Positive Google reviews are important for your business. That’s long been known. But do they have an impact on your SEO? And could obtaining, then including Google reviews on your website actually increase your visibility online? This blog will look at how customer reviews could help drive organic traffic and performance.
According to John Mueller, a webmaster trends analyst at Google, copying reviews onto your website likely won’t have a huge impact on your SEO. Google tends to focus on unique content, as opposed to copied reviews from Yelp or other such sites. If you’re going to do it, though, just don’t mark up copied reviews with structured data and schema as this contravenes Google’s guidelines.
It’s understandable to want to showcase positive feedback on your site, but you may be better off leaving your Google reviews alone. Earlier this year, Joy Hawkins put forward a case stating that reviews do in fact contribute to your positioning in the search results. She found that businesses with a significant number of lost reviews suffered a drop in their rankings as a result. This clearly suggests a correlation between the number of good reviews and a business’ online visibility.
That said, it’s important to note, while there are benefits of having Google reviews, there are still some 200 other factors that are used to establish how well a given page ranks. So, with that in mind, keep up the work on obtaining positive feedback but don’t rely on it as your sole means of climbing the Google ranks.
Good reviews are a pretty sure-fire way of building trust with possible customers. If your first impression of a business is how highly regarded they are by others, research shows this will likely encourage you to click through to that site. In fact, a study conducted by CXL has shown that having a substantial number of positive reviews could increase click-through-rate by as much as 35%.
So, you know the importance of having reviews. But how do you actually encourage people to leave one? First and foremost, you have to actually ask your customers and give them an incentive to follow through. Above all, though, it’s about making the process easy – the simpler it is to give feedback, the more likely people are to do it. We’ve written a blog dedicated to helping you encourage customers to leave online reviews, so take a look to find out more.
FSM.
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