Do you reply to user reviews on GP?

Insplisity

Hi,

just wondering, if you guys bother replying to user reviews?

I have dozens of apps and I do it once a week. It takes me about an hour, but I'm not sure, if it's worthwhile. I know that Google recommends that we reply to user reviews, but I wonder, does it have any positive effects?

I'm pretty sure that Google has some kind of "Quality Score" (like in AdWords) for our accounts and/or apps. What I'd be interested to know is if interacting with our users improves our QS.

What do you think?

szymon247

I do. I reply quickly when there is a negative one. I reply once a week or so to positive ones.

Personally, if I start getting more coming in I will probably only reply to negative ones (as sometimes it influences people to change their rating) and outstanding ones (I wouldn't have heart not to if someone tells me that they really love a certain app).

As for whether it does something, I know Google kind of hints at it, but I did not notice anything changing as far as app positioning goes after replying to comments.

Apps

I do it on my popular apps (after all, those are the only ones that have reviews).
I try to use the main keyword of my app in my reply, but not always. Maybe keywords matter in the replies as well, but we should not overdo it I think.

Insplisity

Thanks for your input, guys.

I was once told by my GP Business Dev manager (when I asked him what to do to improve my organic reach) and he listed a number of things, like use material design, make localizations, etc. - and he said to reply to user reviews.

Maybe that's not a ranking factor, but more like a "soft skill" type of thing. I didn't want to drill more into this with him, because I'm sure, that he would not reveal what counts for ranking and what not.

I talked with him about this about a years ago. Maybe things have changed, I don't know.

But I have a friend, who has a very popular game (with 10's of thousands of DL's per day) and he doesn't reply to user reviews. Nevertheless, he gets featured by Google all the time.

I'm just wondering about this because it takes up a lot of my time which I'd like to spend otherwise. Maybe I'd need to look into hiring someone for 2-3 hours per week for user interaction.

holyoak.com

If an app is getting 10s of thousands of downloads a day, I wouldn't necessarily worry about it. But for apps where you're trying to build up a user base, seeing a responsive developer seems to help sell the app.