Great explanation but the big question is where are these ratings coming from. Are people giving themselves a 5 star rating? Also, ratings change over time, how is this rating maintained over time, it seems like people are just making up the rating and number of people who have left a review. Can you advise where the review information is coming from and how is it maintained over time?
So these can be customer generated reviews from your site or reviews from 3rd party sites. One thing to note, Google does not recommend using 3rd party reviews (which I find interesting since the website owner could just easily give themselves a 5 start rating as you mentioned.) There are a few ways to handle reviews over time. You can add schema to you code that will dynamically change as the reviews on your site change. You can use a plug-in to handle the changes. You can manually update them. In many cases we use Capterra, G2 crowd, Trust Pilot or onsite reviews for markup.
Good stuff. What reviews can you use? I know you can't embed google reviews and use those to get the stars but can you use any third party review sites and embed those? Or does it HAVE to be reviews that people has literally made on your own site via your own way of "taking reviews" whether it's a review plugin in WP or whatnot And every single review has to get wrapped up in the schema right? so that can obviously be done manually but that seems like an awful amount of work so how do you personally do it? On WP, some review plugin that solves it all? Anything you can recommend? Or if you can use 3rd party reviews, how do you deal with those?
Could you provide more info for us service businesses? We have a ton of reviews on google, yelp, and Facebook, but have never been able to get the star rating on SERP. It looks like it's required to have 1st party reviews? Is that correct?
@@smamarketing Thank you!! To get the reviews to appear on the frontend of the page - can you use a review plugin? You don't need to sign up for Google Customer Reviews?
Still. No video on you tube has explained how to get your google reviews on a rich snippet. Google moved the goal post so far that I think only a select few know in the seo world.
In the structured data you don't want to use affiliate links. Structured information is only for the search engines. Yes, you can use our generator to create your product review markup:)