The impact of reviews on local SEO

As a local business, reviews are a necessary component to your overall strategy. Google loves customer reviews because, quite frankly, customers love reviews. As consumers, we’re growing more and more accustomed to the idea of reviews on businesses. When we explore new towns, reviews become an important factor in making a decision. Or in our own town, if we identify two companies that seem to offer a similar product, more often than not, the reviews influence our decision one way or another. Not only are reviews important to helping your conversion rates, but your local SEO is hinged on them.

Google displays the highest rated businesses with more prominence when consumers are searching with local intent. In other words, searching for a cupcake bakery, Google’s going to show you the one with the highest quality reviews first. Google claims they feature unbiased search results, but there’s no doubt that they bias local SEO towards reviews collected on their own network. Google is motivated to become the go-to source for local information, but they still need to maintain a healthy balance towards what consumers want to see. So reviews on other authoritative websites do provide value as well.

Yelp is a great example of a site that is worth securing reviews on. Google prominently displays Yelp ratings in local search results. As with most everything in local SEO, quality is more important that quantity. 10 very positive, well-written, reviews are more valuable than, 20 mediocre one sentence reviews. So too is the frequency at which you receive the reviews. 10 reviews in one day will appear suspicious, so earning them over time naturally is key. Let’s take a look at how search results and reviews come together.

When we conduct a local search, we can see right away how reviews pop out on the page. I can see how many stars a business has, along with the number of reviews they have. Also in the search results, we can see star ratings coming from Yelp. If I select into a listing, I’ll not only see the reviews here on the right-hand side of their card, along with a snippet of each review, but I can select the total number of reviews directly below their search result and read them without ever having to leave my search.

Now, another popular search is to look for a brand followed by the word reviews. Google is going to show the most relevant reviews to our business in the search result.  It’s easy to see how reviews not only add visual appeal to your search listing, but they really help add credibility to your business.