Every SEO specialist will know about the “obvious” factors that influence search engine rankings.
Mobile-friendliness, content relevance, link-building authority, and keywords are all some of the most important SEO metrics, and SEO marketers will be vying for dominance in each so that their respective websites will soar to the top of the SERPs.
Given that the competition is fierce in these metrics, it becomes important to look for other SEO-affecting factors that can be exploited. You’ll need every advantage you can get if you want to stand out from the crowd.
One topic that’s been of perennial interest to SEO marketers is the humble Google My Business (GMB) review and rating, and whether it has an impact on SEO performance.
It’s true that reviews and ratings strongly influence customers’ first impressions of a business and whether or not they choose to explore them, but is there more going on behind the scenes beyond this organic influence? If this is the case, how can business owners leverage and optimize their My Business listings?
We’ll explore these and other topics about GMB in this blog entry, and hopefully provide insight into how you can use it to improve your SEO standings.
What Is Google My Business?
Google My Business is a feature that allows business owners to manage the way their business appears on Google.
In their My Business panel, owners can input information that customers will find valuable, such as contact numbers, comprehensive business hours, shop locations, and more. They can also upload photos, describe some of the products and services they offer, and even indicate whether or not they deliver, and in what areas they offer delivery services.
Having complete GMB information will be of great help to your customers when they’re looking for your business. When your business appears in a search in Google, it’ll produce a Local Knowledge panel that contains all your relevant GMB information, as well as reviews and questions and answers.
On top of that, the same information will be highlighted and displayed when someone finds your business on Google Maps. This is perfect for users searching for local businesses in the vicinity.
Google My Business also allows owners to discover insights about their business. Metrics such as site visitors, directions requests, and users who called you directly through the “call” button in Google are all available for business owners.
Google My Business Reviews
As mentioned above, Google My Business also allows users to review businesses they’ve visited. These reviews consist of a star rating, from 1 to 5, as well as an optional text review for users to describe their review in more detail.
The average rating of these reviews, as well as the number of reviews, appears in Google My Business listings on both Local Knowledge panels and in Google Maps. Users will be able to see all reviews and their details, as well as a breakdown of the number of reviews for each rating from 1 to 5 stars.
Owners can respond directly to each review, which can help build trust with customers. Reviews to which the business owner has replied will show up with a label, “Response from the owner.”
Do Google My Business Reviews Impact SEO?
Google My Business itself has certain direct impacts on SEO. Simply having GMB information already highlights you in your very own Knowledge Panel, and more complete information with greater engagement has a chance of putting you in the Google carousel that appears when users search for local businesses. These are considered massive SEO benefits and will promote your site immediately.
However, reviews are a trickier subject. There’s no explicit information about how they impact search engine results—though to be fair, there is almost never any explicit information about how Google’s algorithms work.
Organic Impact
To prospective customers, GMB reviews, and indeed reviews of any kind, are very strong indicators for the quality of a business. With or without any direct algorithmic benefits to SEO, there are organic benefits that make GMB reviews a great thing for your business.
For one, studies show that nearly all users read online reviews and take them into account. Alongside this, about 91% of consumers 18-34 years old will trust online reviews as much as they trust personal recommendations.
User reviews as a whole are considered an authentic indicator of a business’ performance. Customers may treat positive reviews from large publications or endorsers with some degree of suspicion, thinking about the possibility that these endorsements may have been paid for or otherwise sponsored. Online reviews can be seen as genuine evaluations from “real people” who have actually used the business in question.
Good reviews have measurable impacts on a business’s performance. An increase in rating by one star can improve revenue by as much as 9%. Indeed, 72% of surveyed consumers say that good online reviews for a business will improve their trust in it.
In addition, when a business engages with their customers by responding to reviews, it shows that the business is looking at feedback. Responses to positive reviews can be considered a form of thanks, while apologetic and reassuring responses to negative reviews show that they are always listening to customers’ needs.
Indeed, customers are 16% more likely to recommend a business, and even rate it more highly, if they see that the business is responding to reviews. This, of course, relies on responses to reviews being constructed effectively.
Conversely, negative reviews have the opposite effect on customers choosing a business. 57% of surveyed consumers, for instance, won’t use a business with less than 4 stars.
The quantity of reviews also plays a role in consumer psychology—on average, consumers won’t trust a business’s star rating unless there have been at least 40 reviews.
All of these are indirect impacts on SEO, but they nevertheless strongly affect a prospective customer’s decision to do business with you, when they see your star rating in Google search results.
Direct SEO Impact
Now comes the big question—is there any evidence that Google My Business reviews actually impact SEO? A variety of studies across the Internet provide the answers.
First up, one 60-day case study that researched the direct influence of GMB reviews indicates that increasing the number of meaningful reviews for a business listing that previously had 0-1 reviews, has a significant effect on search engine rankings after two months.
The study employed the researchers’ personal accounts, which meant that the maximum possible influence they could have had on the listings was highly limited. In real-world scenarios, a large number of reviews could have an even greater impact!
Another study, which performed research on high-ranking businesses, came to several conclusions about the impact of GMB reviews, primarily correlating positive rankings with review quality and quantity.
A lot of the important data is related to the top 3 search results. This is because the top 3 results in a local business search are presented in the form of the “Google 3-Pack,” where the top 3 listings get featured in a special box above the Web search results.
For one, the top 3 businesses in search engine results are very likely to have a higher rating than the rest of the businesses in the top 10. Specifically, 64% of all top-rated businesses are also in the top 1-3 search engine rankings.
The actual differences between the star ratings aren’t actually that high. Businesses at rankings 1-3 have 4.47 stars on average, while positions 4-6 have 4.46 stars, and positions 7-10 have 4.45 stars. From a statistical perspective, these are very low values, but they may represent the key difference that will lead a customer to choose a higher-ranked business (even if it’s rated only slightly higher) over another.
The average number of ratings for high-ranking businesses may also play a big role. The top 3 businesses have an average of 47 reviews, whereas rank 7-10 listings have 38 reviews. Local businesses have an average of 39 reviews across all industries.
A similar study conducted on over 20,000 local listings came to similar conclusions. The study showed that the three highest-ranked local businesses have 472% more reviews than those in the 4-6 spots.
At this point, there’s enough strong evidence to suggest that improving one’s GMB reviews creates a somewhat related effect in improving one’s SEO rankings. This may be because of a real relationship between ranking and reviews, or because the process of improving GMB reviews results in other SEO ranking improvements.
Moz suggests that 9% of the Google algorithm is determined by reviews. This is very much in line with Google’s preference for trustworthy and authoritative businesses, and a large quantity of diverse and positive reviews is a very strong signal for trustworthiness.
Even if all of these impacts are merely correlative and not causative, you also have to consider the organic impacts of positive reviews, which translate to improved business performance.
A Strategy For Improving Google My Business Reviews
We’ve established that there’s a strong relationship between GMB reviews and SEO performance. Now, the next question is:
How do you improve your Google My Business reviews?
Quantity
Sometimes, it’s as simple as asking the customer to review your business.
Oftentimes, the problem is simply that customers are unaware that they can leave a review, so informing them or reminding them about this opportunity to leave feedback can lead to positive results. 70% of consumers, when asked to leave a review, will do just that.
You can remind your customers to review you in your email blasts, marketing materials, landing pages and sales funnels, or by advertising your Google My Business listing and asking for reviews. Unlike Yelp, Google is actually perfectly fine with you asking for reviews from your customers, as long as you don’t incentivize them to do so.
By doing this, you can increase the number of reviews on your local business listing, increasing the trustworthiness of whatever star rating you have.
Quality
It’s a big no-no to try and artificially inflate your reviews with fake accounts or incentives. Many black-hat SEO marketers will try it anyway, and will probably crash and burn.
The most obvious way to improve quality is to simply be a better business in comparison to your competition, but you should be striving for that anyway.
One other way to improve your review standing, however, is to engage with the reviews you already have, both positive and negative. As we described earlier, engaging with reviews shows that you’re listening to feedback. This is explicitly stated by Google’s support pages!
On top of this, studies show that consumers who have left negative feedback have a good chance of a change of heart after getting a response from the business they reviewed. 33% would go on to post a positive review after getting a response, while 34% deleted their negative feedback.
A similar study from Harvard Business Review came to the same conclusion, that engaging with both positive and negative reviews has a net positive result on ratings.
Of course, as we said, this is reliant on a properly constructed response. Some tips to constructing a good review response include thanking them for the feedback (whether negative or positive) and showing empathy for their concerns.
It’s also important to offer solutions to negative reviewers, to help fix the problem they have with the business. You can also outline the concrete steps you’re taking to make sure that whatever negative experience they had doesn’t happen again.
For positive reviews, you can offer extra value, such as the chance to test out new features before they’re released publicly. Don’t advertise this, of course, or else you’ll be incentivizing positive reviews.
Conclusion
There’s certainly a definite relationship between Google My Business reviews and SEO rating, and it’s not just a minuscule factor that can be overlooked. Good reviews may end up being a key advantage in your competition for the top spot in the rankings, and you’ll do well to try and maximize them the best you can.
It’s also important to note that improving your online reviews also means doing better business in general and engaging with your customers in more meaningful ways. These are things that will have far greater positive impacts than just a better star rating.
Chaz Edward
