Whether you're listening or not, your customers are talking. They are expressing their opinions to your potential market, and these days no one is holding back!

Your customers will talk to their friends, blog, tweet and post their opinion about you and your company on any review site they can get their hands on. This can be scary, if you don't get the chance to respond to their positive or negative review! Well, it gets even better because sometimes, the most authoritative review sites can rank higher than many people's own business name.

Potentially, while doing a search for your business name the search results could return the listings of these same authoritative consumer review sites displaying an aggregate of all your customers' reviews (good or bad). To make it 100% clear...this means that these reviews show directly in the search results, and in the case of Google, may even be shown on your Place Page listing! Combined with the fact that these sites tend to rank at the top of the SERPs, it's very easy to see how they would have such a huge impact on your ability to attract new customers online.

The growing strength of online consumer review sites can either be very scary for you and your business or very profitable! Now is the time to incorporate the strongest of these consumer review sites into your SEO or Online Reputation Management strategy before your good name gets away from you. Let's lay out the consumer review sites that really matter!

The top seven consumer review sites are:
(based on the most influential and consistently high ranking in all of the search engines)