The Local Review Ecosystem

96% of US consumers read local business reviews, and 79% spend the majority of their review-reading time on Google. With figures as substantial as these, a local business owner might conclude that Google Business Profiles are really the only platform on which they need to devote time to review acquisition and management. However, an entire ecosystem of review opportunities exists beyond Google.

Because most local brands are constantly seeking new avenues for growing their visibility and sales, it’s important to know that many different platforms publish reviews that are read by consumers, and that in some cases, reviews earned on one site can be reused by others, and can even influence Google local search rankings.

Looking again at those percentages, a local business owner should be open to evaluating them in at least two different ways:

1. Google Business Profiles are the dominant force in local search, and commonly the most significant third-party source of online visibility for local brands. Given this, one reasonable option is to focus nearly all review acquisition and management efforts on Google, based on the theory that improving review metrics there will have the most impact on the greatest number of consumers.

2. Because Google has become so integrated into the review habits of nearly 8 in 10 consumers, it’s as if the search engine has already done most of the marketing for local businesses in terms of making review acquisition calls-to-action highly visible. Given this, some local business owners might find a competitive edge in devoting more time to platforms other than Google in an effort to maximize visibility in less competitive spaces.

While either option could make sense on the basis of specific business resources and goals, the ideal is to allot time for review acquisition and management across the entire local business review ecosystem.

86% of consumers say reviews are either the most important or a somewhat important factor in determining whether a business is worthy of their trust. Considering the tremendous impact reviews have on consumer behavior, competitive local businesses should prioritize this special form of content within the overall local search marketing budget. A smart strategy will take all opportunities into account, and we’ll move on to look at these now.

Data Source: The Impact of Local Business Reviews on Consumer Behavior | SEO Industry Report - Moz

As mentioned above, 79% of consumers spend the most time reading reviews at Google (which could include exposure to review content on Google Business Profiles, local packs, local finders, and Google Maps). For 49%, Facebook is in first place, followed by Yelp (46%), TripAdvisor (28%) and Nextdoor (20%). 13% of consumers prefer smaller industry-specific sites and 4% make other choices of where to read reviews, including Amazon, the Better Business Bureau, AAA and local news sites. Your industry may include niche review opportunities on platforms like FindLaw for lawyers, or HealthGrades for doctors. A mix of all of the above, then, would be your starting point for becoming visible across the review-reading ecosystem.

Your options for acquiring and managing public sentiment don’t end with this list of standard platforms, however. There are three other key sources of review content within the ecosystem:

1. Your local business website

42% of consumers look at the reviews and testimonials you publish on your company’s own website. It’s vital to develop a program for gathering this sentiment from your customers. Such content can be featured on a single reviews/testimonials page, or can be sprinkled throughout the website, enriching location landing pages, product pages, or other types of pages.

2. Informal third-party reviews

When bloggers, columnists, news sites, and social media participants publish sentiment about your business, it’s a less formal style of review which can still influence consumers. Finding ways to get featured by local writers is a smart addition to your overall review strategy.

3. Formal professional reviews

Professional reviews from entities like Michelin or Zagat typically cannot be sought, but they can be quite influential if a business is lucky enough to earn them. It’s important to know that Google instructs its Quality Raters to take such review content into account when evaluating the reputation and authority of brands.

Taken altogether, you now have a list of opportunities for developing your online reputation across a wide variety of platforms that are utilized by customers.

The old adage of not putting all your eggs in one basket could have been coined to describe the online local business review scenario. Review loss is, unfortunately, part and parcel of local business reputation management. Platforms like Google frequently filter out review content, either algorithmically or manually. Similarly, Yelp frequently won’t show incoming reviews from profiles they don’t yet trust. Meanwhile, systems can experience bugs that temporarily cause large numbers of reviews to disappear, and they don’t always all return when platforms implement fixes.

It can be very frustrating to know a customer left you a review, but it never goes live on your listing, or to see a bunch of your reviews suddenly vanish. Because reviews are so closely linked with consumer actions along the journey to transactions, lost reviews have to be seen as having negative monetary consequences.

The best defense is to diversify the platforms on which customers can read reviews of your business. This way, if you wake up on Monday morning to discover that half of your reviews are missing on Google, at least you’ll know that people can still read about customer experiences with your brand on Yelp, or Nextdoor, or Facebook, and the reviews on your website lend extra peace of mind because you know they’ll never be removed unless you take them down yourself!

Nearly all businesses in all categories will want to start earning reviews on the major platforms like Google, Yelp, and Facebook, but you can broaden your assets by searching for geo-industry-based review opportunities.

If your business is quite new, the easiest way to investigate is to search Google for the names of your top competitors and add the word “reviews” to your search phrase and see what comes up in the results. Making a spreadsheet of what you find will help you keep track of your opportunities. You can look at both local and national competitors to discover where people are reviewing these entities.

If your business is established, you should perform the above task but supplement it with an audit of your own reputation. Look up your business name + “reviews” to discover all of the places customers are talking about your business so that you can be sure you’re actively managing your profiles wherever they exist. You may well find that listings have been created for you (instead of by you) on certain sites.

You can also look up reviews by business category, with a search phrase like “reviews of contractors Seattle” or “reviews of dentists near me” to see what Google surfaces.

The above screenshot shows a Bing listing for a local fabric store. While the listing exists on the search engine, the review portion of this profile is coming from Facebook. This is because Facebook is syndicating its reviews for the use of platforms like Bing that haven’t seriously invested in building up a proprietary review corpus. Looking further down the listing for this company, we see that Bing is relying heavily on review syndication from multiple sources, as seen in this screenshot where reviews are being pulled in from platforms like Yellowpages and Loc8nearme:

Google sometimes displays similar content on the Google Business Profile, in this instance, highlighting reviews from Foursquare, Facebook, and OpenTable for a local restaurant.

Apple Maps is another example of reliance on syndication, as they pull in their review content from Yelp. It’s good to understand that reviews you earn in one place can help you stand out on other platforms wherever syndication is occurring. It’s not something you can control, but realizing the existence of this practice shines a light on just how powerful a single review can be.

What you can directly control is becoming your own review syndicator. It’s great to get a detailed, 5-star review on your Google Business Profile, but it’s even better when you showcase this influential content in multiple places, including:

• On your website
• On your social media profiles
• Within content you’re publishing on your site or blog
• Within image and video content
• On in-store signage and print materials

Repurposing review content can lend an added degree of trust to your pages, posts, publications, and multimedia. Just be sure you read the guidelines of any platform before re-using their reviews so that you are certain these types of syndication are allowed.

Many case studies over the years have determined that various aspects of Google-based reviews have an impact on how well a local business ranks within Google’s local interfaces including packs, finders and Maps. For example, it’s been demonstrated that the number and recency of reviews a business has received correlates with improved rankings. Other factors, such as the words within a review, are not believed to directly impact rank, though they can certainly influence consumer decision-making!

It makes sense that reviews left directly on Google Business Profiles have the most influence on local rankings within Google’s system. But it has also been strongly theorized that the search engine may allow aspects of Yelp reviews to contribute to Google local pack rankings, and other unconfirmed third-party relationships may exist.

Finally, it’s important to know that Google instructs its Search Quality Evaluators to examine the reviews of businesses to determine their reputation and trustworthiness. Though the ongoing work of these evaluators does not directly impact rank, its purpose is to help Google ensure that it is returning relevant results to users. By earning and managing customer sentiment across a wide variety of high-quality online spaces throughout the local review ecosystem, you’ll be doing what you can to ensure that influential sentiment about your business is easily discoverable by the public and by the staff and programmatic processes of major digital entities.

• Prioritizing Your Review Efforts
• Implementing a Review Acquisition Strategy
• Understanding Review Guidelines
• Understanding Review Filters
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• The Impact of Local Business Reviews on Consumer Behavior | SEO Industry Report - Our local business review survey outlines key takeaways regarding the impact of reviews on consumer behavior and local business success. Learn more about the fundamentally important inclusion of online local business reviews in any local SEO strategy.