Written by Michael Fiil   15.3.2022

How do you display stars in Google search results and why are they called Review Snippets?

Google or Bing decide whether your landing pages should be "starred" or not. In other words, you have no guarantee of getting the stars, just as you have no guarantee of how Google or Bing thinks your web pages should rank in the search results!

 

Everyone talks about SEO or SERP - all just buzzwords - it is probably only the professionals within online marketing who relate to the individual buzzwords. While everyone else is thinking about how in practice they will become more visible online because they have experienced the consequences of Covid-19 lockdowns and for all intents and purposes will avoid getting into the same situation again?

Before the COVID-19 lockdowns, everyone felt invulnerable. Most experienced progress. No one was prepared for a pandemic to creep in, causing a total lockdown of physical stores. For many stores, sales stopped overnight.

Those who were not visible online started with social selling and all sorts of other initiatives in the hope of being able to sell online. Lockdow has meant that many consumers have changed their behavior and therefore everyone now also talks about "next normal" or ROPO (Research Online Purchase Offline) - again buzzwords - you have to deal with whether your business has come "good" or "bad" out of COVID-19!

 

All companies have existing customers, you have to sell more to them, but there is also a need for new ones and to attract new customers online you have to remember how the new customers find us:

They do not type our website in the browser too many of them do not know we exist. New customers - or most - start on Google and type "Mercedes C class" if they are looking for a Mercedes or "farmhouse windows" and display a result in the search engine.

 

First a lot of paid links (ads), below regular links and finally again paid links.

 

What are we all most nervous about or trying to avoid if we have to shop online? - we will not be cheated for everything in the world! Therefore, all statistics also show that what new customers are looking for most or as much as a particular product or service is security. Credibility, trust and security and that is what the Review Stars are helping to signal.

 

Google calls them "Review Snippets" and if you want to show Review Snippets in the Google search result, Google must know this and this is done by inserting some code on the web page, which is called "reviews-schema"

 

<script type="application/ld+json" class="reviews-schema" > {

    "@context": "http://schema.org",

    "@type": "Product",

    "name": "Au2Matic - Review Snippets blog article",

    "image": "https://www.au2mailer.com/crm/storeimages/au2mailer-33-myimage10.jpg",

    "description": "What is Review Marketing and why is Google calling the stars Review Snippets?",

    "mpn": "672057",

    "sku": "672057",

    "brand": {

    "@type": "Brand",

    "name": "Au2Matic.com"

    },

    "aggregateRating":

    {

        "@type": "AggregateRating",

        "ratingValue": "4.6",

        "reviewCount": "132"

    }

} </script>

 

This code is placed in the <header> section of all the pages you want Google to display review stars. As mentioned, you get no guarantee that Google will show the stars, but with the code you have told Google that you would like to.

 

As you can see, the code itself contains the values ​​4.6 in rating and 132 reviews and the challenge is that next week we hopefully have 4.7 in rating and 175 reviews, but if Google should know, you must correct the code again on all your pages.

 

Here it is that Au2Matic.com is amazing. From the dashboard, you can copy a finished script (code) and paste it into your web pages once. The script makes sure to retrieve the latest customer reviews from Au2Matic so the values ​​are displayed in real time forever.

 

Here is an example of the java script code that automates Review Snippets on Google:

 

<!---- au2matic.com review script start ------->

  <p style="font-size:1%;" id="a2mjson"></p>

  <script>

      var request = new XMLHttpRequest();

        request.open('GET', 'https://au2mailer.com/api/a2m-getschemaorg.asp?apikey=fe9fc289c3ff0af142b6d3bead98a923');

        request.send();

        request.onload = ()=>{

          document.getElementById("a2mjson").innerHTML = request.response;

        }

  </script>

<!---- au2matic.com review script ending ------->

 

If you copy the code example into <header> on one of your web pages, publish the page and then run a test using this tool, you will see that Google understands the code and can display the stars.IMPORTANT: the example shows ratings from Au2Matic.com so you should only test and experience how easy it is and then remove the code again.

 

Here you can read more about the review-schema using Au2Matic.com and if you want to explore more about managing customer reviews on your own website, learn more by reading about Review Management.

 

 

This article was written by Michael Fiil, who since 1997 has worked with SaaS solutions, e-commerce and data-driven marketing.

In 2023, many will call him a specialist in the concept of ROPO (Research Online Purchase Offline), but his experience with and insight in digitization, started at the same time as the beginning of the Internet. In 1999, he headed the first International Business Partner at IBM Global Network and the thesis was EDI. Michael's first e-commerce platform, in 2001, was a Retail Management Platform, which per EDI could collect sales data from the stores' cash registers.

"The goal of marketing is to retain current customers or acquire new ones" and in the "new normal" offline and online merge. Data-driven marketing
is about utilizing known data and automating the display", Michael Fiil has stated, and more than 50.000 views of his blog articles support the topicality.

COVID-19 has shown with great force how important online visibility is when the physical store is closed down. That is why ROPO really became a concept during CORONA and important to master when talking about the "new normal".

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