By Alison Flangel

Customer recommendations are one of the most essential parts of owning a small business. Not only do customer reviews provide important feedback for business owners themselves, but they encourage other local consumers to give your company a chance. We are going to go through places where you can get customer reviews.

Top 5 Places for Customer Reviews

  1. Angie’s List
    Angie’s List is considered a “higher-end” review site, as users have to pay for an annual membership. This site is geared towards service-based businesses. Reviews can not be anonymous, and are given on an A-F scale. It’s free to set up a page for your company on Angie’s List; once you have yours, encourage your customers who have an account to leave reviews.
  2. Consumer Reports
    Consumer Reports is a nonprofit organization that product tests to write unbiased reviews and recommendations. With 7.7 million products reviewed in the U.S., this site does not accept advertising, and pays for all of their products themselves. This site is very legitimate, and is a great way to gain exposure.
  3. TripAdvisor
    TripAdvisor is a review site that caters to the following industries: travel, hospitality, airlines, entertainment, or restaurants. Currently, as the largest travel site in the world, TripAdvisor has over 200 million reviews taken by customers. If your company has any leg in the travel industry, creating a profile on TripAdvisor can boost customer reviews as well as overall sales.
  4. Yelp
    Yelp is one of the most popular and well-known free review sites. Any business can create a free profile on Yelp, which allows users to set up their own free profiles to review businesses. The great thing about Yelp is as a business owner, you can respond to revieweres that leave comments on your page. Additionally, you can put information on your Yelp page such as store hours and location, so your profile will often come up when people Google your business.
  5. Google My Business
    Google My Business is one of the most accessible review sites, as the reviews show up when you search Google for a business. Receiving reviews, comments, or pictures on Google can boost your business as it is almost always guaranteed to pop-up on customers’ mobile devices.