Local businesses may not know the ins and outs of how reviews drive local rankings. After all, search engine algorithms don’t make it easy to understand. However, they do – specifically, displaying reviews on location pages. These pages detail contact information, addresses, and other information critical to being found by prospective customers.
If you have yet to display your reviews on your website, this will surely convince you to do so.
Benefits of Displaying Reviews
Location-specific pages help potential customers learn more about individual franchise locations. Customers are often looking at hours, addresses, or phone numbers on this page which means they have the intent to buy. By including social proof, such as reviews, customers are encouraged to take the next steps and visit your store in person.
Displaying reviews results in:
- More social proof
- Higher conversion rates
- Higher rankings on search results
Let’s take a look at a real-life example of how displaying reviews on location pages improved business for a food and beverage franchise.
How Clean Juice Improved Local Ranking by Displaying Reviews on Location Pages
When it comes to new franchises, reviews are an extremely valuable form of feedback that can lead to operational improvement, product innovation, and enhanced training. But they’re also critical for the ability to rank in highly crowded categories — such as food and beverage. How a franchise location ranks in local searches (“near me”) or in Google Maps can be the difference between earning a new customer — or losing them to a competitor.
Clean Juice is a USDA-certified organic juice and food bar franchise that was started in 2016 by Landon and Kat Eckles. They’ve been a customer of GatherUp since 2019.
Utilizing GatherUp’s review widget, they displayed customer feedback on individual location pages, their home page, and product-specific pages. The review widget pulls reviews automatically from the software and displays them in a variety of layouts and customizable designs, like the example below:
To show how displaying reviews on a location page can impact ranking, we ran the numbers between two Clean Juice locations. Both locations began in September 2022. Location A is displaying reviews on its location page, and Location B is not:
*Note: Rankings are based on searches within the location’s ZIP code
As you can see, the number of reviews and average ratings are quite different. Additionally, while both locations performed equally well on brand searches, Location A ranked higher for “juice bar”, “cleanse” and “juice cleanse.” Location B, the one not displaying reviews on the location page, did not rank as high for those keywords.
Other factors that play into the local ranking include Google Business Profile (GBP) categories and the number of photos. We recommend franchises make sure their Primary Category is consistent across locations. And it’s vital to add as many local photos (not stock images) to a location’s profile as you can. This gives potential customers a real view into the location, the appearance, and products or services and encourages photos in reviews.
By displaying reviews on location pages, specific locations under the Clean Juice franchise were able to enhance their online visibility — and reputation. Read the full case study.
“We place the review widget on each location page and cleanse page to improve SEO on our website and capture guest feedback on the Contact Us page.”
You can easily post a single review on your website manually. But if you want the full impact of displaying regular, timely reviews, you’ll need some sort of software to support you. That’s where GatherUp can help. Schedule a demo with one of our product experts! They can walk you through how easy it is to get more reviews and share them on your website and social media to improve your brand visibility, social proof, and overall online reputation.
