Customer’s reviews are a powerful tool that strongly affect your online store’s conversion rates and – if implemented properly – click through rates in your SERPs. This article will cover just how much do they affect it in numbers and point out some of the best practices in acquiring these reviews and implementing them properly into your store.
Third party review services vs on-site reviews
Well known eCommerce solutions such as Magento have a built-in product review functionality. The problem with it is pretty obvious: the store owner can moderate the reviews and some customers are well aware of that. This means you could simply disapprove or edit negative reviews, which sounds as an awesome feature but it makes experienced users doubt in the quality of your review score.
Amount of reviews and its affect on Conversion Rate
Does amount of reviews matter? Short answer: Yes it does! An aggregate rating of 5 out of 10 stars means a lot more if 50 people left the review compared to the same rating with only 5 reviews. Most customers are very aware of this and you’d be amazed just how much a large number of reviews can increase your conversion rate.
According to Reevoo, a company that analysed 2.5 million customer reviews, there is no cap on how many reviews add to your conversion rate. The more you have the higher the rate is. Interesting part of their research is where they concluded that there is a very small difference in the range of 10 and 30 reviews in regards to improving your conversion rate (~3% vs ~3.3%).
As you can see in the graph on the left, it’s pretty much the same thing if you have 20 or 30 reviews, but conversion rate starts going up rapidly after that. There is also a pretty big difference in range of 0-10 reviews and above, raising your conversion rate by 1% with the first 10 reviews on a product.
User reviews’ affect on SEO and search engine CTR
The affect of user reviews on SEO is pretty obvious. It’s a fresh, unique piece of user generated content that search engines can index and it enhances and enriches the content you provided in product description. It also enables you to rank for “product name review” keywords which are in some niches used pretty often. Product reviews bring another thing with them that doesn’t have much to do with SEO: they improve the rate at which users click on your result in the search.
So lets move on to the numbers. Just how much improvement in CTR can you expect after implementing reviews? According to Reevoo, we’re talking about 10-20% increase in CTR, depending on the amount of reviews and aggregate score.
How do you display reviews in the search results?
In June, I wrote about Schema.org, a new microdata standard that 3 major search engines agreed upon. Schema.org has standardised markup for reviews and agregate reviews that can be implemented into your online store. If you’re trying to implement them into Magento, you can talk to us, we have lots of experience with it.
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