Christmas Checklist: Is Your Business Ready for the Sales Season?
Christmas time is here! Although the Christmas seasons tends to sneak up on us, its important for shop owners to be prepared before basically anyone else.
Google stars can be an incredibly useful tool for online shops that depend on traffic from the search engine giant. However, it can be frustrating when you can see that your stars aren’t being displayed in the search results. Don’t panic. We’re here to help you figure things out!
What are Google stars?
Google stars refer to the star ratings displayed throughout the search engine. These ratings are based on the customer reviews published online.
Google uses a 5-star rating system. Sometimes, they are displayed as 5 stars, while other times, Google may display a single star with the rating score next to it. You can see an example of both below:
Source: The Crofthouse
Google stars appear in many places. The most common places to see them:
- Standard Google search results: stars can be found in organic and paid results.
- Google Shopping: star ratings may be displayed for both products and shops.
- Google Maps: stars may appear alongside local businesses in Google Maps.
With this in mind, it’s important to know that Google stars are most often separated into 3 categories:
- Service reviews: Service reviews (aka seller ratings, shop reviews, store ratings) are reviews based on the performance of the business. Reviews tend to focus on things the shop can control (e.g. packaging, customer service, delivery).
- Product reviews: Product reviews focus on the product's performance. The customer provides feedback on things like product durability, colour, size, fit, etc.
- Local reviews: These reviews are similar to service reviews in that they focus on the service provided by a business. However, local reviews are limited to reviews from physical shops in precise locations.
Note: As we are focused on e-commerce businesses, we will be looking at Google Search and Google Shopping in this article.
Why are Google stars important?
Simply put, Google stars build trust in your company and your products.
Whether it’s figuring out which product a user needs or finding a shop that offers the best price, Google is often where the customer journey begins.
Therefore, the first impression your brand makes will often take place in the search results.
When your business shows up in the results with a good reputation, this is a great way to build credibility and inspire clicks. For organic stars, this means more traffic to your site. For paid ads, this means a better click-through rate, more traffic, a boost in conversions, and a lower cost-per-click.
How does Google decide when to show stars?
The bad news is that there is no way to guarantee Google displays your stars. The search engine considers stars as a privilege and not a guarantee. Google also changes how reviews are displayed fairly often, experimenting with formats, colours, and placement.
However, there are certain requirements to fulfil in order to have a chance at being displayed. We’ll cover the most common reasons for shops not displaying stars in the next session.
It’s also important to understand that Google limits some reviews from being displayed in certain places: Google no longer allows shops to display their own seller rating/store rating directly next to their own domain in organic search results. That means that store ratings can only appear next to trusted 3rd party review sites (e.g. the dedicated shop reviews page on Trusted Shops).
This rule, however, does not apply for Google Ads. You can still display stars next to your domain in paid ads.
Note: In some markets, Google has been observed placing stars next to a shop’s own domain again. However, these are not sourced directly from the shop, but is generally a compilation of reviews and ratings that Google has collected from trusted reviews platforms. Again, Google often experiments with Google stars, turning on and off certain features quite spontaneously, often without announcements.
Common reasons your Google stars don’t appear
Let’s look at the reasons why your shop might not be displaying stars in Google.
Incorrectly structured data & schema markups
Structured data is code added to your site’s HTML. Also known as schema markup, you can think of them as ‘labels’ you can place throughout your website in order to help Google understand your website (and brand) better. Some of the most common schema markups identify your phone number and other contract information.
Customer reviews can be ‘marked up’ in a similar way. Google has to understand that the reviews on your sites are actually customer reviews. With that in mind, product reviews and service reviews are marked up differently.
If there are any mistakes in your structured data, this may be causing an issue with displaying your stars in Google.
Warning: Manipulating your schema markup to show ratings you haven’t earned can backfire tremendously if Google figures this out. This is not advised.
You can learn more about schema markup from our whitepaper:
Incorrect data in your Google accounts
For Google Shopping, whether it’s free listings or paid ones, proper account setup is crucial. You’ll need to make sure the shop name and domain in your reviews match the shop name and registered domain in your Google Merchant Center account.
If certain product reviews aren’t showing, consider that products must have unique identifiers like GTIN, SKU, or MPN.
When we talk about things like Google Knowledge Graph (that box that highlights business info at the top of the results), you may need to check your Google Business Profile for accurate information as well.
Review platform issues
Google really only collects and publishes reviews from two sources:
- Google’s own reviews platform – a simple reviews platform directly connected to your Google Business Profile
- a trusted 3rd party reviews provider (like Trusted Shops).
A list of approved providers can be found in Google’s Merchant Centre.
Policy violations
As we mentioned earlier, if you’ve been caught doing something shady with your reviews, Google very well might be punishing you by not displaying them. This can include, but is not limited to:
- submitting reviews yourself
- hiring an agency to write and submit reviews for you
- incentivising reviews illegally (e.g. offering a reward in exchange for 5-star reviews)
Not enough (good) reviews
Google has certain requirements for showing reviews. Depending on which reviews (i.e. service or product reviews) you want to display, the number of reviews required varies. The quality of the reviews is sometimes also considered by Google.
Product reviews
Whether we’re talking about organic results or paid results (Google Shopping or Google Ads), Google requires:
- you must have a minimum of 50 reviews across all your products.
- your product review data source must be uploaded at least once per month and must contain updated reviews.
For more details, check out Google’s article on displaying product reviews.
Service reviews
The number of service reviews needed in order to display Google stars is not set in stone. According to Google, the number of reviews can vary by merchant (and industry), but most businesses will get a rating after about 100 reviews in the past 24 months (per country where stars will be displayed).
In addition to the number of reviews per country, service ratings also need to have a higher average than 3.5 stars.
For more details, check out Google’s article on displaying store ratings.
Note: Google also limits reviews for certain industries, namely education. If you’ve categorised your business as a school in your Google accounts, you may want to reconsider this if possible.
Tips to improve your odds of displaying Google stars
Even if you’ve addressed all of the above points, it is still no guarantee that Google will display your star ratings. Here are a few additional tips for improving your odds of displaying those Google stars:
Shutterstock/PeskyMonkey
Collect reviews consistently and at scale
Google consider the recency of reviews when deciding to display star ratings. That is why it’s important to have a constant stream of new reviews coming in. There are some tips for making sure your customers actually take the time to leave reviews for your business:
- Ask them: Unhappy customers leave unsolicited reviews. However, for those happy customers, you’ve simply got to ask them. Make sure you send an email to the customer to request the review(s).
- It’s all about timing: Send review requests at the right time. The customer should be asked soon after they’ve received the item, but not too soon that they haven’t had a chance to test the item. This may vary per industry, where fashion companies might ask for reviews sooner than a lawn care company.
- Reminders: You don’t want to be spammy, but asking for reviews a second time (if they haven’t responded to the first mail) can be effective in boosting those response rates.
Use a trusted reviews provider
We provided a list of Google-approved review providers earlier in the article. Many of these providers make it easier to not only get your stars showing in Google, but they can also make reviews look nice on your website.
So, how can you decide? Consider what options the review provider has in addition to just the ability to transfer reviews to Google. Ask yourself:
- Do they offer both service and product reviews?
- Is it easy to transfer these reviews to Google regularly?
- Do they integrate well with my existing solutions (e.g. e-commerce platforms, email marketing solutions, etc.)?
- Do they offer tools to make review collection easier and more efficient?
- What other trust solutions do they offer?
Reviews are about building trust with your audience. The best review providers provide more solutions than just helping you display reviews in Google. They help you build confidence with your customers.
How Trusted Shops can help
Trusted Shops not only offers a trusted reviews platform, but also provides trust solutions to boost your brand as a whole.
The Trustmark & Buyer Protection add 3rd party certification along with 30-day protections that bring peace of mind to new customers. We call the Trustmark the ‘6th star’.
Google Integration helps you keep Google up to date with all the reviews you’ve collected. Set it and forget it. It does a lot of the work for you to boost your chances of displaying Google stars.
The Reputation Manager helps you boost your ratings on open review platforms (like Trustpilot). By redirecting some of your review invites to other review platforms, your business can shape a consistent reputation across the Google search results.
It doesn’t end there. Explore our B2B website to learn more about our trust solutions.
Conclusion
Make sure you are checking the right boxes to improve your odds of getting your Google stars displayed throughout their platform. Working with a Google trusted review provider can make things much easier. Regardless of that, it’s important to have realistic expectations regarding Google stars. There is no guarantee of anything. The best you can do is take the actions needed to improve your odds.
