Third-Party Reviews on Local Pages

If you’ve invested in local landing pages, then you want to get as much bang for your buck as possible. One of the ways you can increase the return on investment from your local pages is by integrating third-party reviews.

Third-party reviews from publishers like Google and Yelp can be valuable as customer testimonials on local pages. However, there are a number of guidelines and recommendations that brands should be aware of if they decide to integrate these reviews onto their local pages.

If you decide to use third-party reviews on your local pages, avoid marking up those reviews with Schema code, as this can cause confusion with first-party reviews and is against Google’s recommendations. Schema markup should be reserved for first-party reviews.

The greatest benefits to be gained from publishing reviews on local pages comes from first-party reviews. Reviews that you have gathered yourself, or with the help of a vendor, on your own websites and digital properties can be marked up with Schema code, which allows Google and Bing to index them and display rich content in search results. First-party reviews that have been marked up with Schema are also eligible for display in your Knowledge Panel and other online profiles.

Even though third-party reviews that have been embedded on local pages don’t have the same SEO benefits as first-party reviews, they are still useful in the larger context of a local search marketing strategy. For guidance on the best ways to embed third-party reviews on local pages, brands with multiple store locations will often work with companies like SOCi.