The Importance of Reviews for Local SEO
In the past, reviews weren’t as important to local SEO, but now reviews can make or break your local SEO. For example, I have tattoos and sometimes I like to look through listings for places to get a tattoo. I was looking on Yelp at the different listings and I found one that had negative reviews. However, the guy that was running the tattoo shop responded back very well to the negative reviews. This is how you can turn a negative review into a positive one.
What Makes Up Review Metrics?
- Review quality – Is the review fully filled out and filled with information? Is it more than just stars?
- Review velocity – Is the business getting reviews consistently over time or periodically in batches?
- Review diversity – Is the business getting honest reviews or only 5 stars?
Even if you get bad reviews, if you show that you are responding that can go a long way with your customers.
Where to Get Reviews
- Yelp
- Angie’s List
- Home Advisor
- GetFiveStars.com
GetFiveStars.com allows you to send out emails to your customers to ask them to send a review. You can set the parameters so that if they give you a review in a certain range the reviewer will be sent to one place, or sent to another place for a different range. After they give you a review, they can then be directed to give another review for a different site like Yelp or Mailchimp. This helps to encourage those who gave you a really good review to leave a review on a bigger review site.
Yelp is a popular site to look at reviews however, it is VERY strict with its guidelines and truly does not want a review that is promoted. But if you can get a good review on Yelp, it shows much more credibility.
My favorite 3 for getting reviews are Get Five Stars, Mailchimp and Yelp.
Local Focused Link Building
Think of Potential Users
Use potential user interaction as a link quality metric when building at a local level. For example: putting your logo on a little league uniform helps to advertise on the more “human” level.
Build Citations
Build citations to send local signals to Google about your business. Make sure your AP name address and phone number are formatted consistently across your citations. Decide early on if you want to build citations manually or with assistance.
Consider Time and Budget
This will tell you if you want to build citations manually or if you want to use a system or service.
Citation Building Services
Don’t Forget Technical SEO
People seem to push technical SEO by the wayside. In the last few years, it has become more and more important for effective SEO.
Visit Search Consoles Frequently
- Google Search Console – Don’t be afraid to become a frequent user of Google Search Console because there is a lot of excellent information and data on there.
- Indexing – Are the correct number of pages being crawled on your site within Google Search Console (webmaster tools)?
- 404 errors – Is Google noticing 404s on your site? If so, determine if you should set up 301s.
- Pat and render – Perform a “fetch and render” run of your site.
- Clickthrough rate – Improve your organic CTR.
- Update metas – Look in SERPs to see how Google is pulling your meta data and make optimization updates based on what you see. But remember, if you have bad copy, no one is going to click on your links.
- Site crawls – Is your site crawled properly?
- Protocols – If your site is HTTP is it being crawled that way or does your host allow Google to crawl it as HTTPS? For example, a client had a hosting company ranking well in the search engines, then one day it tanked. Found out, they had one section that was HTTPS but did not have any content and the page was giving an error when it was accessed. The issue was fixed and it helped with the rankings again.
- Hosting provider – Get familiar with your hosting provider and how Google crawls your site. But don’t be surprised if, when you call tech support for your web hosting, they immediately blame a plug-in.
Recommended WordPress hosts: WP Engine and Pagely
Always utilize structured data markup on your site: schema.org or JSON-LD can mark up certain lines of your copy so that it can be “voice friendly.”
What Can Use Markup Data
- Business information such as name, address and phone number.
- Product and service reviews like nite site reviews including the review scale.
- Be sure to test your markup data!
Audience Local SEO Q & A Session
Q: What plugins do you like for structuring data?<
A: I like to keep plug-ins light because they can slow down your site.
Q: What do you do if you want to control the type of reviews that you get for your site?
A: You would want to use a site like “Get Five Stars” so that you can have better control.
