How to Add Review Stars to Your SERP Listings

Reviews stars markup allows you to add an overall rating to your SERPs. By adding specific structured data to your page you can enable it to show a star rating below the meta description. This is a great way catch the eye of potential customers. It gives your site that extra bit of information that makes it a little more attractive to the user.

Video Transcript:

In the latest episode of Hack my Growth, we’ll be taking a look at how we can add review markup to our website, in order to earn some amazing rich results.

All right. So let’s get into the content. Like we said in the opener, we’re going to be looking at how we can add review stars into our SERP listings. As we talked a lot about in this channel, rich features can help your brand stand out. They can give you that edge that may cause a user to click when they might not have actually clicked before.

How Review Markup Helps You Stand Out

There’s a lot of factors that are at play when we talk about SEO. But one of the things that structured data can do is allow our sites to have that extra bit of information that makes us look a little bit more attractive to the user.

As you can see here, both on the left and the right, we’ve got these reviews stars. The stars are marked up where you’ve got an overall rating and some places you’ve got votes and other places you’ve got things like reviews. These are places that you can add structured data to your page in order to mark up your page so that you get these ratings.

Now, those yellow stars really do pop on a page of white with black and blue. There could be other features like images and other things within the mix as we’ve seen a lot right here. Within this search result, you’ve got the FAQ snippet, you’ve got people also asked and reviews, but that yellow does definitely draw your eye. You’ll see the review snippet a lot when it comes to products. So, if we look at the specific type of product, you can see here that we’ve got all the different reviews, both from Amazon, as we can see here, being marked up, and we can see how many people like these. It’s kind of interesting. You’ve got really the same product and it looks like just from two different Amazon suppliers with two different review ratings. But it definitely allows you to see some really helpful information from a user standpoint, and for those of you looking to get organic visibility, can set you apart as well.

Why Is This an Important SERP Feature?

Over the last few days or so, we actually can see that reviews were shown on about 50% of search results. So, this shows that hey, a lot of these results have. If we look over here at the last 30 days, they haven’t been anything less than 47% of search results. So, if you’ve got products, or information, or services that you’re selling where you get reviews from clients, this is a way to help mark up your site.

If you have a Google my business listing, those reviews definitely show up right there within the maps. But we’re talking about things outside of the maps here. We’re looking at specifically the search results like we see here, where we’ve got the link, our title, our description, and then some more information. Right now, as of the time that we’re looking at this video, it was at about 50% of results were showing these review types.

So they are very important and there is a way that you can take advantage of them. Just because they are eligible for 50% of results, doesn’t mean they’re always showing up. Google will fluctuate. You may see a review one day and you may see it go away another. They’re constantly changing. They’re constantly testing things. That’s why you see these go up and down. But when you have this script in there, you have a higher chance of earning that and as you can see, they don’t give it to everybody. We’ve got all of these links here with no reviews. There’s only one that’s actually showing the starred review. In this one, we have the top two had them, but a lot of the results below did not have the reviews. In order to actually get these stars to show up within your search listings, you need to have two pieces of information. You have to have both aggregate reviews, as well as real physical reviews to mark up.

What Type of Markup Do You Need?

Now a lot of people will go ahead and put aggregate reviews into their organizational markup or maybe one of their services or products, but they won’t mark up real reviews, and in that case, you’re not going to see this star rating show up. They need to have some actual reviews to verify the rating that is also being claimed within the aggregate review rating. So, you’re going to want these reviews on the page. You’re going to want to be marking up those reviews on the page. Now, you don’t have to have every single review, but you do need to have some physical reviews to markup and you need to make sure that you have an aggregate review rating as well. Let’s head over to Simplified Search, one of our sites. I’m going to walk you through what this page would maybe look like, and then the associated markup you would need.

Here we are on the Simplified Search website and under the resources pages, I have all of these different examples that you can look through to see what the different markups look like as well as what is the associated structured data that you would need in order to receive the markup, or to receive that rich feature. This is a product markup, and we’ve got a fake product here, a robot that’s going to do all your structured data markup for you.

We’ve got a price associated with it, we’ve got an overall review rating, and then we’ve got some physical reviews here on the page as well. Now, if we scroll down, you’ll see the JSON LD that’s associated with this, and this is the same JSON that you’ll also find embedded into this page underneath it. If we looked at the structure data here, you would see product markup, and within that product markup, you would see reviews. You can go through this entire markup right here, and you can see there’s the aggregate reviews as well as other reviews in the body.

Again, we’ll go up here at the top and you’ll see, this is a review type of a product, and then under here, you’re going to have this markup. We’ve got an aggregate rating of 4.7. We have the best rating. What’s the best that they can get, and what’s the worst that they can get. This is so they know what your score is based on. Lastly, you would have the rating count, which is the number of reviews that have been added to this specific product. We’re marking this up here from a very high level. It’s telling us how many reviews, what that overall rating might be. Right below all this information here, we’ve got review, and as you can see, we’ll have the review body, the author of the review, which is a different type of scheme, the name of the review, and in this case, the name we’re using is just the author. We’ve got the date published, and then the rating that she gave us.

Now, I can mark up every single one of these reviews and add more of that information in here. But in this case, in this example, I marked up one of the reviews. Now, because I have that information here, I’ve got both the aggregate rating and a physical review, my page is now eligible for the review markup.

Now, to check that, it’s always important to do that, you can go to the rich results test, and this is going to show you whether you’re eligible for that result or not. I like to use the schema.org tester with structured data tester, Google still has it. They were going to sunset that product, but so many people pushed back that Google decided to keep it live. Now, that’s a really good tool to validate your markup if you’re looking at structured data itself. But if you want to know if you’re eligible for rich result, this is the test that’s going to show you that. So once you have that markup in, you’ve added to your page, and you’ve added both the aggregate review rating, as well as some physical reviews.

This page will not only be eligible for product mark-up, because again, I nested all of this information within the product mark-up, it’s also going to be eligible now for those starred reviews. That’s really important because I want to make sure that I get some more visibility for this product. As you can see here, I’ve got the product and I’ve also got the review snippets. We can look here and it’ll show us the information.

We’ve got both the aggregate review rating, and then the reviews themselves. You’re going to want to put both of these types in, in order to get those stars to show up. If you rely on the aggregate reviews, you’re not going to see the results that you want to see. Structured data is a game-changer, and it helps us get more visibility with our websites within the search results. It’s a way that we can combat against some of those bigger sites, or some of the bigger players in our industry. It’s a way to set ourselves apart from our competition, and it’s a way to help our users find more useful information on our website.

How Can You Learn to Do This?

I’ve got an entire course that walks you through this from top to bottom, I’ve built this from the perspective of somebody who started with no training whatsoever when it came to structured data and JSON-LD, and then learned how to do some pretty advanced things with it. As I’ve grown, I’ve shared everything with you on how to get started, as well as how to take your structured data implementation up to a whole new level.

If you’re interested and because you’re checking us out on YouTube, you can use the code YouTube to get 25% off, and you can find more about that at learn.simplifiedsearch.net.

As we wrap this up, I want to say again, thank you for watching and I’ll make one more plug. If you need help building out your structured data, we’ve got a tool here that’s going to help you do that. It’s the structured data generator. It’s going to help you build out that product or offer aggregations here as well as adding reviews and other information to your website. You fill out the form here. It’s going to build the JSON code for you. You can validate it.

You can test it for rich results before adding it to your website. I hope you learned something new today. I hope you can take advantage of these reviews within the rich results, within the search results here in Google. If you got any questions, please comment below. Until next time, Happy Marketing.