Aggregate Rating Markup for Local Restaurant

[robertsteck]

Hello Moz Community,

I am finally getting around to creating markup for a bunch of the sites we work with using JSON-LD. I have a question specifically regarding adding review markup for a local restaurant.

It's my understanding that putting the aggregate rating on the homepage never results in stars being shown in the SERP's.

So what would be the best practice for taking advantage of all the great Google reviews we've accumulated over the years? These are reviews for the restaurant in general and not for any specific service or product.

Should I create a reviews page on the site and use the markup there?

Thanks for any and all suggestions.

[robertsteck]

I now realize that it's against Google's guidelines to markup reviews that aren't generated on your site!

Nevermind!

[Smileworks_Liverpool]

I'm a local dentist and have the same problem.  So we have 188 x 5 star reviews.  They are appearing next to every blog post I write and every services page but not the homepage.  Having those yellow stars in the serps and on the map is HUGE and tyou can get them just not for the homepage.

If you're on wordpress theres a plugin called Google reviews for business that works really well for us. So all your team pages, about pages, blogs and menus can have the stars - just not your homepage. So you could create individual pages for each dish or meal if you like and have stars next to them. So as a dentist I have a braces services page, an Implants one, a cosmetic one and a whitening one, all with reviews in the map, on the page as a slider and in the blogs.

So don't be defeated, you can do it really easily with the plugin!