Introduction
SEO and reviews are two of those most obscure topics. Everyone agrees there are some relations between the two, but no one knows precisely what or how exactly. In this article, I’ll try to demystify how reviews can impact your SEO and where reviews don’t have a significant impact.
The first thing to clarify is that service and product reviews have different roles when it comes to SEO, we will cover them in separate sections.
Note if you are busy and don’t have time to read it, then here is a quick 1-min video highlighting the main aspects of SEO for reviews:
Common misconceptions
First, let's address the common consensus what you will find from the 1st ranked article on Google when it comes to reviews SEO:
You might heard phrases like the above, “Google likes fresh content”, “Unique user-generated content is favorable by search engines”, and similar phrases. However, the truth today is that reviews themselves don’t get ranked much in search results even though they are included in the index.
You can find this out by doing a simple test like the following: we search some keywords that only appear in the review text to make sure that they are indexed, Let's use an exact match query with quotes:
As you can see, Google returned the review referenced, which means its good news reviews improve your SEO, right? Even though they are crawled, when we remove the exact match, we don’t get reviews referenced anymore, as you can see below:
This means that, in theory, Google can rank pages based on your review content, but in practice, this happens very rarely unless the review matches a particular long tail keyword that you didn’t have in your landing page meta keywords. However, this will not likely drive significant organic traffic.
I’m not saying there is no place for reviews on landing pages optimized for specific keywords, especially when combined with correct page linking. However, that might work only when you have someone with technical SEO chops and the ability to test and validate content impact on your organic traffic. For the rest of us who expect a significant organic traffic boost, just placing a widget with reviews that change daily is likely to be a disappointment at best.
Now, with that said, there are other benefits from reviews apart from content alone, and that mainly relates to your ratings. Let's go over them next.
Off-site rating / review profiles
This is probably the most significant benefit you can expect from SEO is getting good ratings on external Review sites that rank very well on Google, for example, Trustpilot:
For “Brand keyword”+reviews, an external review site with your rating will almost always outrank your homepage. This means that people unfamiliar with your brand on Google will likely check for social proof before deciding to become a customer.
To benefit from this, make sure either you don’t have any profile externally that ranks well, or you have a good enough rating on one or more sites that rank you, or at the minimum, your rating is better than your competitors on those sites. The reason for competitors is that sites like Trustpilot will advertise them on your profile page if their rating is higher than you:
Ad rating
The next way rating can benefit you SEO-wise is by displaying your review score on the ad. Here is an example searching for “flowers delivery in Glasgow”:
There are two conditions to appear on the ad rating:
- Have an average rating above 3.5
- Use Approved Review platform by Google or Google reviews
You can find all the details here: https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/2375474?hl=en
Note that even if you are eligible for a rating on your ads, this doesn’t mean that it will show up every time, as this is controlled by Google, but when they do show up, the CTR for the ad link will likely outperform other ads without or with lower ratings.
Category page rating
Another way to leverage rating is by adding rating data to your category page that is relevant specifically to that category. You can think of your category as a product because Google shows ratings under brand sites only if they are related to a specific product but not the site itself.
Here is one example of how it can look like:
For this to work, you would need to have a widget that enables ratings based on different criteria, for example, customers that bought in a specific location like Southampton; here is how we can do it with the StackTome widget:
Long tail SEO
Lastly, I do want to mention the potential of using review content for long-tail SEO. This is only feasible if you have an in-house SEO specialist who understands long-term impacts and on-site keyword & link optimization. So it’s not for everyone, but for those who have resources, reviews could benefit from optimizing your landing page content.
The first thing to leverage is the review content. If you have a sufficient number of reviews, at least 1000+, you can use keyword matches to find relevant ones for your landing page, like here an example:
With StackTome, you can go even one step further; you can even set synonym matches like follows:
This allows you to leverage more of your reviews to provide more unique content for any given landing page you are targeting.
Another optimization you can do is create on-site page links in the reviews themselves. This way, you can signal to Google that certain pages are more necessary on your site than others, boosting their ranking on Google as well. This strategy can work especially when targeting peak season and boosting your unique pages like Valentine's products or Christmas.
We can do this with StackTome as well by defining which links we want to appear for specific keywords, and the widget or API would inject them automatically:
The other benefit of optimizing pages with reviews is that reviews can be rich in text specific to the customer's language. Visitors who visit your landing pages will likely be more engaged with the text/media and more likely to improve ranking due to a lower bounce rate. However, this all depends on how well you can pick reviews that are relevant to your landing pages.
Product star rating on Google Results
This is the easiest way to get some SEO benefits from your product pages. If you have a widget that exposes ratings to Google bot correctly, visitors will be able to see rating stars on the Google result page:
Note that for this to work, you must use a review provider that is approved by Google, or you will need to upload the reviews to the Google Shopping feed manually. More details on this here:
For full details, see here: https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/14620160
For Product ratings to be displayed in search results, it is mandatory that you have a minimum of 50 reviews across all of your products.
Ratings on Google Shopping feed
The other way your product rating can be discovered is through Google Shopping Feed. This is more important than main Google results, as your product page will be shown together with other competitors, and ratings can help you increase the CTR on your product pages. This is relevant for sponsored shopping ads:
As well for organic shopping feed list:
For a rating to appear in the feed, you will need to make sure you are using a review aggregator that is supported by Google if you don’t want the hassle of uploading product reviews manually.
However, in some cases, even when you are eligible to get your ratings shown on Google, they might still not appear. In this case, you will need to contact the Google Product Rating team directly to review your Google merchant account - https://support.google.com/merchants/gethelp - usually, they have to enable the ratings manually in this case.
Bonus - Review summaries
If you have 1000s of product reviews, there is another tool you can leverage called review summaries & topics. It won’t have as strong of an impact on SEO, but it could help you engage customers more on your product pages, which can have indirect benefits to SEO as well - reduce bounce rate & increase CTR, which are well-known factors that impact page ranks on Google. Here is an example of how Amazon does it:
To be fair, Amazon has been a pioneer in customer reviews, and they have by far the largest dataset to make it work. For a regular D2C eCom brand, it might be a challenge to replicate a similar approach, even when having enough reviews, as most review providers don’t provide AI integrations that would match a similar level of functionality as Amazon. However, once this becomes available, it will be an SEO improvement and likely improve your product page conversion rate.
Summary
Here, I covered the most relevant aspects of customer service/site & product review SEO benefits and went over misconceptions and limitations of review content. To sum up, it's not about reviews themselves but the rating that has the most significant impact on your SEO, especially the rating on third-party review sites like Trustpilot rather than your site. Apart from rating, review content can have a slight benefit if you have in-house SEO expertise to optimize the reviews; if not, it's unlikely to yield much benefits.
As for product reviews, the most obvious thing to do is get your product ratings published by Google. Apart from that, optimizing your product pages for visitor engagement might have indirect benefits to SEO as well, but that is even more useful for your PDP conversion rates.
If you would like to get the most benefits from SEO in terms of optimizing your rating, try out StackTome today with a free 14-day trial for a fraction of the cost of other paid platforms.
