Do you ever wonder how Google knows how to rate pages or display overall ratings of products? Yeah me either, but I stumbled upon it while looking for blog post topics and I actually found it somewhat interesting. “It” is called review schema. Review schema is a structured data markup that enables search engines to understand and display ratings and reviews of your site. The way it works is by summarizing multiple reviews written about a certain item or piece of content. This can be helpful information for Google to better understand your site when it is crawling, and it may improve your ranking. Users may appreciate this too when looking at your site.
There are two types of review schema: simple and aggregated.
Simple Review Schema gives a star (1-5) rating to a page by a single reviewer. Review schema is used to sort through all reviews and select the one to be displayed.
A simple review schema includes the following properties: the author of the review, itemReviewed (type of item being reviewed), itemRevieved.name (specific name of the reviewed item), the reviewRating (a property that stores the review’s rating), and a reviewRating.ratingValue (a number or fraction/percent rating). It may also include a datePublished, reviewRating.bestRating (shows best rating), and reviewRating.worstRating (shows worst rating).
Aggregated Review Schema summarizes multiple reviews into one but displays it the same way a simple review is displayed. Like a simple review, an aggregated review must include itemReviewed and itemReviewed.name, but it must also include ratingCount (how many ratings the summary is based on), reviewCount (how many reviewers the summary is based on), ratingValue (average rating in the form of a number or fraction/percent). Again, just like a simple review, it may optionally include reviewRating.bestRating and reviewRating.worstRating as well.
If you want to easily add review schema to your SEO strategy, you can get things like plugins or browser extensions. You could also totally write the script for it if that’s your thing! Whatever way you choose to do it, review schema can be a way to help Google and other search engines better understand your content and give you higher ranking; and it helps give yourself credibility to users.
Sources: What Is Review Schema? & How to Implement It and What is Review Schema?
2 Responses
This is a good piece of information to have in your back pocket, especially from a positioning perspective because it allows you to put your page exactly where you want it.
This was a super insightful post! I had never heard of review schema either, but it is an interesting tool to have. I like how they offer two different types of review schema that users can choose between in order to meet the intention of the user. It seems like you can apply this technique in many different ways, which is interesting.