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By Jefferson Graham, USA TODAY
LOS ANGELES — Mike Dorausch is always on the lookout for new chiropractic clients in Los Angeles. To help spread the word about his services, he gently asks patients to say nice things about him at one of the many customer-review sites popping up on the Web.
"Online reviews is how people find us," Dorausch says. About 80% of his new business stems from customers finding online reviews about him and booking appointments, he says. Picking up on a trend started by the travel industry, business-listing sites by Google (GOOG), Yahoo (YHOO) and others including Yelp and Citysearch let customers rave about their favorites, or complain about poor service. That helps consumers get real-life opinions about local businesses and services. For businesses attempting to reach consumers, the feedback spreads the word in a way ads can't. But perhaps more important, the reviews can dramatically raise a website's visibility in search engines. Reviews and star ratings are often cited in search results. A Google search for "Los Angeles chiropractor," for instance, includes not only links to websites and descriptions, but also a 10-item list of local chiropractors with their addresses, reviews, star ratings and a local map at the top of the page. "You're seeing a lot of businesses fighting to get into that top 10," says Greg Sterling, an analyst at Sterling Market Intelligence. "This is the most privileged position on the Internet. It's a big, prominent placement. If you're there, you benefit, and if you're not, you don't." Sterling says businesses will spend about $1.7 billion this year trying to reach potential local customers online, growing to $2.2 billion in 2009. Dramatic growth at local level Local listing sites are showing dramatic growth. Traffic at Google Maps is up 25% year to year. Relative newcomer Yelp, founded in 2004, is up 129%. Yelp is all about members waxing enthusiastic (or critical) about everything from hotels, restaurants and local shops to neighborhood favorites including best city parks and cool street corners. Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman says business owners have to walk a fine line in how enthusiastically they seek reviews. "Some business owners will post their reviews on their door, or on the counter, to show them off, and that's a subtle way of asking customers to write about them," he says. "If you go too aggressive, the community could get upset, and you could end up hurting yourself." "Yelpers" will write negative things if they think they were harassed to offer their opinions, he says. Dorausch feels he's subtle about it. "No one has ever gotten mad," he says. Yes, he does have signs in the office asking visitors to leave their Gmail address (you must have a Google account to leave reviews on Google's local pages), but he won't ask before working on your back. Dorausch says he waits for patients to say how they enjoyed their visit. "That's where the opportunity is to ask if they'd like to share that in a review," he says. (He follows up with an e-mail with Web addresses for review sites.) "I would think most businesses would not go wrong with that approach," he says. Most customers take up his offer to leave a review, he says. More important, potential customers read them. "People look for somebody in their area and read what other people have written. Do these people practice what they preach? They take a lot of value in that." Still, readers should tread with some caution as they sift through reviews, says Chris Winfield, president of 10e20, a New York firm that helps local businesses with their online marketing campaigns. "As a reader, you have to take the reviews with a grain of salt, because you just don't know who really wrote it," says Winfield. "Fake reviews are all over the Web." Were they written by actual customers — or friends of the business owner as a favor? Or perhaps even by the business owner, under a phony name? Getting into trouble Winfield says he's seen some businesses aggressively seek reviews by offering free iPods or gift certificates in exchange for a client taking the time to go online and wax poetic. But to be so brazen can get you in trouble. TripAdvisor, the most-visited travel site, has strict rules about reviews that were obtained via remuneration: Asking is OK — but rewarding is forbidden. "If somebody was being incentivized, it would impact the degree of trust in the review," says Brian Payea, TripAdvisor's trade relations manager. TripAdvisor would remove such a review from its site, he says. It has lots to choose from. TripAdvisor's 6 million members have written 15 million reviews since the site was launched in 2002. At Google, where the number of reviews are "in the seven figures," the company has no such policy. Readers are savvy enough to winnow out the phonies, says product manager Carter Maslan. "It's a free marketplace for people to leave their opinions," says Maslan. "When I see a business that seems like it's an infomercial, I can see through it, and make my own judgment."
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