and we’re seeing more reviews as a result.
Over a quarter of people say they’re checking more reviews now than they were before and that’s because they’re concerned about scammers and they want to know how businesses are dealing with the virus so they’re coming to Trustpilot to get honest opinions and experiences. Continuing to ensure trust is increasingly important.
We need to make it easy for people to find your reviews. Trustpilot profile pages as I said tend to appear high up as a top search result often with rich snippet stars and they’re backed by our review platform credibility built for people and businesses.
The profile pages appearing at the top or near the top because of our high domain authority means that you shouldn’t let your reputation go unchecked and when people search for our reviews of your brand. You can see what they can find just by doing it yourself which is quite simple. Search your business and reviews. We want to make sure we establish trust and reply to reviews as I mentioned. Actually 95% of unhappy customers return to your business if their issue is resolve quickly and efficiently which points us back to a good response to a bad review being worth 10 good reviews. Even whether it’s good or bad we just encourage you to reply.
Looking at showcasing review content oops, the missing slide here. Sorry. We want to make sure that you’re listening to your customers whether it’s good or bad and the reason being is that you get valuable feedback obviously so we’ve worked with Aussiebum to transform their business because before they did have quite a story going on there and obviously they had a lot of negative organic reviews coming in before they started collecting reviews with us and that can be quite common because often people leave negative reviews in a few places as a negative dumping ground because they’ve had a really bad experience and that’s just human nature.
Don’t be too worried because on the flip side we see a lot of companies inviting all their customers to get an accurate representation of their claimed profile so they’re representative of their whole client base so now you can see where Aussiebum are at now. They’re almost at 10000 reviews which is very exciting. We are going to launch some more information about their journey coming up and one thing that we notice a lot around here not just about Aussiebum but it’s not just about the positive reviews it’s obviously about what businesses have learned from the negative reviews so they can improve and grow.
Then they can showcase that online which is important because social proof actually influences consumers to make a purchase and around 66% of customers said the presence of social proof increase their likelihood to buy a product. Share it around and here’s some examples. You might recognize them. Alright so what do we do? We make sure we keep a cool head and reply and we want to make sure we’re turning negative reviews to your advantage to help you win respect and loyalty to show off your service, to boost sales, to signal authenticity and credibility. Solving problems which is important and following up on complaints and also getting valuable insights obviously to improve your business.
We want to avoid being an over reporter and also even if you believe reviewer’s version of events is incorrect it often pays to briefly and politely respond with your side of the story even though you may not be able to win over every unhappy customer. People reading reviews are often savvy enough to see through unreasonable complaints.
As I said don’t be an over reporter. Each review can be reported for only one reason and we will assess it for that specific reasons. We know that for example some options aren’t available in specific circumstances so one example is if you invite a customer to review your business you obviously can’t report their review for not being based on a genuine experience. Makes sense right?
Richard: Yes.
Haley: You need to use the find a reviewer tool before you can report reviews for not being based on a genuine experience because it’ll save you time. Our content integrity team will just get you to do this anyway so it’s best practice to get into the habit early. Super simple and we want to make sure you report consistently and fairly so if a review is being flagged because it’s negative and contains personal information you should probably also report positive reviews for containing personal information and we have a transparent flagging feature so it gives people an overview of reporting activities and star ratings as you can see there.
Also just disagreeing with facts as I said before it doesn’t mean you can remove or flag the review but we’re also not a court of law so we have to take a neutral stance but just reply to show your side with respect, be nice and show up your customer service. Ensure that you care most importantly so content integrity. They’ll notify you of the outcome of each review so don’t panic. You can’t please everyone. Here’s the bottom line. Just use your feedback in a positive way and just show how you can build trust, fix problems and win more business.
Guess what? I’m not going to throw in any stake knives but I will tell you it’s free. You can start for free and I think that’s important because a lot of people ask us and we are an open and transparent platform so a lot of our community are using free. We have a free platform. We have a standard platform and so customers or users can basically do what they need to do. You can add on other modules if you go through and purchase a standard platform which starts at 189 per month but we offer our customers and our users a flexible approach on what they use and buy and when they do that. We recommend only what we identify as a true solution to tackle customer’s challenges and pain points which are all unique to every customer. You can unlock the modules as you need to build your own journey and boost trust.
Richard: Good stuff.
Haley: One thing I will say is we help you with those best practices and we also help you obviously to implement so that’s another thing that’s important so that’ll help you with your reach and your results and your level of support.
Richard: Thank you Haley. That was a quick rip through and now we’re on to, hang on. We’re on to uh…
Haley: Sorry, I bumped the thing there.
Richard: That’s okay, cool. We’re on to our Q and A now so thank you. That was a fast track through the world of Trustpilot. There have been a few questions coming in. One, are there any score ratings put on Trustpilot reviews? Do positive reviews get shown higher up or do negative reviews get priority? How does that work at all?
Haley: We have a Bayesian average and we can talk about that so essentially how it works is that say if somebody has just one review and it’s five stars it wouldn’t t be fair to have them show as a five-star company because it’s just one review right? There’s a lot to it and we actually have a support article which I can share with the audience as well which explains the rating and the trust scores but essentially because it’s an open and transparent platform. People can search that profile page to see the five, the four, the three, the two, the one so the community can actually see those reviews but the weighting is volume and timing.
Richard: Yes there’s no weighting based on the score that’s it’s given?
Haley: Well there are ratings and you can actually see your average rating…
Richard: Weighting.
Haley: Yes, there are. I’ll share that link with you after the call Richard and you can pop that in the notes below.
Richard: Okay cool. So another question’s come in. Who owns the reviews on Trustpilot? If a business uses Trustpilot and then decides not to what happens to the reviews?
Haley: So the service reviews?
Richard: You actually decide not to use Trustpilot. I mean you can’t.
Haley: You can. You can choose to use it and choose not to use it.
Richard: If you choose to have a paid subscription and then stop having a paid subscription then does that just go back to a free or does everything get deleted?
Haley: Yes. No it doesn’t get deleted because we’re an open and transparent platform so the profile page will stay there unlike some other platforms but what will happen is those reviews will stay there and some of the functionality of the platform which includes lots of different features obviously will drop back to the free platform. For the standard you won’t be able to use widgets and things like that for placement on your site. You’ll be able to use the limited number of widgets and other features that you can use on the free platform which is all available on our page. You can check that out.
Richard: So a business doesn’t actually get the choice whether their reviews or reviews on their business are going to be on Trustpilot or not. Consumers create the reviews and then the business just has to put up with it. Is that how it works?
Haley: They can choose what they do with their reviews so what can happen is say for example they’re getting, we don’t censor the reviews. Say for example someone’s getting ones or twos the business doesn’t have to show those ones or twos on their Facebook on their website in the widgets and things like that they can show what they like to show but it will ultimately link back to their profile page which consumers are pretty savvy. They already know how to check out a business from the widgets and they know how to check out Trustpilot as well.
The business, yes they have the option to share the love around as I showed you in those social posts and some of the widgets and things like that before on the visuals but essentially that information is public because we’re an open, transparent platform.
Richard: Okay. Another question are the reviews shown on a website indexed by search by search bots on a page or only on the Trustpilot domain? So they’re actually…
Haley: It’s both.
Richard: Yes, it’s both isn’t it?
Haley: It is, yes. The product reviews and the photo reviews are housed on the businesses’ page and then the service and location reviews are housed on the Trustpilot page.
Richard: Okay Gareth, can I invite you to come in and ask your questions?
Gareth: I would like if, I’m sorry if this is a technical question. You may or may not be able to answer but I’m really quite interested to find out about the indexability of Trustpilot reviews on site. If a bot looks at a landing page that has say 200 reviews are they being indexed by the bot?
Haley: That’s a good question.
Gareth: Part of that content aka adding domain authority waiting to that page or is Trustpilot getting all the benefit?
Haley: No, I believe that they the customer gets the benefit of that as well and so I believe…
Gareth: So the bot does see it.
Haley: I believe…
Gareth: Because there are potentially content issues.
Haley: I’ll confirm that one offline Gareth. I’ve not been asked that but I’ll ask the integrations team about that to confirm from the technical side and we can put a note in the notes.
Gareth: Yes, I’ll provide an example if you want because it they appear almost as like an iframe in a way. It would be good to know that.
Haley: Yes. They are an iframe and also for anyone who wants to know at home we had a question come up yesterday and today so I think it’s probably a question that people do have whether the widgets actually cause issues loading on a page and they do not slow down the page. In fact those iframes that the widgets are all in also load last as well so that’s important to note because I don’t believe the same is true for other reviews from different platforms.
Richard: All right.
Gareth: That’s it for me.
Richard: That’s it for you. Haley, thank you I think this has been a quick, as I say a quick whip through the world of Trustpilot. There’s a certainly a lot to take in but it’s been really good, no thank you. It’s been really good to getting an overview. I guess the key, the key takeaways is whether you like it or not well not you but whether businesses like it or not Trustpilot exists. It’s out there and the businesses that don’t know about it and don’t know that their customers may be leaving reviews on it are at risk of getting bad reviews or getting even from getting good reviews but getting bad reviews and not knowing about it and not knowing how to respond when they do or if they do.
Part of what this webinar is about is having people understand what Trustpilot is and it’s out there whether you like it or not. It’s probably best to start liking it and at least understanding how it works so that you can handle things as they come in and if you choose to use it great. If it’s a good solution for you for businesses terrific but it won’t be for everybody. It will be for some.
Hayley, thank you. That’s been good. Anything you want to say to wrap up Haley?
Haley: No but I actually may just comment on taking those reviews. As I mentioned earlier in the session if it’s product reviews those product reviews can come in from other platforms or go out from Trustpilot because product reviews are housed on the company site so that’s one thing just to note.
Richard: Right as okay.
Haley: As a distinction from service reviews. I should have clarified that on the question but no, thank you so much for having me. Of course you’re well equipped to have those questions with the people that are listening. If anyone has any questions feel free to reach out on LinkedIn and we’ll put some notes afterwards when you pop up the recording.
Richard: Yes, terrific. If anyone’s got any other questions now’s a great time to ask otherwise we’re going to wrap up so please ask away. Whilst you think about that let me just tell you what’s going on in the next upcoming fabulous Concise Webinars. In two weeks’ time we’re going to be, this is the what you need to know about series and the next one in the series is what you need to know about Google my business. There’s been quite a few changes with Google my business lately and more are being planned by Google. They’ve released some information and there’s some things that are changing so it’s important to get on top of that one as well.
Then two weeks after that Tips, Traps and Tools for Managing Social Media. How to improve the way that you may be managing social media for your business and there’s some interesting things happening in that space as well. That’s the next two Concise Webinars coming up.
In the absence of any other questions we’re going to wrap up now. Again thank you very much Haley, for participating today and Gareth, thank you for your voice.
Gareth: I didn’t get a lot of airtime today but it…
Richard: It’s interesting when you don’t speak a lot but normally when you do it’s quite good.
Gareth: Quite, quite good. Yes.
Richard: No, that’s good so Gareth is going to be getting more involved in the session in two weeks’ time which is a Google my business one. That’s definitely in his in space, wheelhouse. If you want any more help or info on any of this please get in touch and again very happy to take questions afterwards. Thank you very much for participating in today’s session everybody and hope you enjoyed. Thanks everyone. Have a good day.
Haley: Thanks for having me. Have a good day.
Richard: Thanks. Bye.
Haley: Bye.
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