Reviews have immense power. They influence customer decisions, shape your brand’s reputation, and ultimately have a direct impact on your bottom line. A single review can be the difference between a completed purchase or an abandoned cart.
The power of reviews doesn’t stop—or start—there, though. Reviews can be the reason you win or lose a click in Google’s search engine result pages (SERPs). That’s where first-party reviews have a unique impact.
Today, we’ll dive into the world of first-party reviews and explore how they can benefit your business.
What Are First-Party Reviews?
First-party reviews are customer testimonials/ratings collected by you and displayed directly on your website. That means your business owns the reviews and controls the review acquisition process as well as how they’re presented to users.
On the other hand, third-party reviews appear on independent websites and platforms that you’re probably familiar with: Google Business Profile, Yelp, and TripAdvisor.
If you only ever send customers to those platforms to leave reviews, you probably don’t have any first-party reviews.
The Importance & Benefits of First-Party Reviews
While both first-party and third-party reviews offer valuable insights to customers, first-party reviews allow you to add Product or Service Schema markup to your page to enable the star ratings as seen in the image below. This can have a significant impact on your click-through rate and help you drive more qualified traffic to your site.
Important note: Google states that you shouldn’t use third-party reviews in this way. Also, since these star ratings need to be for a product rather than a business, Google will not show these for your home page.
Who Should NOT Implement First-Party Reviews?
First-party reviews are going to be a good fit for every business. There are a few niche scenarios in which first-party review collection just doesn’t make sense. In particular, we don’t recommend it if:
- You only have one product and you don’t have a product/service landing page, because as stated earlier, Google won’t display star ratings for your homepage.
- If you have multiple products, but your product pages don’t have any notable organic visibility. The immediate next step here is to improve organic visibility for these pages and then invest in first-party review acquisition. (It’s fine to start collecting reviews now if you’re confident you’ll be able to get your product page ranking on Google.)
- If your product(s) are averaging below a 4-star rating. A star rating below 4 will likely hurt your click-through rate more than they will help it.
How To Implement First-Party Reviews
First and foremost, Google has outlined detailed guidelines regarding review acquisition and display. A few key things to remember include:
- Google won’t display star ratings when reviews are marked up in the following Schema types: LocalBusiness and Organization
- Don’t cherry-pick reviews from other platforms and mark them up on your website.
- Users must be able to leave reviews directly on the page on which the product is offered.
- The reviews must be displayed on the page on which the product is offered.
To begin collecting reviews, you’ll need a tool like EmbedSocial, GatherUp, or Elfsight. (If you have a development team, you could also consider building a proprietary review collection system.) Once you choose your system, you’ll install it on your website.
From there, you’ll want to engage in a few review acquisition strategies, including:
- Create follow-up email or SMS campaigns
- Have business representatives ask customers to share their experience via review
- Send customers home with a simple thank-you card that points them to a review acquisition page (use a QR code)
First-party reviews are a powerful tool that your business can leverage to build trust, improve organic search performance, and ultimately boost your bottom line.
