How your eCommerce business can benefit from stars in search

Online reviews can serve as a guide to consumers during the customer journey and the decision-making process. Today, 92% of consumers read online reviews, and word of mouth remains the most popular method of recommendation for consumers.

But with billions of brands available online, it’s important for eCommerce businesses to choose and implement the correct digital strategy in order to gain as much online visibility as possible, and ensure visitors turn into customers.

In this article, we'll discuss how your business can benefit from displaying stars in search, and how important customer feedback is in today’s competitive landscape.

Online reviews are a great and easy way to increase traffic, improve PPC and SEO results, build your online reputation, eliminate doubt, as well as increase customer confidence.

But what makes stars in search so powerful?

Online reviews appearing in search results affect the way browsers find and view your business. The nature of the reviews naturally determine whether or not the shopper is going to engage with your brand.

Depending on how you collect reviews, you’ll have review snippets stars display on organic search results, and stars show up as part of your Google Seller Ratings on Google Ads, which can have positive impacts on click-through rates and traffic.

Example of Review Snippet Stars From Product Reviews

Example of Google Seller Ratings Stars

In 2018, Moz attributed 13% of traffic value to online reviews (review quantity, review diversity, etc.), making customer feedback the 5th most important ranking factor.

Claiming feedback and reviews and managing them correctly with a Google review partner such as Trustpilot can directly impact your search performance. According to Moz, stars displayed in search have become necessary to any eCommerce company’s success, helping each and every one of them turn more quality traffic into revenue.

Collecting product and service reviews for your eCommerce site has never been easier! With a third-party review collection service like Trustpilot, gathering customer feedback and working towards boosting your visibility on search engines is .

If you’ve already started collecting reviews, you can import them into your Trustpilot Account to manage and view all your previous and current reviews in one place.

If you do not have any customer feedback yet, and would like to start your review journey today; simply upload a csv file to invite past customers to reviews your products.

Once this is done, it’s time to activate our Automatic Feedback Service; allowing you to optimise your review collection process as much as possible.

To showcase your reviews in search resuls, you'll have to add your customer feedback to your website. Simply install our SEO TrustBoxes to feed review data to Google in order to maximise your paid and organic search benefits.

Google Seller Rating (GSR) is an automated Google Ads extension that demonstrates other people’s trust in your brand.

Essentially, it’s a star rating system that displays under the headline and URL of your PPC ad.

The bottom ad has Seller ratings, the top one doesn’t. Which one would you click?

Well, a whopping 64.6% of people click on Google Seller Ratings Ads when they are looking to buy an item online.

According to Google, using reviews to achieve Google Seller Ratings could help your business increase its click-through rate by 10% on average, and therefore improve your quality score and reduce your cost-per-click.

But how can your business achieve Google Seller Ratings to showcase reviews directly on the search engine results page?

There are a few criterias to qualify for this ad extension and see positive results on your search engine performance. However, please note that these criteria do not guarantee anything. Only Google controls Google, and the Google algorithm can adjust at any time.

Here are the current Google regulations in order to gain Google Seller Ratings:

• At least 100 verified service reviews

• Collected in the last 12 months

• In one market

• Minimum average star rating of 3.5/5

Google Seller Ratings allow you to build trust earlier in the funnel, making it easier for customers to choose between you and your competitors.

Rich Snippets are the markup of your content with ‘structured data’ that allow search engines to better understand and index this information. This schema markup, generated by product reviews only, is what helps you stand out in organic listings.

The rating and the number of stars show useful additional information that will encourage browsers to trust your business earlier in the customer journey.

Example of Review Snippets from Product reviews

In order to qualify for Review Snippet Stars, it’s required to use Aggregate Rating to mark-up your web page for product reviews.

Review Snippets can help boost your SEO and optimise your click-through rate, constantly driving quality traffic to your eCommerce site.

Building an online presence has become one of the hardest things to achieve when trying to market an eCommerce website.

Customer reviews are a simple and great way to achieve it. Collecting user-generated content helps keep your website’s content fresh and updated, impacting your SEO performance.

By acquiring stars in search - Google Seller Ratings or Review Snippets - in Google search results page, you’re building transparency, trust and customer confidence earlier in the funnel, pushing browsers to choose you over any of your competitors, and therefore dramatically increasing your click-through and conversion rates whilst lowering your cost-per-click.

Did you know that Trustpilot business profiles appear in ~0.15% of all Google searches? To find out more about how we can help you boost your online visibility, check out our Complete Guide To Reviews below.