Hey everybody, this is Joe Burnich with bigwestmarketing.com, and in this short video we are going to talk about how Google reviews can either help or hurt your SEO rankings. So let’s get started with that right now.
Okay, so real quick before we jump in, I wanted to pull up this little pie chart, it is Google ranking factors. We got this at the last big local SEO conference that we went to in Denver in late 2019, so this is very fresh information. This is the stuff that Google looks at when they’re ranking websites for a local business. This is not a national business or big eCommerce business, anything like that, this is for local businesses in local cities.
So let’s look at these ranking factors. The Google My Business Signals is about 25%, then your links, the link building stuff, also known as Backlinks is right around 16.5%. The Website Signals, so the stuff that you do actually on the website, and this is the stuff that most people get stuck on, is only at 13.8% of the total factors: 13% of your energy, your time, your money and everything should be going into tweaking the website, so don’t spend too much time on that because Google is so smart these days with their AI that you don’t need to sit there and tweak all the crazy little stuff that people tell you on your website. That’s old information.
Citation stuff is right at 10.8%, and then the one that we’re looking at today is Review Signals. So Review Signals is 15%. 15.4% of Google’s rankings has to do with the reviews, specifically Google reviews that you get on your Google My Business account. So what we’re going to talk about right now is the good and the bad of that.
So let me pull up this website I’ve got here. So I was reading this article at brightlocal.com, which is one of the main authority websites that has to do with local rankings, and this new article that came out is talking about fake reviews and how they’re a real problem. And this article is mostly about why consumers need to be careful, and what kind of reviews they can trust or not trust, because what happens is there’s all these companies out there right now that you can pay, and they’ll go and fill your Google My Business account with fake reviews.
And in the past when Google sensed that this was happening, what they would do is they would actually just delete those reviews. I haven’t seen reviews deleted off a Google My Business account in a long time, but a pattern that we’re starting to see, and this is not completely verified yet, but I wanted to get the word out there that this may be an issue since the November Google update, November, 2019, that big update, the last big update that Google came out with, ever since we’ve seen that happen, we’ve had two websites, two clients that have had significant drops due to that update.
And in both cases it appears that those people have a series of fake reviews. It looks like those people have hired a review company to place fake reviews on their Google My Business account. So like I said, before Google would just delete them if they suspected they were fake, but now our suspicion is that Google is no longer deleting them, they’re just dropping your rankings if they sense that that you’ve gone out and paid a company to get Google reviews. So that’s how you can actually hurt your Google rankings if you don’t get genuine five-star, or not even five star, but just genuine reviews on your Google My Business account.
Now I have lots of other videos out there on different techniques, and different ways to go out and get reviews from your clients, but this is not about that. This is more about what hurts and what helps. So let’s go back here. And so what I want to show you is when I, Joe Burnich, leaves reviews for businesses that I frequent, when I leave reviews for those, those reviews are very powerful in the rankings, and I’m going to show you what I’ve talked about.
So a couple of days ago I left a review for Costco here in Missoula, Montana, where I live. And if you’ll see here, my reviews, the most recent one for Costco here in Missoula, but you’ll see this little thing where it says Local Guide next to my name, and it also has a little star. As opposed to this one down here who does not, they don’t even have a picture of themselves, they don’t have Local Guide, and no star.
Here’s another Local Guide, Martin, another Local Guide, Trenton. Tara, not a Local Guide. David Crumb, not a Local Guide. Here’s another Local Guide. The reason I’m showing you these Local Guide reviews is because these will typically show up at the top. They typically hold a lot more weight, because I’ve been verified with Google to leave reviews. So once you start leaving a lot of reviews under the same Gmail account and you put a picture in there and you have your profile filled out completely, Google will give you the opportunity to become what they’re calling a Local Guide.
And watch what happens, I can actually click on this Local Guide link here and it’ll take me over to my profile. So if anybody wants to go and look and check me out as a Local Guide, this is what they would see. And I’m a level five. So there’s different levels out there, you get points, it’s a point system, and Google will give me little coupons for stuff, more reviews I leave. And so you can go and check all the reviews that I’ve left for everybody on Google, you can check all the photos that I’ve uploaded along with these reviews, which also makes me a higher level guide, and it’s just a way for Google to decide what reviews are meaningful and what reviews are not so meaningful.
So if you want to increase your rankings, if you want to play into this, let me get back to this little chart, if you want to play into this 15% and get in and get those review signals coming in, then you want to get as many reviews as you can from Local Guides. So you’re not necessarily going to know who it is unless you actually talk to your clients, and you send them emails, send them text messages or have conversations with them, asking them to leave reviews. But you will kind of get a sense for those people that understand the game, they understand how to leave reviews, and you can even encourage them to take pictures of the service that you performed and upload that as they leave reviews as well, that is going to help your rankings.
So that’s all I really have, and very simple to get higher up in the rankings. You want to get good reviews and you want them to come from people that are considered Local Guides by Google. If you want to hurt your Google rankings, then you would go out and you would pay some company to put a bunch of fake reviews onto your Google My Business account, and Google is getting better and better at spotting those fake reviews.
That’s all I have today guys, I hope this was helpful. If you have any questions, give us a call at (406) 493-1881, or check out our website, bigwestmarketing.com. And we can also set up a free 30 minute consultation if you’d like to discuss this stuff further. Once again, my name is Joe Burnich, and I will talk to you soon.
