Get Rich Snippets on Google’s SERP with Schema.org

Ratings and Reviews

Reviews and Ratings provide a qualitative description of your business, product or website. The Review property describes information about a review, such as the reviewer name, the date of the review, the length of the review, and the number of ratings. Users must have read reviews or ratings in places (schemas) that are search-engine results pages. Implementation involves preparing a page that contains a review of a product and then add the required markup. Reviews or ratings in schemas must meet the following criteria:

• Reviews must be genuine.
• Critic reviews or ratings should be genuine, not paid endorsements or promotional phrases.
• Promotional phrases and/or images must not be found in critic reviews or ratings.
• The aggregate score for all four critic reviews or ratings should not exceed the rated score.

The pros of reviewing a product on a Google SERP are obvious: it increases your CTRs and searches. Reviews also bring traffic to your website, increase conversions and find plenty of satisfied customers. The downside is that if you are a marketer, you need to be on your website reviewing products to stay competitive. Reviews on a Google SERP can cost you up to 5% of your website rankings.

The objective of the review is to give an honest and unbiased evaluation of a product, not to give a recommendation. Moreover, Google doesn’t want your negative reviews to creep up the page, so you shouldn’t include them.

Structured Data and Reviews

Note that Reviews are a structured data dependent feature which uses the Review schema markup. The full definition of Review is available at Schema.