The importance of reviews for your business continues to grow and compound year over year. Reviews have an incredible impact on local rankings and conversions start here.

Google has been expanding the features on search result pages to send less traffic to websites. You can often get all of the information you need right in local search results. According to a recently published report, 65% of searches in 2020 were zero-click searches, up from 50% just a year earlier. Your GMB listing must stand out from the competition and reviews are one of the most powerful ways to win over searchers and get you new business.

Why are Google reviews so important?

• Google reviews are a local ranking factor. This means Google takes them into consideration when ranking businesses. Among other factors, Google looks at review quantity, star rating, frequency of new reviews and keywords in reviews.

• Google will highlight quotes from reviews to match a user’s search term. These quotations are selected by the algorithm and called Review Snippets. They highlight portions of reviews that include keywords from the user’s search. This means that your reviews can help increase visibility in search results.

  

• If your business has a sufficient number of quality reviews with a consistent main theme, you can trigger the Place Topics feature. Place Topics uses data from your reviews to provide topics based on concise information ...