Although it’s probably the hardest area to optimise and requires the most effort, reviews are one of, if not the most important factors when looking to improve rankings in the Local Pack. When I first set up my consultancy business in 2021, I started proactively approaching clients to request a Google review, however I found that some of my reviews never appeared.
Why aren’t my Google reviews showing up?
The mistake I made, which others can learn from, is that I went from having no reviews at all to requesting multiple reviews all at the same time, so when 3 of my clients submitted a review at the same time, it was flagged as spam and sadly, those reviews have never since appeared. The learning here is to space out your review requests, particularly if you are a small business. Google has plenty of other information regarding reviews that haven’t shown up, but this is one reason I haven’t seen documented elsewhere.
More on Google reviews
Make it as easy as possible for your clients to leave a review by sending them a link to leave a review within your email request (more info here). My reviews have helped me to become quite dominant in the Local Pack in Bournemouth, UK and I regularly get enquiries from local people:
These reviews also present a great opportunity to add some user-generated content to your own website as you can take the review copy and add it to your site. In many cases, the reviews will be highly relevant too. For example, mine mention ‘SEO Consultant‘, ‘content’, ‘website migrations‘ etc. which then helps to improve rankings on the pages I add them to on my own site:
You can also then use those reviews and star ratings within schema across your site to help pull through Rich Results such as review stars. I recently had an enquiry come through the below page and the star rating trust signals certainly helped in their decision to contact me:
Overall, reviews will not only improve your GMB visibility, but can also be used elsewhere to improve rankings, click through rates and general trust signals on your site, making them a worthwhile investment, so make sure they are part of your local SEO strategy.