A higher ranking in Google search results means more click-throughs and more customers. Here’s how customer reviews can help you improve your site and reach that coveted top spot.
Customer reviews can be a strong driving factor in purchasing decisions, but they also help boost your business in other ways.
Populating your product pages with valuable customer reviews packed full of personal experiences also increases the diversity of related keywords your website ranks for in search engines.
As a result, this will increase your overall organic search visibility so you can appear higher and more often.
Product reviews and SEO go hand-in-hand because they:
- create a consistent flow of fresh, keyword-rich content
- help your site rank for long-tail keywords and target shoppers with purchase or consideration and evaluation intent
- help you rank for words and phrases that people actually use to describe your products
- enhance search engine listings and encourage more click-throughs, so you don’t even have to necessarily rank higher to start getting more traffic
Creating unique valuable, trustworthy content is crucial for SEO, and reviews ensure that your content becomes unique written for you by the people that know you best — your customers.
Here’s how to use customer reviews to improve your ranking.
3 Ways to Use Reviews to Improve SEO
1. Create a Dedicated Customer Review Page
Having a dedicated reviews page means potential customers don’t have to dig for the information they need.
Instead, they can find the story of your products (as told by existing customers) all in one place.
This is important because reviews make up an integral part of the buying process.
Shoppers actively seek out past customer experiences. When someone types “your brand” + “reviews” into Google, you want your website to show up first.
A dedicated reviews page helps you do this.
Take Wolven Threads, for example.
Let’s try an example by typing “Wolven Threads reviews” into Google. The brand’s own dedicated reviews page is the first result to show up.
Google is more likely to offer up your branded website if that’s what customers are searching for. But it’s also more likely to result in higher click-throughs as search engine users will recognize the brand in the search results and more naturally click on it.
2. Add Google Rich Snippets to Your Product Listings
Standing out among a sea of other search results is important if you want to attract those coveted higher click-throughs.
Adding Google-rich snippets to your listings means they stand out against those without any visual enhancements such as star-ratings right from search results. This plays into the fact that people actively search for reviews before making a purchasing decision. In fact, research shows that 91% of shoppers hunt down reviews.
With rich snippets, you’re serving reviews up front and center, so customers are more likely to find this relevant and click through to your site.
And the better the reviews are, the better your chances are of ranking higher.
Google’s pretty clever like that. Its algorithm identifies positive reviews that signify your brand and products are trusted and high-quality. It helps place your website higher because it wants to provide searchers with the best experience possible.
The third listing here is not the higher-ranked, but its customer reviews improve the way people see this page. It stands out the most thanks to its incorporated star-rating.
Merchants can take it a step further by adding reviews to Google Ads, including Google Shopping Product Listing Ads and Google Seller Ratings. Okendo is a certified partner for Google Shopping, making it easy to incorporate social proof in your listings.
3. Respond to Customer Reviews
Responding to customer reviews is a no-brainer — it eases any issues customers might have had and shows you care about your buyers’ needs.
Simply put, it indicates to potential customers that your brand is a good bet.
But responding to reviews adds another layer of goodness — it can add additional keywords that your product can rank for. It can be an opportunity for you to include other related keywords in your product’s page content.
The more customer reviews you get (and the more you reply to), the easier it will be to rank for search queries that accurately describe your products. Okendo can help you collect high-quality reviews.
Freshly Picked reviews often indicate to Google the type of product bought, the material, and other descriptive elements to help the product page rank.
The Importance of Reviews for SEO
So do customer reviews really improve your ranking? Yes.
They have the power to completely level-up your eCommerce SEO game.
Okendo makes it easy for brands to collect and display reviews for enhanced search listings on Google with their suite of Google Integrations, including rich snippets, PLAs, and Seller Ratings. You can also easily manage and reply to reviews using their suite of content management tools to rank for additional long-tail keywords.
Get started with Okendo today.
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