5 Things to consider before working with product reviews

Many companies offer product reviews for a website. Some install with a few clicks, but lack SEO benefits. Others are very powerful but require extensive time and resources to set up and keep running.

Product reviews require a balance of time, resources and benefits to consider. So we’ve put together 5 questions to consider when choosing product reviews.

But first… What do you want to achieve?

• Is your main driver more traffic from keywords?

• More visibility through review snippets?

• More on site conversions from social proof?

• Or just more insight into your products?

Keep these questions in the back of your mind as we address five things to consider with every customer feedback solution you consider.

SETUP

How long will it take to set up and what resources are needed?

Building a collection of product reviews takes time. If you already have product reviews you don’t want to start over from square one.

We recommend importing existing reviews in your collection tool, invite past customers to leave a review, and automate the review invitation process going forward.

How Trustpilot Product Reviews work: Typically this process takes less than one hour to import, collect, and display reviews. It does not require any development work.

TRAFFIC

Will I get the SEO benefits from my product reviews?

Indexing product reviews on your site is similar to allowing your customers to SEO optimize your site for you. Your customer provide unique fresh content for your product pages when they submit a review.

When shoppers review products, their descriptions use the same words and phrases that other consumers search for. If correctly marking up your reviews against your URL, search engines will index the content which can lead to your product pages appearing in more searches.

How Trustpilot Product Reviews work: Whether you choose our SEO TrustBoxes or build your own custom TrustBox, you’ll get the SEO benefits directly on your product pages for maximum impact and traffic in search engines.

Will my product reviews give my product pages Review Snippets in Google?

Review Snippet stars in organic Google Search can improve CTR up to 30% and having product reviews on your product pages can make your site eligible for Review Snippets, but you need the correct structured data markup to get them. It’s always best to check Google for the latest requirements.

How Trustpilot Product Reviews work: Google recommends using JSON-LD format for structured data markup and our SEO TrustBoxes have this markup built-in. This means you have the best way of integration product reviews on your site ensuring you are getting the maximum SEO value. If implementing a solution on your own, we recommend using JSON-LD.

What is Google doing with product reviews and why you should use JSON-LD?

In 2016, Google announced the next step in the evolution of Rich Snippets: Rich Cards. This means people searching on mobile will see a big, beautiful card advertising the result instead of plain text (see image below).

Now with more searches in Google on mobile than on desktops this has the potential to be a very powerful search conversion tool. Google “strongly recommends” using JSON-LD to get Rich Cards.

Google is constantly changing, including the best practices for product review mark-up. Years ago, reviews were marked up with RDFa. This then changed to microdata. Now microdata has changed again to JSON-LD. If you are not displaying reviews in JSON-LD, you soon will be a step behind.

SALES

Will product reviews be displayed in a way that impacts my bottom line?

BrightLocal research shows 92% of consumers read online reviews, and 71% say online reviews directly influence their buying decisions.

Social proof is a powerful asset when selling online. Building trust in both your business and your products is an investment proven to drive ROI.

Already have product reviews on your site? Follow these steps to see if you are getting all the benefits that you could be receiving:

1 - Examine the product page with Google's Structured Data Testing Tool

2 - Look for:

• "aggregateRating" - This is the overall rating of the product

• “reviewBody” - This is the review text. If Google can’t see this, then you are not getting any keyword benefits from your reviews

• “reviewCount” - this is the number of reviews Google can see. Is it the same number of reviews that appear on the page, or are some reviews not visible to Google?

3 - If other errors appear then your solution is not meeting the proper structure requirements for SEO.

The effect product reviews have on page speed

Slow page speed is a known conversion killer. Walmart.com experience a 2% conversion increase for every one second they improved their page speed.

If your product reviews solution is using RDFa or microdata markup then it needs to be a server-site integration, which means they add to your page speed and can decrease conversions.

Using the JSON-LD data markup you can built an integration that loads asynchronously with your site and therefore doesn’t negatively effect your page speed keeping your conversion rates as high as possible.

Ready to try out product reviews?

Trustpilot offers an all-in-one product reviews solution designed to boost your SEO and help you build a strong reputation.

With product reviews, higher traffic, conversions and online legitimacy are just around the corner. Download a free copy of our Complete Guide to Reviews, and find out more about product reviews.