Do reviews improve general search rankings?

[PaulSteinbrueck]

Local SEO Guide recently published research that shows one of the most important factors in how a company's GMB listing ranks is the ranking of it's website. If you improve the search rankings of your website, it helps the rankings of your GMB listing

Local SEO Ranking Factors Study 2017 - Local SEO Guide

I'm wondering if anyone knows if the reverse is also true. Does improving the ranking of your GMB listing - especially by getting more reviews - improve the rankings of your website in the general search results?

Has anyone seen a study done on this or have any evidence one way or the other?

 

[Linda Buquet]

Hi Paul,

No it's pretty much a one way street I think.

Your site is definitely an important ranking factor for your local GMB ranking - but reviews on GMB don't help ranking on organic because with that algo, Google is mainly weighing factors on your site and how users interact with it.

 

[Garrett Sussman]

To add on to Linda's reply, while you can't really get stars to appear on your homepage SERPs, you can earn some organic stars by using schema markup on other pages.

Even though you can't control whether the organic stars will appear, if they do, they tend to lead to a higher CTR which will improve your website's rankings.

Not an exact science, but I think that sort of gets to what you're asking, Paul.