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Don’t set up a review kiosk in your place of business to ask for reviews. A single IP address being shared amongst multiple reviews on a given platform can lead to those reviews being flagged and removed.

Don’t narrow your focus to a single platform. Diversity in where your business has reviews posted is insurance against reputation loss should something happen to your reviews on any one of the platforms.

When a customer is willing to share an email, follow up within a few days to ask them to write a review about their experience. Give them a choice of platforms so that they can pick their favorite.

The changing distribution of middle star reviews means that it’s more critical than ever for businesses to create a review program to solicit a larger volume of reviews from people who may not have thought to leave one before.

BrightLocal’s 2020 edition of their annual survey to over 1,000 users in the US, 79% of consumers say they trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations from friends or family. However, if we look at the overall trend, we can see that 10% fewer respondents trust online reviews compared to 2014.

Users are more web-savvy than ever, and they can tell when there are suspicious patterns in reviews–like when a business has all 5-star reviews that were submitted all within the same time period. However, it also means that consumers can sort through potentially negative or fake reviews as one-offs when one or two individuals were perhaps having a bad day and took it out on your business. 

If Google cares this much about ratings, review text, responses, and emerging elements like place topics and attributes, any local brand you’re marketing should see these factors as a priority.

In 2017, when I wrote the original version of this post, contributors to the Local Search Ranking Factors survey placed Google star ratings down at #24 in terms of local rankings influence. In 2020, this metric has jumped up to spot #8 — a leap of 16 spots in just three years.

local SEOs have noticed patterns over the years like searches with the format of “best X in city” (e.g. best burrito in Dallas) appearing to default to local results made up of businesses that have earned a minimum average of four stars.

1. Reputation In Your Title Tag You have control over the meta title tag and can change it as we outline above to include your overall rating and review count. Especially if you are optimizing this title tag for a page dedicated to reviews you can also let the user know you are displaying all of your reviews in one place, offering them a lot of data and efficiency. GatherUp customers would benefit here from showing all of their 1st- and 3rd-party reviews in the Review Widget. 2. Reputation In Your Meta Description

allows anyone logged into a Google account to thumbs-up any review they like

Google doesn’t prevent anyone from hitting the button, including owners of the business being reviewed.

60 percent of the brands had earned at least one like somewhere in their review corpus.

As Alan Kent of Google recently said on Twitter “a merchant’s product page with user reviews is not considered a “product review page” in this context.”

Identify product reviews. Google also recently clarified that structured data may help Google identify product review-type content, but it is one of many ways Google identifies such content. Danny Sullivan wrote, “as for structured data, it might help us better identify if something is a product review, but we do not solely depend on it.”

Users read an average of 10 reviews for a given business but want to see roughly 40 reviews to trust the accuracy of the star rating

When evaluating a local business, in this order, users look at star ratings, then review quality, recency and length of reviews

Google is now the dominant reviews platform

Please note that Google told us that this product reviews update will take approximately three weeks to roll out and we are only now in the start of week two. So, the data may change but generally when Google rolls out these updates, the bulk of the impact you would see from an update would be in the first few days of that rollout.

Data providers show December was bigger than April

Semrush did tell us that the November 2021 core update was bigger than the December product reviews update, but they are two different types of updates and that makes sense. In fact, The December product reviews update is not showing huge amounts of movement compared to the November core update, Semrush said

Google is now showing review rich results only for:A clear set of schema types for review snippetsNon “self-serving” reviewsReviews that have the name property within the markup

How to influence the organic product carouselIn Google’s blog post, they detailed three factors that are key inputs: Structured Data on your website, providing real-time product information via Merchant Center, along with providing additional information through Manufacturer Center.This section of the article will explore Google’s guidance, along with some commentary of what I’ve noticed based on my own experiences.

Make sure your product markup is validatedThe key here is to make sure Product Markup with Structured Data on your page adheres to Google’s guidelines and is validated.

Submit your product feed to Google via Merchant CenterThis is where it starts to get interesting. By using Google’s Merchant Center, U.S. product feeds are now given the option to submit data via a new destination.The difference here for Google is that retailers are able to provide more up-to-date information about their products, rather than waiting for Google to crawl your site (what happens in step 1).Checking the box for “Surfaces across Google” gives you the ability to grant access to your websites product feed, allowing your products to be eligible in areas such as Search and Google Images.For the purpose of this study we are most interested in Search, with the Organic Product Carousel in mind. “Relevance” of information is the deciding factor of this feature.Google states that in order for this feature of Search to operate, you are not required to have a Google Ads campaign. Just create an account, then upload a product data feed.Commentary by PPC Expert Kirk Williams:“Setting up a feed in Google Merchant Center has become even more simple over time since Google wants to guarantee that they have the right access, and that retailers can get products into ads! You do need to make sure you add all the business information and shipping/tax info at the account level, and then you can set up a feed fairly easily with your dev team, a third party provider like Feedonomics, or with Google Sheets. As I note in my “Beginner’s Guide to Shopping Ads”, be aware that the feed can take up to 72 hours to process, and even longer to begin showing in SERPs. Patience is the key here if just creating a new Merchant Center… and make sure to stay up on those disapprovals as Google prefers a clean GMC account and will apply more aggressive product disapproval filters to accounts with more disapprovals. ”– Kirk WilliamsFor a client I’m working with, completing this step resulted in several of their products being added to the top 10 of the PP carousel. 1 of which is in the top 5, being visible when the SERP first loads.This meant that, in this specific scenario, the product Structured Data that Google was regularly crawling and indexing in the US wasn’t enough on it’s own to be considered for the Organic Product Carousel.Note: the products that were added to the carousel were already considered “popular” but Google just hadn’t added them in. It is not guaranteed that your products will be added just because this step was completed. it really comes down to the prominence of your product and relevance to the query (same as any other page that ranks).

a growing black market in which some companies pay for fake positive reviews, while others are seemingly being extorted by web firms who post negative comments then propose their "review-fixing" services to get them taken down.

When CBC News asked Google about Riverbend's complaints, including Pereira's own fake review, it was finally removed — along with 32 other one-star reviews. And as a result, the company's star rating went up from 3.6 to 4.1 overnight. 

There is no evidence that Google is planning to turn away from algorithm-based content moderation, or make the kind of massive human investments that Toscano and others are calling for.

There are a few main reasons to add a Google map to your website: It helps customers or website visitors get directions to your business and saves customers the steps of opening a new browser window, leaving your website, and finding directions. Customers can simply use the map on your website. Your business contact information is easy to find. The data an embedded Google Map provides is your business address, phone number, website, directions, reviews, and review stars. A Google map can highlight nearby points of interest, parking areas, restaurants, theaters, parks, etc. Visitors can reference nearby areas if they are not exactly sure where your business is located.

Our financial client created COVID landing pages for both personal and business accounts. This client saw a 95% increase in organic goal completions from February to March. There was also a 97% increase in organic goal completions YoY. Google posts that focused on coronavirus-related services and products have also performed well.

Figure out the best method for earning reviews. Test email, texting, and in-person requests from your team, physical cards with a bit.ly link, etc. Test each one for a few months, then switch to a different method. Test until you find the method that works best for your customers.  The other thing that really needs to be considered is how to get customers to write about the specific services they used when working with your company. Little prompts or questions that they could answer when you reach out will help customers write better reviews.

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Importance of Ratings and Reviews From 2008 to 2009, usage of consumer ratings and reviews increased to 25 percent (+3) among IYP searchers and to 27 percent (+5) among general searchers. Additionally, people who use social networking sites for local business information are more likely to use consumer reviews (53 percent). It's interesting that, while overall usage of ratings and reviews is only 24 percent, its importance during the business selection process is 57 percent! Because users of ratings and reviews heavily rely on them to select a company to do business with, they should be a serious component of any marketer's online strategy.

If you embed a widget with reviews about your site (LocalBusiness/Organization & sub-types), on your site, we won't show those as "stars" in search. If the reviews are elsewhere, then we would show those there.

Lily's Music Blog" can review "XYZ Records", but if "XYZ Records" hosts their reviews on their own site, then we wouldn't show that.

It's fine to show them on the page to users, and/or to link to them (sometimes it's useful to give a bit of background about a business), it's just that we wouldn't show as review stars in the search results, when it's for your site & on your site.

Soovle — Scrapes Google, Bing, Yahoo, Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube, and Answers.com to generate hundreds of keyword ideas from a seed keyword. Very powerful tool, although the UI could do with some work.Hemingway Editor — Improves the clarity of your writing by highlighting difficult to read sentences, “weak” words, and so forth. A must-have tool for bloggers (I use it myself).

Yandex Metrica — 100% free web analytics software. Includes heat maps, form analytics, session reply, and many other features you typically wouldn’t see in a free tool.

For example, two of my all-time favourite tools are gInfinity (Chrome extension) and Chris Ainsworth’s SERPs extraction bookmarklet.By combining these two free tools, you can extract multiple pages of the SERPs (with meta titles + descriptions) in seconds.

Four symbols regularly appear as snippets within the map pack and local finder. These include Review Mentions, Website Mentions, “Sold Here” Icons, and also more recently Google Post Mentions.

Review Mentions appear in the map pack and local finder when a query matches up with a component of a GMB review published by a customer

it is useful to encourage your customers to mention the service or product they experienced when publishing a review