Onpage Reviews, SEO & Traffic Uplift

[BeckyKey]

Hi

I wondered if anyone knew of any case studies to reinforce the importance of on page reviews for SEO & increasing traffic.

I'd like to push it in my company, however it would be great to show them some results from a case study.

Thank you!

[KevinBudzynski]

Unfortunately, many of these case studies are from agencies trying to sell their service.

Here are some I found that may help:

• https://vwo.com/blog/ecommerce-optimization-customer-reviews-increases-sales/
• http://www.bazaarvoice.com/case-studies/onedirect-case-study.html
• http://mountaineerdebbie.blogspot.com/2015/03/e-commerce-retailer-case-study.html

Good luck!

[CleverPhD]

Markup for reviews will not help you rank for SEO directly.   That said, if the page already ranks, then Schema markup for reviews that then shows in a rich snippet helps with your CTR on that position (and this helps solidify your position as Google sees the action on your result).

I cant find the reference, but wanted to mention, there was a recent article showing that you actually get a higher CTR in position #2 with some sort of rich snippet vs something in #1 position without a rich snippet.    See if you can find it (or maybe someone else here can) for some reason my Google skills are failing me right now and I cannot find it. I must need more coffee. :-).

I cant release the actual data for client privacy reasons, but I can say from my own experience, we had a bunch of our pages on page 1 (usually top 3) for various local searches with review data marked up and the snippets would show for the reviews.  There was a change in how the schema validated and we saw a ~6% drop in traffic to those pages when the snippets on the search results went away - this was with no significant ranking changes.  We corrected the markup, Google crawled the site like crazy within 24 hours and we had our snippets and traffic back.  It was pretty amazing to watch and validated everything I had seen others talk about.

Separately, I just got back from PubCon.  Ton of people talking about using markup, most notably Duane Forrester from Bing. He spent half his keynote talking about advances in machine learning and the other half talking about how we all needed to use Schema.org.  In other words, computers are getting smarter and smarter, but if you can, please help them out with markup.

Hope this helps you figure things out.

[BeckyKey]

Hey

This is very helpful thank you. My main issue and motivation for doing this is to add to the thin product content we have on the pages.

I know we need a lot more content in terms of video etc, but I thought reviews could be a place to start. We have reviews already, but they're currently on a third party pop up and not on our site - so won't get crawled.

Thanks for the articles!

[BeckyKey]

Great thanks! I'll give these a read

[CleverPhD]

I think the key point there is not the schema markup per se, but the fact that the reviews can be original content on that and that can help the page rank.  That is the angle you want to start with with the Schema being the icing on the top.   Improving the thin pages is the key first step.  Lots of stuff out there on how Google does not like thin/duplicate content.

[BeckyKey]

Awesome thanks, I'm on the right track then