How important are business reviews on my SEO

Posted by Richard Denver on 12 Jul 2021

Hosting Australia

It’s common knowledge that online reviews and SEO have been closely tied together for a long time. It is estimated that online reviews make up as much as 10% of the criteria for how Google displays search results.

Over the years many of us in the industry have continued to run tests to improve our clients ranking across search engines. It is not surprising that when we develop a website for a client one of the early to do’s, is to ensure that we set active Google My Business for our clients.

For years we have been aware that the first website that appeared in Google search results received the lions share of clicks, approximately 43.2% of the traffic with the second listing received 30.7% of the remaining traffic. Google quickly realised it could financially benefit from this, so they moved ads from the right hand column to above and below the Google search results, increasing results for clients and revenue.

Unfortunately the impact of this was website listings like your business were pushed down the results page. With the introduction of Google reviews on Google maps appearing in search, website listings were pushed even further down the page to the point that they were below the first screen. This meant that the user had to scroll down the page to get to the business listings.

In the below example we have taken the generic search term ‘Real estate’. You can quickly see how Google presents the search results.

Google Search Results

Moving onto a more localised search, we used the search term ‘Real estate Agent Frankston ‘ which presented as follows.

Google Search Results

Now with website listing appearing below the end of the first screen in both desktop and mobile, clients looking to manage their ad spend quickly realised to only way of being seen on the first screen was to activate and make an effort to enhance their Google reviews.

How business reviews have changed

Now with website listing appearing below the end of the first screen in both desktop and mobile, clients looking to manage their ad spend quickly realised to only way of being seen on the first screen was to activate and make an effort to enhance their Google reviews.

In the 2000’s everything changed, business reviews were becoming public. Online review websites became the go to place for customers to provide feedback. Again the majority of these were negative in nature and if a business did not claim their business on these sites they were unable to provide assurances that the feedback had been received and was being taken onboard. This saw business's lose revenue and clients as the reviews inevitably appeared in Google search below their business and in some cases above their business listing.

Today we have Google reviews appearing in just about every search result. So there is no real need to search out a review for a business or company any longer.

With Google maps including reviews on the first screen, it is important to get listed, maintain and respond to reviews and ensure your ranking score remains high. Once you have reached about 30 reviews your ability to out list your competitors becomes more challenging. Efforts at this point needs to be placed on how often your NAP (business name, address and phone number) is listed or cited on the internet. The more listings or citations, the better your ranking should be.

So in conclusion the best way to get noticed on the first screen is by improving your Google business reviews, that’s unless you have a big budget for Google ads.