When it comes to attracting more visitors to your site, star ratings play an important role. If you have good ratings when users look up your site on the web, it means it is a good resource. In fact, people tend to trust and prefer sites that have good ratings over others that fall under the average category. But how to get star ratings? How to get reviews on Google? Let’s take a look into how you can improve your start ratings on Google search results.
Get Online Reviews
Although it is obvious, you need to get some reviews before Google can actually display them. It might seem easy at first but not easy enough once you get down to attract reviews. Google has certain requirements, which means you have limitations on using reviews as snippets.
For instance, the reviews should be readily available on your site’s page. Plus, the reviews should not be related to adult products or services. Above all, you cannot use a third-party service to collect reviews for you. The reviews should be solely collected and aggregated from your website.
Perhaps the best way to get reviews is by asking your loyal customers. If you have been serving some customers for a while, they would be happy to leave you a review. You can share with them a feedback form via email or a link. And once you get the reviews, thank your customers for their time and effort.
Display The Reviews On Your Website
Once you have received a handful of reviews, you will now need to display reviews on your website. There are several ways of doing so. The first and most complicated way is to code the reviews into your pages. Therefore, whenever you receive a review, you will visit your CMS, add the code and mark it up.
If you are collecting a lot of reviews at the same time, you should opt for a relatively better time-efficient method as this one could take a few hours. There are a few WordPress plugins out there that will make the task a bit easier but you will still have some manual work to do.
In addition to that, you can also use third-party apps that are designed to collect and display the reviews but they can be costly. You will be able to cut down half your work but at the cost of paying a lot of money. Regardless, make sure to display the ratings along with the reviews as well.
Check Your Schema Markup
Now that you have displayed the reviews on your site, it is time for you to tell Google where the reviews are located. Then again, you can use an app that takes care of the process if you do not have the basic markup knowledge. Each part of the review requires an HTML tag. Therefore, if you were to miss any markups, Google will not be able to read the reviews.
This means the probability of getting ratings on your Google results will reduce. Another reason why displaying and marking up reviews manually is not suggested is because there is simply a lot to remember. Marking up is a type of language, which requires intrinsic details. Forgetting even a tiny detail will reduce the chances of receiving star ratings.
Tell Google About Your Business
Google needs to know about your business, which means you will need to include a markup for it as well. Even though your website might have this information already, you should double-check. It is important for you to clearly mention the business hours, contact information, location, etc. This helps Google identify your business as authentic and makes it stand out.
At the same time, go through the Google rules & regulations to make sure you are not breaking any of them. Google does not like sites breaking any rules. For instance, do not display reviews on your homepage. Reviews are meant to be about individual products and services. Sharing them on your homepage makes it appear as if you are sharing reviews about your company. This might help the visitors build trust but Google does not like it.
Therefore, it is better to make Google your friend rather than an enemy, making things extremely complicated at every corner.
Final Word
Getting your star ratings displayed takes some time depending on the method. If you are using a service to aggregate and display the reviews, you won’t have to put in much effort. But know that whatever effort or money you put in, it is going to be worth it in the long run. Make it easier by employing white label review management software.