Adding product reviews to your website is a great way to help users in their decision process as well as increasing your rankings and diversity of keywords your website shows up for in Google. But the big question is this: How do you add reviews to your website, or, more importantly, are there best practices for adding reviews to get the most value?
The Benefits of Adding Reviews To Your Website
Whether you own a franchise, B2B company, or a small business that is servicing a local market, reviews can be a great way to separate yourself from other companies offering the same products or services.
Reviews provide insights into what you’re doing well, what you can improve on, and provide you a reason to engage and build a relationship with people who have just purchased or will purchase what you’re offering.
There are 5 primary benefits of having reviews on the same page as your product or service instead of having a link to another page that has a list of the reviews:
- Provide more content for the search engine spiders, which gives the product page the opportunity to rank for related long-tail terms, including combinations of product name and review.
- Create a content differentiation between your location and other locations as well as other companies offering the same services or products.
- Support the user journey by validating the product or service; increasing CTR, sales, and revenue.
- Give the product page the opportunity to rank for words that people use to describe your products (not your marketing speak) and use when searching for your product
- Studies have shown consumer reviews are more trusted than manufacturers’ descriptions.
SEO Best Practices for Adding Reviews
There are a few key considerations and best practices to follow when implementing product reviews on your franchise website or small business website. These considerations give the reviews the most value for users and for driving additional long-tail traffic.
Make sure they are in the code
The reviews must appear in text form in the HTML of the product page they live on. We highly recommend being mindful of using AJAX/JavaScript or any other technologies (e.g. Flash, Cookies, iFrames, Images, etc.,) that can prevent search engines from reaching the content.
We recommend QA’ing this by disabling JS and CSS in the browser and ensuring review content is visible.
Markup reviews and ratings with Schema.org
Schema is a shared markup vocabulary that makes it easier for webmasters to define their content assets and get maximum benefit for their efforts within the Google SERPs. Due to the value this has, search engines have come together to provide a shared collection of Schemas that webmasters can use.
You can find the review markup (a review of an item – for example, of a restaurant, movie, or store) here and the aggregate rating markup (the average rating based on multiple ratings or reviews) here.
Utilize Google’s Rich Snippets Markup Helper
Structured Data Markup Helper shows you how to update your site so that Google can understand the data it contains. Once Google understands the data on your site, your data can be presented more attractively and in new ways within the Google SERPs.
You can access the Markup Helper here.
Utilize Google’s Rich Snippets Markup Testing Tool
This tool from Google helps webmasters test their Rich Snippet implementation. It provides insights into the validity of the implementation, as well as how the snippet might be displayed in the Google SERPs.
You can find the Testing Tool here.
Have a View All Reviews page
Plan to have a View All Reviews page if you are concerned that there will be a large number of reviews and feel it will impact the UX of the page. This will also allow for review growth and organization. Link back to the product page from the view all reviews page.
URL structure could be: /product-name/reviews.
Optimize View All Reviews page
If you are planning on having a View All Reviews page, make sure it’s optimized to allow for traffic acquisition.
Title Tag: Reviews for [Product Name] | Brand Name
Description: Find out what other users thought about [Product Name].
Additionally
- Simplify the review posting process for the user by not adding too many required steps.
- Ask for reviews from current users via email shortly after they have purchased a product and again a couple weeks later or once you know they have received the product.
- Pay attention to the reviews you are getting so you can engage with users who are leaving negative reviews, and thank those leaving great reviews.
