Do Google Reviews Help Your SEO Rankings?
If you’re a business owner who relies on Google for traffic, website visits and ultimately customers, it’s important to understand how Google reviews affect your SEO rankings.
– One of the most common questions we hear is “Do my Google Reviews help with SEO?”
The short answer: Yes!
But there is a lot more to it than that.
Google Reviews are one of the most important signals for search engines, and Google’s algorithm is designed to reward high-quality sites with higher rankings. In other words, if you have a lot of reviews from customers who say they had an extremely positive experience using your product or service – then Google will rank your site more highly in its search results.
Google takes a number of factors into account when determining which sites to rank higher, including:
- The quality and relevance of content on the page
- Links from other pages on the web
- Pages that are refreshing quickly in search results (this is called “freshness”)
We can’t control how many good reviews our competitors have but we can certainly control how many reviews we have.
Reviews are also important for another major factor and that is how a potential customer views your business.
With more and more people searching online for good products and services they will look to reviews to help them make their buying decisions.
You can imagine that if they are looking at two businesses side by side and one has 10 5 star reviews and one has a single 3 star review then they are more likely to choose the business with reviews.
This is great but it doesn’t mean that competitors can create fake reviews to catch up or even overtake you in rankings, Google has a crackdown on this and penalizes sites for doing so.
Google also uses Google My Business to create an accurate and verified Google map of your business location.
What Google Reviews can do for you:
- Build trust with potential customers who are looking at reviews as they make their buying decisions
- If you’re a small company without many listings Google will rank you higher if it has more reviews than competitors in the same niche or area.
- Google could even penalize sites that use fake reviews by not listing them in search results, so it’s best to focus on getting good customer feedback and then working hard to maintain positive review status online.
So there you have it
The long answer is, Yes! Google does take into account how many positive reviews a site has when determining whether or not that site deserves better rankings within its SERP results.
