Multi-locations - Reviews for the company or for each locations ?

[AdMor]

Hello everyone,

I work for a company with 400 locations. I would like to collect reviews with a tool like Trustpilot or Verified Reviews.
But i have one question: is it better to have a single account for each location on this tool (=400 accounts) or just one global account for the company and split the review per location after? I read that google needs a single rating for each location.
Is there SEO impact?

Thanks a lot,

 

[James Watt]

Does that mean you would be gathering reviews only for your website, in lieu of on Google/Facebook/Yelp/etc? Having reviews on Google appears to be a ranking factor, it definitely improves CTR, and having reviews on 3rd party sites (Yelp, Facebook) appears to be more of a ranking factor since last September as well. I'd advise using a review management system that allows you to send reviews to the specific location on 3rd party sites, and then use those to seed your review page on the site. I think grade.us or get5stars would be a better review solution than the businesses you mentioned, you should contact them and see if either of them fit your business needs.

 

[JoshuaMackens]

Hello everyone,

I work for a company with 400 locations. I would like to collect reviews with a tool like Trustpilot or Verified Reviews.
But i have one question: is it better to have a single account for each location on this tool (=400 accounts) or just one global account for the company and split the review per location after? I read that google needs a single rating for each location.
Is there SEO impact?

Thanks a lot,

If I understand your question correctly, you're going to want to do this for each location for Google reviews as well as Yelp/Facebook. Seattle customers should review your Seattle location, Los Angeles customers review your Los Angeles location, etc.

If you don't, you'll have reviews from all over the United States at different locations the customer never went to and would easily be a candidate for review filtering, especially with Yelp.

 

[AdMor]

Thanks for your answer!

-> James Watt: Yes after collecting reviews on Truspilot or Verified-Reviews we will invite our customers to share their opinion on GMB. But we need a powerfull tool to understand the needs of our clients.

-> JoshuaMackens: We would like to do so because in the precedent local review guidelines (Google updates local reviews schema guidelines), Google says:
"Reviews for multiple-location businesses such as retail chains or franchises can only be submitted for the specific business location for which they were written. In other words, reviews for multiple-location businesses cannot be syndicated or applied to all business locations of the same company". It is no longer precisely but i think this rule is still valid. So if we have only a single rating for all of our locations it could not be accepted.
Do you agree?

 

[Eric Rohrback]

"Reviews for multiple-location businesses such as retail chains or franchises can only be submitted for the specific business location for which they were written. In other words, reviews for multiple-location businesses cannot be syndicated or applied to all business locations of the same company". It is no longer precisely but i think this rule is still valid. So if we have only a single rating for all of our locations it could not be accepted.
Do you agree?

That's correct. Every location needs to be individually reviewed. It's better for you to have a program set up for every individual location.

 

[JoshuaMackens]

Thanks for your answer!

-> James Watt: Yes after collecting reviews on Truspilot or Verified-Reviews we will invite our customers to share their opinion on GMB. But we need a powerfull tool to understand the needs of our clients.

-> JoshuaMackens: We would like to do so because in the precedent local review guidelines (Google updates local reviews schema guidelines), Google says:
"Reviews for multiple-location businesses such as retail chains or franchises can only be submitted for the specific business location for which they were written. In other words, reviews for multiple-location businesses cannot be syndicated or applied to all business locations of the same company". It is no longer precisely but i think this rule is still valid. So if we have only a single rating for all of our locations it could not be accepted.
Do you agree?

I'm not saying follow the rule for rules sake. As a rule I personally do not let Google tell me how to do SEO

But in this instance (and honestly, in most instances) their guideline is what you should follow. It makes sense on every level to do so. That way your reviews carry more weight (especially in the future if Google gets their act together on reviews) and are less likely to get filtered.

 

[AdMor]

As a rule I personally do not let Google tell me how to do SEO

I totally agree with you!


Thansk everyone for your help!

 

[AdMor]

Hi everyone,

I still need a little help!
Trustpilot offers me to create a unique page for our company on their website that centralizes the reviews of all locations (eg: https://fr.trustpilot.com/review/mycompany) and then create local review rich snippets on each local page of my site with their API.
I hope my message is clear ;-)

Do you think this can create a problem of not having a specific page per location on trustpilot.com ?