Nicelocal Has Changed Its Rules for Company Ratings

Nicelocal

NEW YORK, February 14, 2023 (Newswire.com) - Nicelocal has changed its rules for rating businesses. In order to rate a business they've been to, users now have to write a Nicelocal review.

How did Nicelocal's rating system work before?

Before the end of 2022, the rules for rating businesses were the following:

• The user had to have a Nicelocal account.
• A user could only rate (1-5 stars) a few businesses in each category. Website users who rated businesses could decide on their own whether to write a review about them or not.

On the one hand, this approach allowed companies to get more ratings, so their Nicelocal ratings would change more quickly. On the other, this made it possible to spam both positive and negative ratings.

What's changed?

In order to rate a business whose services they've used, users now have to write a review as well. It doesn't matter whether the review is positive or negative as long as it's based on real experience. Review moderation still takes the same amount of time -- up to three business days.

Nicelocal believes that this approach is better and fairer for both users and the companies in its catalog. After all, users would much rather read about how real people experienced and interacted with a business than just see how many stars it's earned.

Advantages for businesses:

1. They get more feedback from real clients. And the more reviews a business gets, the more objective its Nicelocal rating will be.

2. It enables them to work with reviews more actively. Marketing experts and business owners will be able to get more reliable information about a given business in order to analyze its strengths and weaknesses. This will enable business owners to constantly work on improving the quality of their service.

3. It will make Nicelocal reviews more transparent and fair by minimizing the possibility of review spamming intended to boost a business's position in Nicelocal's search results.

Advantages for users:

1. They will have access to more Nicelocal reviews. This will make it even easier for them to choose the right business, since Nicelocal will contain even more information from real customers.

2. They will get a more objective impression of a given business. Before someone can write a review, they have to analyze the company's service and remember what they liked and disliked about it. If they do this, the rating given to the business will be more objective.

Users will also benefit from Nicelocal reviews becoming fairer, since a company card's position in the catalog is one of the key factors users base their decisions on when choosing a business. 

These changes to the way Nicelocal reviews work will make competition between the companies on the platform more transparent and fair. For businesses, it's a great opportunity to get more reviews and more information about the quality of their service, how in-demand it is, and which issues it might need to address.