Search - Testimonial Snippet API

Achieving organic stars for your product using brand testimonials.

Why do you want to do this?

Acquire and control-click through rates in organic search and build an optimized way to be discovered and dominate search results against competitors.

1. Drives click-through rates for search terms such as <brand name> + reviews

Difficulty

Easy 

Resources

https://resellerratings.readme.io/reference/sellergetreviews#seller

Steps

let's guide you through how to get snippets for your testimonal pages that highlight your product and brand trust for snippets in search results.

1.  Locate or build your testimonials page - you can do this via our widget install for testimonials or by using our API for a custom-built solution.
2. We recommend the JSON LD format to insert ratings and review data into your page.
3. We're going to look at the schema for Aggregrate Rating
   1. The key elements here are Type @aggregrateRating, the Rating Value and Rating Count
   2. These elements coupled with reviews showcase a trustworthy store and snippet results in Google
4. Let's see what the code result would look like in your header using JSON LD

<script type="application/ld+json">

{

  "@context": "https://schema.org",

  "@type": "Product",

  "name": "sitename",
  
  "brand": "brandname",

  "image": "imageurl",

  "aggregateRating": {

    "@type": "AggregateRating",

    "ratingValue": "3.5",

    "reviewCount": "11"

  },

</script>

You can go a step further and actually include schema.org for your actual rating data aggregate, but that may or may not be necessary.

Testing and validation

1. Run the page with the generating code through a rich results test such as Google Snippet Test
2. If that passes, and you don't see the result in search yet -  run or initiate a crawl through Google Webmaster tools and wait a few days for Google to crawl the page

Real Examples & Results

Examples - https://www.progressive.com/insurance-reviews/

In the case below the type was designated as Product

Here's Geico's link

Updates and Notes

As of 2020, Google made changes for local businesses that use self-serving reviews to gain snippets.  They severely nerfed this.

Self-serving reviews aren't allowed for LocalBusiness and OrganizationR eviews that can be perceived as “self-serving” aren't in the best interest of users. We call reviews “self-serving” when a review about entity A is placed on the website of entity A - either directly in their markup or via an embedded 3rd party widget. That’s why, with this change, we’re not going to display review rich results anymore for the schema types LocalBusiness and Organization (and their subtypes) in cases when the entity being reviewed controls the reviews themselves.

The "name" parameter is required in structured markup now:

Add the name of the item that's being reviewed With this update, the name property is now required, so you'll want to make sure that you specify the name of the item that's being reviewed

With that said, services that are deeply integrated into their products seem to be able to get snippets still, as the examples above show.