Today, we’re launching an important and eagerly-awaited feature for Reputation Manager. It’s called Showcase Reviews and, as the name suggests, it allows you to showcase your customers’ reviews beautifully on your website.
The addition of Showcase Reviews means you can now use Reputation Management as an end-to-end solution for managing reviews.
With Monitor Reviews, you can track and respond to reviews on 80+ websites, all in one place.
With Get Reviews, you can collect customer feedback and generate new reviews via email, SMS, kiosks and shareable links.
And with Showcase Reviews, you can now easily collate your best reviews and display them proudly on your website.
Monitor Reviews → Get Reviews → Showcase Reviews
It’s almost like we had it planned all along ?
But we didn’t just build Showcase Reviews to give you an end-to-end review management solution. Our goal with Showcase Reviews was to make adding and managing reviews on your site as easy as possible.
Why? Because as it turns out, it’s not that easy to begin with…
Why is manually maintaining reviews on websites such a pain?
Chances are you (or your clients) have already got some great online reviews to draw from, so it’s just a matter of placing them on your site and – hey, presto! – powerful social proof to help drive up conversion rates.
Except it’s not really that simple. Here’s why…
The Chore of Sourcing Reviews
Firstly, there’s the issue of having your customer reviews spread across a ton of review platforms. You might have to trawl through hundreds of reviews on dozens of sites to find the juiciest reviews.
The Struggle to Show Reviews
Next, there’s the pain of actually getting them on your site. Review sites seem to pride themselves in making it frustratingly hard to embed reviews – Google My Business doesn’t even offer a review widget and instead asks users to wrestle an API into submission.
So if you’re going down the embed route, you’re missing out on all your Google reviews, right off the bat. Then there’s the task of picking just one review site’s widget to embed, or resorting to a hodgepodge of multiple embeds worthy of Dr Frankenstein. Yuck!
The only alternative? Build something yourself! Which is fine if you a) can code, or b) have money to spare for a web developer. And let’s be honest: that’s not most people.
The Pain of Maintaining Reviews
Finally, there’s all the ongoing maintenance. Manually updating your site with the freshest reviews takes time, so it’s easy to understand why it can often get neglected.
But it really shouldn’t! For example, allowing your reviews to collect dust might actually be hurting you. Our own research shows that 84% of people believe that reviews older than three months aren’t relevant. Keeping your reviews up to date doesn’t just give you fresh content to publish, it also helps boost conversion rates.
Take the pain away with Showcase Reviews
Display reviews from across the web
With Showcase Reviews, you can combine reviews from 80+ sites to show the full breadth of your online reputation.
Pick the best reviews from all the top sites*, as well as 40+ industry-specific niche sites. You can also add in any first-party reviews you’ve been collecting with Get Reviews.
*apart from Yelp, which is very strict about reusing its review content
Widgets that look great anywhere
We have two out-of-the-box widgets to choose from: carousel and list. (And four if you count the single, double or triple column layouts available in the list widget!)
Every widget variation is fully responsive, so it’ll fit perfectly at home anywhere on your website. Display reviews loudly and proudly on your homepage, drop a widget in your sidebar, create a dedicated testimonial page with a wall of reviews – it’s your call.
Share reviews in style
Our three default widget styles – Modern, Classic, and Bootstrap – will look great on any site, but we also know you’d like them to match your brand. That’s why we allow you to customize the design from top to bottom.
We’ve made it super simple to create an on-brand widget with no coding required. Change the colours, font, text size and text-alignment so it perfectly matches your brand. Add a drop shadow and border so it blends seamlessly with your site. Once you’re happy, just copy and paste the lightweight embed code into your site.
Dynamic and real-time
Say goodbye to static review widgets. Showcase Reviews will automatically display all your latest and greatest reviews on your site as soon as they land in Reputation Manager.
But rather than opening up the floodgates, you can use filters to maintain control.
Only want to display four and five star reviews? No problem.
Only want the freshest reviews? Just set a date range to only show recent reviews.
Want to exclude certain review sites? Simply deselect them.
Seen an out-of-place review that’s still slipped through for selection? Add it to a blacklist and it’ll never see the light of day.
Complete control
If you want to retain even greater control, you can manually curate the exact reviews to show in your widget. And with all your reviews in one place, it’s easy to find your most glowing reviews as well as to decide the order in which they appear.
Know your code? Build your own
If you need more customization, you can use a JSON feed to build your own widget by reinventing the design and layout.
JSON feeds contain the same review data as our out-of-the-box widgets and provide the same control over which reviews are shown.
How to build your own Showcase Reviews widget
Watch this short video to learn how to build an on-brand review widget in minutes.
Read the Showcase Reviews how-to guide on our Help Center for more detailed information.
Looking for inspiration?
We’ve put together four live examples of Showcase Reviews in action.
Start building today
We’re really excited about the release of Showcase Reviews. Not only are we allowing you to build beautiful, on-brand widgets in minutes, we’re also taking the pain out of the ongoing maintenance of reviews on your website.
We love it so much that we’re now using it on our own site to display the reviews we’ve received from customers like you.
We’d love to hear your feedback in the comments below. And once you’ve set up your gallery of glowing reviews, why not share it with us on Twitter?
