Reviews on Landing pages

[Ampere]

I have 15 town based landing pages on my website for my electrical contracting business. On the bottom of each page I included 2 excerpts of reviews from people in that town that I received on Google or Yelp. If the review was short I included the whole review.

I was wondering if I would be able to make those show the orange stars in Google results?

 

[djbaxter]

Add them as images?

 

[Ampere]

Add them as images?

If I add the reviews as images, that will make the orange stars show up on that landing page result in Google?

 

[Phil Rozek]

@Ampere, no. If you add images of those reviews you won't get the orange stars in the search results.

The stars will show up as a result of your using Schema review markup. Here's a free generator: https://jurisdigital.com/tools/schema-review-generator/

And a post with more info (if you want it): https://whitespark.ca/blog/how-to-use-aggregate-review-schema-to-get-stars-in-the-serps/

Marking up Google and Yelp reviews falls into gray area these days. It is (and long has been) fine to copy and paste them onto your site, and they won't get filtered if you do. That part's OK. But Google has been vague on whether you can use reviews on third-party sites to try for review stars. (See guidelines here: Review snippet | Search | Google Developers)

The kicker is you aren't guaranteed the review stars. Whether Google gives them to you depends on a range factors. See The Rich Snippets Algorithm

I don't bother with review markup anymore. On my clients' sites we just copy and paste reviews (with links back to the original review sites). The main benefit of that is we're not hemmed-in by the stuff we'd have to do to get the review stars.

 

[Ampere]

I see. Thank you. I will do the same as you do and forget the markup.

Which part of the review text should I make the link back to the site the review came from? Also, where should I link the Googles reviews to?

Thank you very much!

 

[Phil Rozek]

Hey @Ampere,

Here's my typical layout:

[review]
- name of reviewer (see review on Google Maps)

 

[Ampere]

Awesome. I didn't realize that you can link to the single review like that! Thank you sir.

 

[Colan Nielsen]

I don't bother with review markup anymore. On my clients' sites we just copy and paste reviews (with links back to the original review sites). The main benefit of that is we're not hemmed-in by the stuff we'd have to do to get the review stars.

Phil are you saying that working to get review snippets showing in the organic search results isn't something you see as being worth the effort?

 

[Phil Rozek]

@Colan Nielsen, overall, I haven't found it to be worth the effort. But I suppose YMMV, and that it depends on the client.

 

[CrystalH]

@Colan Nielsen, overall, I haven't found it to be worth the effort. But I suppose YMMV, and that it depends on the client.

From the studies, I have seen it says that you get about a 15 to 20% increase in clicks. Have you noticed any difference by not focusing on it anymore?

 

[Phil Rozek]

From the studies, I have seen it says that you get about a 15 to 20% increase in clicks.

I suppose it depends on the site, on the page, and on the level of traffic / number of impressions. Most "local" businesses' sites aren't high-traffic enough that you can add review markup to a subpage (doesn't work on the homepage) and notice an increase in CTR in Google Search Console. As I recall, those studies tended to be focused on other kinds of rich-snippet markup, and for ecommerce sites and the like. But you may have seen a post/study that I didn't.

Have you noticed any difference by not focusing on it anymore?

For the reasons above, nope.

 

[JoshuaMackens]

When we did do schema markup review, I will say the performance was excellent. We also use a lot of inner pages to rank for "secondary" terms (terms apart from our main keywords) so it was very beneficial.

However, I'm more wary than usual of penalties these days. Even if it's slightly possible you could get a penalty, I avoid it. Shooting yourself in the foot is not fun. And Google penalties are the worst because many times you don't know you've run afoul unless you get a manual penalty (rare) or your rankings tank. Unfortunately, in my experience, algorithmic penalties aren't always so heavy handed. Sometimes a drop of 2-3 spots over a month or so (almost imperceptible if you track rankings daily) could indicate a penalty. And with that being said, there's plenty of room to run afoul of schema markup issues, especially with reviews. They've already handed out two iterations of penalties for review markup that I'm aware of.