Do Company Reviews Help With SEO?

I recently produced a video on the this topic and thought it would be a good idea to put together a blog post to follow on the subject.

In short, having reviews for your company and products will help your search engine rankings improve. It helps build trust with the users of the search engines and this will therefore mean Google and the other search engines will appreciate you’re a trusted supplier.

If your customers trust you enough to leave you a review then why would a search engine not take this into consideration when building better search results.

The more detailed view…

In order to gain a boost in the search engine rankings from using a reviews platform, there are a few things you need to make sure you have in place.

Google Verified Reviews provider:

Believe it or not, reviews on your Google My Business page don’t count as verified reviews in the search giant’s eyes.

Getting reviews on your Local Google listing is very important as these will be seen by your customers and prospects from time to time, but these alone won’t help you rank in the normal search results any higher.

You do in fact need a verified provider of reviews to gain the real benefits.

There a few of them out there and I’m sure you’ve heard of them all. The platform we suggest to use is reviews.co.uk.

We’re an official partner agency so give us a shout if you’d like more information. 

Rich Snippets on important pages:

Rich snippets are bits of schema.org markup which sit in the pages code and help search engine crawlers better understand elements of your website pages.

Things like pricing, address whether something is in-stock or not are usual use cases for schema but reviews is also a massive one. You should look into how to do this if you haven’t already.

If you have ever searched for something and seen a website listed with Gold stars under the listing, these have been pulled through from the rich snippet review schema.

How does it help with SEO?

There are a few areas we think that help to contribute to your Organic Search Rankings. Below are the ones we see as the most important but as ever with Google there’s so many other factors that could come into play.

Improved click through rate:

With Google and other search engines looking more towards user metrics than ever before, the percentage of people who click through to your website from the search result over the next one should naturally help provide assurances that yours is the better result.

With Google, things are very rarely confirmed as ranking factors; but thinking about some of the studies that have been carried out you can see a clear trend in where a site ranks to how high the Click Through Rate is.

Building trust:

The E.A.T algorithm (as it’s been named) update by Google in August 2018, which continues to be rolled out, means that trustworthiness is now very important and has meant a new surge in demand for trust signals.

Standing for Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness; the E.A.T update has changed the game for many sites out there. If you don’t have the relevant certifications, reviews and proof that you know your stuff within your market then you could see a drop in search engine traffic.

Having reviews for your company and sharing them with Google helps them see that you are in fact a good website to put in front of a searcher.

Company reviews can help with more than just SEO

Of course, gaining better search results should help you and your business gain more clients, but another reason why it’s good to gain reviews is just based on plain old straight forward marketing principles.

The more a prospect can see about how you go about your service offering, the more trust they naturally build up with your brand.

Reviews are now seen as a way of justifying a purchase. “91% of consumers think reviews are important enough to sway their purchasing decision when considering a new business”, a State of Online Reviews study found.

Should you be using company reviews then?

Yes, you absolutely should. And not just for the benefits from an organic search point of view, but from a general reputation management standpoint.

The more HONEST reviews your business gets the better chance you have of showing higher in the search results but also converting more prospects into sales.