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Do ratings/reviews show up in Organic Search Results anymore?
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I read about using schema or h1review to add markup that would get an individual person's review to show up in organic search, but it was from 2013. I did a few queries for keywords in my area, and none of the results had this. Then I did some queries for generic things like "best pizza in Tampa" and "coffee in tampa" and they didn't have it either. So, is this still something that can be done or not?
- I do see it when a review site like yelp comes up or in ads, but I'm specifically talking about organic search results from our website.
Thanks,
Ruben
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Hi Ruben,
Back in 2014, Google stated that they don't want markup on testimonials on your website. You can read about this here and figure out how you'd like to proceed, given this policy:
This caused quite a bit of talk at the time, and I don't believe all sites are complying, but important to know.
Regarding third party reviews you are republishing on your site, I have not seen individual reviews coming up with stars on them for some time, but this seems to change so frequently. For example, up until recently, I was seeing Facebook listings coming up in Google's SERPs with stars on them. Now, that appears to have changed. So, I'm not sure what, if anything, you could do right now to get individual reviews posted on your website to show up with stars in the SERPs.
If anyone has seen a different pattern, please do share with Ruben!
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Well we have both on our site. Some are pictures of hand written notes, and others are screenshots of reviews from places like google + and avvo. So, I can do either.
- Ruben
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Hi Ruben,
Just to clarify, are you talking about testimonials you've collected from clients and have published on your website or are you talking about 3rd party reviews you've collected from other platforms and are re-publishing on your website?
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I have been seeing review stars more and more for local organic positioning. When I click-through to see how they're getting those reviews, for the most part they are employing some kind of plugin that regenerates their Google Plus reviews (I question how legitimate most of these reviews are [especially for small businesses], but that's neither here nor there), or the reviews from a well-known aggregator (Health Grades or Demand Force, for example).
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I agree with Josh on this one. There needs to be some reason Google should believe that the ratings on your site are legitimate. I can't be certain that third party sites like Yelp or Google+ are the source of that social proof, but it seems both plausible and fairly easy to detect for Google. It would be a sound place to start.
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We are collecting reviews using ShopperApproved. When I do searches for many of our product queries the yellow stars and ratings scores appear beside our listings in the organic SERPs. Our listings in the SERPs look great compared to our competitors, and the results since getting those stars to appear have been kickass. If I was in a business like yours I would get in touch with ShopperApproved and ask them to start a service named "Client Approved". I believe that their model could be used to allow accountants, attorneys, etc. to collect reviews on the same platform, but just branding it as "client" instead of "shopper".
ADDED: SA has a widget that you can copy/paste into the code of your website and it will display random reviews, 4/5 star reviews or hand selected reviews. I believe that this social proof from past customers has really increased sales. We are showing random reviews rather than hand-picking.
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