Do reviews improve SEO? The answer is yes. Discover how to enhance your positioning in Google and the traffic to your site, thanks to the opinions of your customers.
SEO is essential in e-commerce. Selling your products online becomes difficult if you don’t know how to get visibility on search engines. Anyone who has a website knows that SEO requires time and effort: you have to make proper keyword selections, create optimized content, work on backlinks and much more.
But what many don’t know is that reviews also help improve SEO quickly and with minimal effort. And this goes for both online SEO and local SEO.
Before we go further with our topic, it is worth remembering that reviews are essential not only for getting traffic but also for converting visitors into customers. The social proof provided by customer reviews is necessary when you want to increase your conversion rate.
Reviews help you get more visibility because they are user-generated content that is unique, new, and contains keywords relevant to your pages.
The goal of Google and other search engines is to provide the best search results to their users: an updated page filled with new and unique content, such as that found in customer reviews, ranks better because it contains more relevant content. For online shoppers, compared to an outdated page.
That is why it can be said that with opinions, you can improve your ranking without requiring much effort: in this case, it is the words of your clients that do the work for you.
This is also confirmed by Google in a blog post in which it communicates that detailed product reviews will be better rewarded. Google will take into account whether customer reviews:
- They express specialized knowledge about products when appropriate.
- They describe what the product is like or how it is used, with unique content that exceeds the manufacturer’s specifications.
- They provide quantitative measures of product performance in various aspects.
- They explain how a product is different from its competitors.
- They describe comparable products to consider or explain which ones might be more suitable for certain cases or circumstances.
- They discuss the advantages and disadvantages of a specific product based on research on it.
- They describe how a product evolved from previous models or versions to provide improvements, solve problems, or help users make a purchasing decision.
- They identify the critical factors for making a decision regarding the product category and its performance in those areas. For example, a review of a vehicle may determine that fuel economy, safety, and drivability are critical factors in making a decision and rating performance in those areas.
- They describe critical decisions about how a product was designed and their effect on users beyond what the manufacturer says.