Diminishing Returns on Number of Reviews?

[aggiejulie12]

Hi there,

Reviews are important to having your GMB rank. However is there a point in which you start to see diminishing returns from the number of reviews you receive, taking aside the idea that consistent reviews are beneficial for users to see, etc.?

 

[Contractor]

This is a great question, something I’ve been wondering myself and I’m eager to see what people have to say about it.

Currently I have more reviews than most of my competitors. So if there is diminishing returns, I’m thinking maybe I should start asking people to leave reviews on Yelp instead of Google. I know a lot of various entities pull their information from Yelp.

 

[Adam Dorfman]

Great question Julie! For any given category + geo-area there is a minimum threshold of reviews you need in order to have a chance for ranking towards the top of a highly competitive, non-branded, discovery query. Once your business hits that threshold, the returns on quantity (for quantity sakes) starts to diminish. That said, continuing to encourage reviews is still incredibly important for a number of reasons including recency and frequency factors like you mentioned but also to continue expanding the keywords and topics mentioned in reviews to help drive long-tail ranking opportunities.

If you are way ahead of your competitors in most review factors, encouraging reviews on other platforms is often worthwhile but I'd suggest focusing on Facebook and vertical specific directories like TripAdvisor before Yelp.

 

[JoyHawkins]

@Adam Dorfman what do you find the minimum threshold is based on?

 

[Adam Dorfman]

It's conditional based on what the competition has - similar to link building. When I'm advising an SMB, I'll typically look at the top ten rankings, take the average of review count for the top three businesses that have the most reviews , and use that as a goal for them to drive. Once there, the quantity of reviews on Google (as a raw metric) shouldn't have any negative impact on how they are ranking but they are free to keep chasing to the top.

 

[JoyHawkins]

Whitespark's tool is great for seeing that too! Free Review Checker Tool - Get Your Google Review Score - Whitespark

 

[dgrunited]

Hi there,

Reviews are important to having your GMB rank. However is there a point in which you start to see diminishing returns from the number of reviews you receive, taking aside the idea that consistent reviews are beneficial for users to see, etc.?

I don't have a specific answer to your question but what I've seen is that when a business aggressively drives for reviews using pushy methods, they will eventually get some unsavoury reviews related to the pushy methods used. This will "let the cat out of the bag" resulting in the entire amount of reviews being worthless. It's quite easy to identify such businesses based on the dates & quantity of the reviews compared to their competitor down the road.