It is a simple truth. Yet while many of the biggest players on the web know it, most webmasters overlook the fact that customer reviews can provide for a source of constantly updated content that potential customers would find to be an invaluable source of information.
It is also true that by simply combining customer how to get 5 star google reviews reviews with RSS feeds, you too can ride a new wave of shopping (or social) traffic.
Traffic! It is the one problem that webmasters continually face, and which can NEVER be fully solved. How to find visitors in a reliable, repeatable, and cost-effective way. Because without visitors all your beautiful content might as well be locked away in a vault–no one is ever going to see it. If the purpose of your site is to sell, you will sell nothing. If the purpose of your site is to build a social network, you might remain its only member. You need traffic to succeed. Lots of it.
In this article I am going to consider just one traffic building initiative–one that happens to be enjoying a growing wave of popularity. It involves harnessing the power of RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds to build traffic. You are probably aware of RSS as a means of syndicating news content. Websites that produce news have been building XML-formatted news stories for years. These files are retrieved by other websites, the new stories are extracted, and the content is placed (on these publisher sites) before a public ever-hungry for new information.
The arrangement has worked well for everyone. Those who have displayed the RSS feeds have gained content to feed their visitors. Those who have produced the RSS feeds have obtained backlinks to their websites, which has helped to bring in new traffic. In fact the arrangement has worked so well that webmasters have been encouraged to move beyond simple news syndication.
This makes a lot of sense. News articles hardly represent the only content that surfers are looking for. Recipes, shopping coupons, MP3s, schedules for local events… The list of possible things that people search for is endless, and if you can provide “new” instances of such information, then RSS represents an ideal means of getting that information in front of the people searching for it.
Sure, it used to be the case that everything you wrapped up in an RSS feed had to take a very simple form. Every item in your news feed was reduced to a title, a url (to the source of the information), and a short snippet, or description, to hook the reader. But RSS has sprouted wings over the years and now you can package practically any data structure into a feed that you like. Because of this there is no reason why we cannot suitably package customer reviews into a feed.
But what exactly would we put into an RSS-formatted customer review feed? And is this a good idea? Let me answer the second question first. Yes! It is a very good idea to package customer reviews as RSS feeds. Why? Because if you think about it, a customer review is very much like a news item. It is a packaged opinion that has been released for the express purpose of swaying the mindset of someone who is looking for information on the very topic it addresses, whatever that topic might be. To the person searching for the information, this review is news indeed, and more often than not it is welcome news.