Attaining Google reviews is very important for your website, not only will it help build trust among visitors and help you rank higher in the map pack and lead to more local clicks.
This help will help your business with local SEO, you can also use your Google reviews as a snippet that search engines can potentially display for many broad searches on a national level, increasing click-through rates to your website.
So, Google reviews can help you rank better and increase your click-through rate, which is a win-win situation.
Having provided SEO services to clients for more than ten years, MaxWeb Solutions understands just how important Google Reviews are for any SEO strategy. To ensure that you are aware of the importance of Google Reviews for your SEO, we delve into Google Reviews and their impact on your SEO here.
What Are Google Reviews?
Google reviews are customer reviews left on the Google platform. These reviews will appear in your Google My Business listing and Google Maps.
According to research, Google reviews account for 73% of all reviews left on the web.
When a user is looking for a product or service they will often encounter your Google reviews and have a look through them before deciding to enquire about your services or products.
Up to 93% of people actually read reviews before making a purchase decision, so it is important that your business has genuine customer reviews and that these are accessible to visitors on your website.
As generating Google reviews can influence your map pack position, getting more reviews can in turn, drive more people to your website.
Reviews and The Local Map Pack
Google reviews influence the local map pack. The map pack will be familiar to you; it is the Google Maps listing and usually x3 or more businesses listed that provide a product or service in a local area.
Here you will find the business name. phone number, directions, link to website, reviews and other information such as opening hours or other snippets of information such as business specialities.
When you consider 1/3 of all mobile searches are location-specific, you can see the importance of ranking high on the map pack and the SEO benefits this can bring to your business in terms of clicks.
How Much Influence Do Google Reviews Have On SEO?
Google never states how much influence reviews or other website elements have on SEO, but it is widely accepted that they are part of the ranking algorithm and influence the map pack.
It makes sense; each review is a form of approval or disapproval by real customers. Businesses with a lot of good reviews should benefit from higher ranking in local SEO as Google wants its users to be satisfied with the results it returns through Google search.
Improving Your SEO With Google Reviews
Now we have established that Google reviews are important from an SEO perspective, you may be wondering how you can gain more Google reviews.
This is entirely up to the customer, although we can offer them some encouragement.
You can showcase your Google reviews on your website and ask people to leave a review, this will engage returning customers happy with your service.
You can also ask customers to leave a review when you send them a follow-up email post-purchase asking for feedback.
A novel way of asking for reviews if you are a services is by using QR codes provided by companies such as tap on reviews. Here you can have the QR code printed onto a placemat if you work in a service industry such as a bar or restaurant, this can encourage people to leave a review after a meal or sitting.
Some people also leave a link to leave a Google review in the signature of their email. This can be a none pressurised way to encourage people to leave a review and can be a simple but effective measure to implement on your outbound emails.
Review Velocity
One aspect of collecting Google reviews that can impact local SEO and the map pack is review velocity. This is the rate and frequency you pick up new reviews.
If one business once picked up a lot of reviews but these have dried up, it could indicate that people are no longer using this business as much as they once did.
New reviews could be weighted more strongly compared to older reviews. Again this makes sense. If for example you are looking for Pizza delivery near me and a pizza shop show up with 500 Google reviews, you may be inclined to think this is a popular pizza shop. But it could have fallen under new management, and the last 20 reviews have all been 1 star, so there could be a time-based factor placed on recency; the search engines will monitor the frequency of Googe reviews so they can promote businesses that are performing well right now and not historically to local search users.
Review Diversity
Getting a wide range of diverse reviews is also important and will help us identify with more keywords. We would like to get reviews talking about products, delivery, customer service, value, ease of use, issue resolution and in-depth user experiences.
If your business has lots of 5-star reviews with ambiguous replies such as “great service”, this is not as helpful as a detailed review, which some evidence suggests, Google prioritise.
Whilst we can not dictate how many words a customer uses when leaving a review, we can encourage them in the wording we use when asking for a review. Detailed reviews are more helpful form a customer perspective so this should be encouraged where possible.
Get Help Growing Your Organic SEO
Here at Maxweb, we have been helping local companies grow at both local and national levels in organic search performance.
If you would like to optimise your website for more local search, please simply get in touch with us today to find out how Maxweb can help your business grow.
Posted on Thursday, August 8th, 2024 in SEO.
