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Bryan Eisenberg has an interesting article over on Clickz - How To Use Customer Reviews To Increase Conversion - where he explores how companies are now using the power of their target audience/customers to create product reviews, which in turn can lead to conversion.

As he says we are all swayed by product reviews when we purchase holidays, books, music, etc from online stores. On our eMarketing course clients, without fail, all our clients say that customer reviews play a huge role in their customer buying decision. Here are some of the stats he comes up with:

1. According to JupiterResearch, 77 percent of online shoppers use reviews and ratings when purchasing.
2. Reviews drive 21 percent higher purchase satisfaction and 18 percent higher loyalty, according to Foresee Results.
3. In a study of 2,000 shoppers, 92 percent deemed customer reviews as “extremely” or “very” helpful, finds eTailing Group.

Bryan goes on to offer some useful advice on how to make your customer reviews even more effective. If you don’t sell products online, you may want to look at customer testimonials, case studies and even blog comments. All of these are very good for adding value to your product, service and/or company and for generating customer buy-in.

It’s a subject that we cover in both our eMarketing Award course and our soon-to-be-launched Search Engine Optimisation Workshop: Meta Descriptions. According to Wikipedia:

Unlike the keyword attribute, the description attribute is supported by most major search engines, like Yahoo! and Live Search, while Google will fall back on this tag when information about the page itself is requested (e.g. using the related: query). The description attribute provides a concise explanation of a web page’s content.

Generally speaking people tend to either not use Meta Descriptions or use the same one for every page of a website.

Well, be careful! You might be missing out on a great opportunity to convert would-be customer into buyers from the search engine results themselves.

To make sure you’re creating the right meta descriptions, head over to the Google Webmaster Central blog, which offers some good advice on how to create good meta decriptions and even tells you what makes for a bad description.