https://www.lockedownseo.com/ Can too many one-star reviews make your Google rankings topple? In local SEO, reviews are important. Google looks at reviews on their platform, but also Yelp, and any industry-specific review platforms. Many SEO consultants believe that reviews can influence anywhere from 10 to 20 percent of the total local SEO algorithm.
Here’s where things get interesting.
Google has several patents that revolve around analyzing the sentiment around words on a web page or words in a review. This means their machine learning is working towards understanding the general perception of a brand. The language that your customers use in positive, neutral, and negative reviews can influence how Google perceives your brand, and as machine learning eventually gets more sophisticated, this may increase.
You can see parts of this right now. When you do a Google search for a service in your area, you may see snippets of reviews when you click through to Google Maps. This means the search engine is dissecting the reviews for specific words that are relevant to your search. You can also see this is you do a search for a specific business, as Google shows two or three reviews in the Knowledge Graph for that business, highlighting specific words in the reviews.
What happens when people have no reviews and then get a negative review? Or if they have many reviews, and the negative reviews start piling up?
One thing that many people do is start reaching out to previous customers, trying to get as many five-star reviews as they can very quickly. Google usually holds onto these for a couple of weeks before adding them into your cumulative start rating, because it is an anomaly in the usual pattern. If you get no reviews for three years, then ten reviews in a week, it looks suspicious.
What if you’re a long-established business with many reviews, but many are one-star or two-star reviews?
Some things can’t be fixed except by working on the internal business itself. Give good customer service, make sure your product or service delivers on the brand promise, and set honest expectations for your customers.
Whatever you do, avoid hiring companies that “clean up” a low star rating by getting fake reviews. These may do you more harm than good in the long run.
#LockedownSEO #seo
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