What could make a searcher click on your website over your competitors? An excellent 5-star rating on your product would do the trick. One of Google's ranking factors is ratings and reviews. We'll discuss how you can take advantage of this ranking factor and improve your SEO click-thru rates with ratings and reviews.
Why Reviews Are Important To Google
Google's algorithm is built on emulating what people want. If you think this way you'll align yourself with providing the best possible experience and improve your organic rankings naturally. So why are reviews valuable?
Because potential buyers use product reviews to help them make purchasing decisions. If Google pulls reviews out of pages and displays them in their results pages, users can efficiently comparison shop a specific product without even visiting the companies website. They're most likely to buy the product from the site that has the highest review with a fair amount of reviews.If users can comparison shop right from the search engine results pages, that means that searchers have fewer pages they need to view, can make purchasing decisions faster and ultimately makes Google more valuable to the user. Faster, more efficient shopping means that the user will likely turn to Google again when they have a need.
Why Reviews Are Important To You
When someone does a search in Google, and they are searching for a product, Google returns all types of results. These results include:
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Paid Ads
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Product Listing Ads
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Videos
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Images
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Local Results
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People Also Asked
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Quick Answers
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Organic Listings
All of these results displayed in an attempt to provide the user with what they want. How can you draw a user to your listing over your competitor? Product reviews can give you a competitive advantage if you can obtain high reviews and a fair number of reviews. We'll cover how to get more reviews later, but next, let's talk about getting reviews set up on your website.
Ratings / Reviews Apps
To have product reviews, you have to have a way to collect reviews from customers. Your e-commerce platform may come with a built-in product review app, or you may have to install an app or plugin. If that isn't possible, there are online reviews services such as YotPo that can display product reviews on your website. Most ratings allow customers to rate a product with a star rating from 1 to 5. 1 being the worst rating and five being the best. They also allow customers to leave comments about the product to help potential new buyers while making the purchasing decision. To display the reviews on your site, you will need to nave the structured data added to your website on the product level pages.
Structured Data
Structured data allows you to identify specific pieces of data on your page and pass those portions of data to Google and other platforms to display your content in an organized way. It ensures that the content is always formatted the same way to show it in their results. To better understand structured data think about the products in a store. Each product has or should have the following:
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Product Name
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Image
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SKU
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Description
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Price
The structured data is usually wrapped around each one of these specific types of data so that Google knows what the product name is, what the SKU is, etc. If you sold shampoo your product code might look like this:<h1> Rehydrating Shampoo</h1><p>Sku: 132k21</p><img src="rehydratingshampoo.png"><p>You will love how clean your hair will feel after using our rehydrating shampoo.</p><p><strong>$15 USD</strong></p>When you look at this code above, you can see that there is nothing that really stands out to say to a machine where the product name starts and ends, where the description is or the price. Structured data ensures that it is clear what areas of the code is the product name, the description, the price, and the SKU. Look below after applying the microdata that identified what each item is for this product:<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Product"><h1 itemprop="name"> Rehydrating Shampoo</h1><p itemprop="sku">Sku: 132k21</p><img src="rehydratingshampoo.png" itemprop="image" /><p itemprop="description">You will love how clean your hair will feel after using our rehydrating shampoo.</p><p><strong>$<span itemprop="price">15</span> USD</strong></p>As you can see, now that the data is more structured, Google could easily extract the name, image, SKU, price, and description of all your pages had this microdata included. Microdata is also available for reviews, which allows Google to add product ratings in Google Shopping results and rich snippets listed within organic listings.
Review Structured Data
A part of the microdata available for a product is the review microdata, which looks like the following:<div itemprop="aggregateRating" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/AggregateRating"> <span itemprop="ratingValue">5.0</span> stars, based on <span itemprop="reviewCount">300</span> reviews. </div>What you see is that for each product, you would be providing the aggregate rating for the product and then a count of the total number of reviews for that product.If your e-commerce system already has this baked in, then your good to go. Otherwise, you may need to work with a developer to have it adequately implemented into your site.
Garnering Reviews
Once your site can collect and display reviews, you have to get them. For small to medium-sized businesses, it can be hard to get people to offer up feedback unless they feel strongly about the product.You may need to create an outreach campaign that reaches back out to those who have bought from you, asking them to provide a review. Maybe consider offering something of value, such as a coupon code or discount off they're next purchase or even an Amazon gift card.
To ensure that you obtain reviews for future purchases, consider creating a follow-up email campaign that sends out to your customers approximately ten days after they make a purchase, asking for a review of the product. Holding the email for ten days gives them ample time to receive the product and make an initial decision.