Customers reviews on product page help ranking and SEO

[Aleksander_Gramm]

At the outset, allow me confess I am marketer. My purpose of this post is to draw the merchants’ attention to SEO opportunity.

Every day I see how much the time and money merchants spend (and waste) on SEO. There are many things as h1...h3, titles, tags, etc. Of course many merchants ignore SEO.


All I can say is that search engines use only two important factors: the content and links. So I think you'll agree if your pages are indexable other ‘technical SEO factors’ will affect the rank to a lesser degree. Many ‘ranking factors’ are myths or theories.
To get quality content is real problem for ecommerce sites. But you can use first party customers reviews (reviews on the product page).

John Mueller wrote on Twitter that from an SEO standpoint, embedding third party reviews on your site won’t add or detract any SEO value to that page. The reviews on your product pages is your own content. Google consider customers’ review on product page as a part of main content. Google consider positive user reviews as evidence of positive site reputation. The General Guidelines recommend their QA to read the reviews because the content of the reviews matter, not just the number.
So the first party reviews still the most power signal for search engines.

The theory is pretty good. But people are hard-pressed to leave review. That is why many merchants not worked on that.
Few years ago I found solution and it isn’t silver bullet. The solution are detailed review form.

As you know the standard Magento review form has three fields: name, title and review. It is really difficult for many people to leave review. If you want to get answer you need to ask your customers. In short words you need add questions and fields. Possible you won’t get many reviews. But you’ll get more useful content.

I give some recommendations.
1) To create a logical structure of the review form. Which questions will you ask? Design, price, security, easy-to-use, pros/cons etc. The question about real product features are good.
2) Which type of fields you need? Text area, drop down, yes/no, etc.
3) To create a task for your developer or to search a module.
Additionally you need to prevent spam, hurtful content. Also it'll better if you use additional features and functions like detailed ratings, voting, social sharing, complain, etc.

Remember, product reviews isn’t for SEO. Product reviews for visitors.

I hope this info help you to improve site and to get more purchase.

 

[Aleksander_Gramm]

UPD.
As John Mueller (from Google) said
“In general, Google doesn’t evaluate a site’s authority. So it’s not something where we would give you a score on authority and say this is the general score for authority on your website. That’s not something we would be applying here.”

Yes you need to stop using these ridiculous 'domain authority'. But you should asl "How I cam improve the rank of pages?"

John Mueller gave the answer:
“If you’re thinking about authority, if you’re thinking about the search quality raters, then that sounds like you’re kind of on the right track there. One of the other questions was also on expertise, authority, trustworthiness – that kind of goes in the same direction.

It’s something, from my point of view, where I would try to get more input from users and potential users. Really try to get the more hard feedback that’s sometimes hard to take where people can really tell you where they think – like comparing different sites in the same niche – where they see issues that you could be doing. Or where they look at your page and think I can’t really trust the content that’s on here.

It’s probably the case that you’ve already been doing a lot of these things really well, but maybe there are things you could be doing even better in that regard.”

There are no words about customer reviews on product page. But it is typical approach to make a decision. As buyers, we need feedback which will help us to purchase.

 

[Clinton]

UPD.
As John Mueller (from Google) said
“In general, Google doesn’t evaluate a site’s authority. So it’s not something where we would give you a score on authority and say this is the general score for authority on your website. That’s not something we would be applying here.”

Yes you need to stop using these ridiculous 'domain authority'. But you should asl "How I cam improve the rank of pages?"

Agreed the Moz "domain authority" metric is quite rubbish.

But why do you believe Google when they say they don't evaluate a site's authority? Don't believe a word they say! Of course they take site authority into account! There's plenty of evidence about for that (though I am too lazy to go find it for you)

 

[fisicx]

Of course they take site authority into account!

The quality rated guidelines discuss this at length: https://static.googleusercontent.co....com/en//searchqualityevaluatorguidelines.pdf

The guidelines are for human reviewers but they will have be collated from the googleplex and contain lots of useful snippets. Well worth the read - especially the parts about intent.

 

[Aleksander_Gramm]

Agreed the Moz "domain authority" metric is quite rubbish.

But why do you believe Google when they say they don't evaluate a site's authority? Don't believe a word they say! Of course they take site authority into account! There's plenty of evidence about for that (though I am too lazy to go find it for you)

Because it works. Also I guess, technically, it's possible and it's better than trying to create 'system' which can evaluate authority. Google can't create system to evaluate accuracy of information on the page.

And Google has launched new algorithm for reviews and rich snippets.