How to showcase your rating in Google Search results
Have you ever seen search results with little star ratings? Google allows a special sort of structured information on your website which tells Google additional information about your products and services.
In the words of Google
A review snippet is a short excerpt of a review or a rating from a review website, usually an average of the combined rating scores from many reviewers. When Google finds valid reviews or ratings markup, we may show a rich snippet that includes stars and other summary info from reviews or ratings.
Benefits..
1. Google Product Ratings make your products stand out
The most obvious benefit of having Google Product Ratings is to make your products and services stand out amongst your competitors. This is partly aesthetic - after all, who doesn't love a flash of gold?
If someone is looking for 'Bike hire' and some listings show stars where others don't, the eye will naturally be drawn to them. Apparently there's a little gold digger inside all of us!
We have had the concept that stars = trust and quality ingrained into us, and will usually have a bias towards product listings that feature them.
Products with Google Product Ratings stand out amongst those without, leading to more conversions and sales.
2. More informed customers
These ratings are only valid when they relate to a single product, and displayed on a webpage that relates only to that product. That is, a product rating can not be applied to a webpage that features multiple products.
Limitations
Here's Google's description of limitations:
Use markup for a specific product, not a category or list of products. For example, "shoes in our shop" is not a specific product. Currently, product rich results only support pages that focus on a single product. We recommend focusing on adding markup to product pages instead of pages that list products or a category of products.
Yonder makes this easy, as we've already classified ratings to a single product by nature of triggering reviews from your booking system and associating reviews to a product, trip etc. It's also worth noting here that 'product' includes services. Therefore valid products include:
- Guided tour of XX
- Kayak hire
- Luxury Suite
- Hair coloring.
- Toilet installation
Installing
Install the widget per product webpage
Copy-paste the Yonder search snippet code inside the <head></head> section of your website’s HTML or as close to the top of the page as possible. This code will keep your rating up to date, as frequently as Google crawls your webpage.
Inspect and request crawling
- Inspect a live URL to confirm the snippet is picked up by Google.
- Request validation using the status report.
Google regularly crawls your webpage. When it does it will pick up your latest rating to use in search results.
Learn more on Google about how it works.
