Review Schema Markup Made Simple: Boost Visibility for Your Products & Services

The power of review is not something to be underestimated. Having genuine, valuable customer reviews about your brand, product, or service improves online visibility, builds trust, and attracts more attention to your SERP listing. If you have a lot of reviews on your site pages, you can utilize product review schema and make your brand eligible to appear as rich results on search. This lets you reach the right audience with ease. In this blog, let’s dive in and understand this concept better and also learn how to build review schema for your site without much effort.

What is Review Schema

This is a specific set of code added to each webpage that gives search engines a clearer understanding of the webpage contents, particularly information such as user reviews, product ratings. Whenever search engine bots detect the review schema as part of the crawling process, they use it to enhance search listings by displaying the additional information of your page. The review schema is used to define the ratings and reviews for various information types, such as:

• Event ratings
• Product reviews and ratings
• Recipe ratings
• Travel ratings

Product review schema example | Source:

In the image, you can see a search listing with elements such as star rating, a high number of reviews, etc. Showcasing Google product structured data along with the webpage link increases online visibility, CTRs and gets more attention.

How review schema markup matters in SEO

Showcase reviews and ratings

One of the main advantages of review schema markup is that you can display your reviews and ratings on SERP and local search results. This allows users to learn more about your brand and services without having to visit your site.

Enhanced Visibility in SERPs

As you showcase genuine reviews and ratings, this increases the chances of appearing as rich results or featured snippets.

Helps build trust

Getting reviews and ratings from real customers and showing them on search results builds trust. Supporting the reviews by adding the reviewer’s name and other markup elements boosts their validity further. This allows potential customers to know what others are thinking about your brand.

Increased Conversions

Getting positive reviews is good for a brand in the long term. Whenever users see positive reviews for your brand on search results, they are more likely to proceed with a purchase and convert.

What structured data for reviews Looks Like 

If you are wondering what a product review schema looks like, it is something similar to this image:

Source:

When it comes to coding schema markup, Google recommends JSON-LD thanks to its ease of use and integration. Let’s look at the example and explain what it is about. Here, the “itemReviewed” specifies what the review is about, which in our case is a “Fine dining establishment”.

How to Implement Review Schema on Your Site

Now that you know what a service review schema is, let’s discuss the series of steps involved in implementing a review schema on your site. 

Determine The Properties to Use

When learning how to build review schema, you must choose from any of the two types, which are: Review Schema and AggregateRating. Both are different types of structured data markup that enable search engines to understand reviews and display them in the SERPs. Review Schema provides information about individual reviews, while AggregateRating provides information about the overall rating of a product or service based on the reviews.

Create The Review Schema

You can create a product review schema markup by using various tools such as Schema.dev or the Schema Builder for Structured Data browser extension to mark up the relevant elements on your page. If you want to create the code manually, you can do that by adding the schema markup in the HTML code and making modifications.

Choose the specific webpage to generate a review schema, and then open the extension. Choose the “Review” tab under the “All Supported Schemas (36) section.”

Upon clicking Review, you will be presented with various properties as shown below:

Choose the property you want and mark the important data on the page. For eg, if you want to select the author of an article, select the “Author” property and then click on the arrow button to select the block on your page with the review author’s name.

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After marking up the information, copy the code by clicking on “View Markup”.

Add the Review Schema to Your Website

Understanding how to add review schema isn’t that hard. Once the code is generated, it must be added to your site. Paste the code inside a <script> tag in the <head> or before the closing </body> tag. If you’re using a CMS, you can add the review schema using dedicated plugins like Yoast SEO, Schema Pro, etc.

ValidateThe Review Schema

You must ensure that the review schema is displayed correctly without issues. If you want to know how to test your review schema, you can utilize the Schema Markup validator tool offered by the Schema.org community. Open the tool and switch to the Code snippet tab. After that, paste your code and click “Run test.”

If there are any errors in the structured data, the tool will display them in the results. You can also use Google’s Rich Results Test tool to test whether the search engine crawlers can detect and understand your schema markup. After the testing phase, implement it and start measuring the overall impact with tools such as Google Search Console, Semrush, etc.

Best Practices for Creating Review Schema Markup

Once you learn how to implement review schema, you can significantly enhance your webpage content’s online visibility in search results. However, there are various review schema best practices which you have to adhere to ensure the effectiveness of your review schema. Here we list some guidelines which you must follow for the best results.

Include Genuine Content

One of the best review schema best practices is ensuring that you have included genuine content written by users rather than AI-generated content. Promoting fabricated content results in penalties and degrades trust.

Add Markup That Only Users Can See

When including markup, make sure to add the ones that are visible to users. Adding schema markup for hidden content is misleading and results in penalties.

Be Specific

Your Google product structured data must be specific and should include reviews related to the particular product, not the overall brand and other products.

Winding Up

When it comes to Google product structured data, it isn’t just about improving SEO. The ultimate goal is to increase credibility, build trust and provide users with a better web browsing experience. If you are trying to implement a service review schema, the entire process is detailed in this article step by step. The key is to make sure that the schema markup for web developers or services that have been implemented accurately reflects what users can see on the page.