What, How, and Why for Review Schema

What's the first thing you notice on this SERP listing? 

The star ratings, the overall rating, and a high number of reviews do make this Best Buy location stand out as trustworthy.

Those are the elements of review schema markup on this page, and it helps increase online visibility, build trust, and attract more attention to your SERP listing. 

With an increasingly more visual SERP and regular organic listings pushed further down the page, review schema not only brings more credibility but also more pixel space on the SERP. 

In this post, you’ll learn what Review Schema is and how to deploy it on a large site, even without dev resources or a strain on your tech stack. 

What is Review Schema?

Review schema helps you markup data like real user reviews, product ratings, and more on your site. 

As Google crawls and indexes this content, it picks it up and uses that markup to understand the content of the page better and also uses this information to enhance your search listings. 

Take this example of a listing featuring the review schema that shows the markup's effect on the listing’s visibility.

That’s one reason why SEOs implement review schema to make them eligible for rich results that  increase their online visibility. 

With review schema, you can display ratings and reviews in the SERP and local listings. Your potential customers, therefore, can learn more about your product, service, or business directly in the SERP. 

As a result, the review schema may help someone choose your listing over another. 

Reviews and ratings also build trust. Review schema uses real feedback from real customers. As you’ll see shortly, you can also support that information with the reviewer's name and other markup elements to boost its validity even further. This helps people potentially interested in your business learn what others think about you without visiting your site or interacting with you in any other way. 

Adding a reviewer's name helps large publications add a layer of authority to their listing. Featuring reviews from influencers and displaying their name in the listing will likely attract more attention from the searcher.

The structured markup also helps you enhance the Knowledge Panel. Google pulls its information from the markup on a page. So, if it decides to display ratings and reviews there, it will pull it from your review schema. 

In short, implementing review schema will help you: 

• Increase your presence in the SERP, 
• Give customers another reason to click on your listing, and 
• Build trust and credibility in your brand and products. 

RECOMMENDED READING: A Look at Product Schema for Ecommerce SEO

What Review Schema Markup Looks Like 

Schema.org is an incredibly powerful markup language that allows you to add structured metadata to many different page elements. With schema, search engines understand your content better and use it to display additional information about your page in SERPs.

RECOMMENDED READING: What is Schema and is it Important for SEO?

For instance, here’s an example showing information about the author of a review marked up with schema.

Additionally, review schema helps define ratings and reviews for several types of information:

• Event ratings
• Local pages and local branches of nationwide chains
• Product reviews and ratings
• Recipe ratings
• Book, movie, or course reviews, and many others. 

In each case, there are several elements that you can mark up with structured language. Let’s look at those now.

Schema Markup - Review vs. AggregateRating Properties

There are two types of review schema properties that you can use. 

Review Schema defines properties that tell Google what others think of your product, local branch, etc. and how they rate it. 

The most important Review properties include:

AggregateRating, on the other hand, defines properties that reveal a branch’s or product’s aggregated ratings based on multiple ratings and reviews.

Here are the properties this review schema type defines:

How to Build Review Schema Markup

Typically, the simplest way to add that markup to the page is to manually modify relevant sections of its code. 

In this option, you access the HTML code on each page and manually wrap its relevant sections with correct review schema markup. 

The alternative is to use a tool like Schema.dev. This simple free Chrome plugin lets you generate structured data for 40+ Schema types on any webpage. 

With Schema.dev, you just point and click on elements you want to mark up with Schema, and the tool will output a perfectly formatted JSON-LD structured markup to copy and paste into your page. 

In other words, building schema markup is fairly easy. Deploying it at scale across an enterprise site with hundreds of thousands of pages, however, is where the struggle lies.

We hear about these struggles often. For example, 92% of SEOs we surveyed last year told us that they cannot perform this task because they lacked dev or engineering resources. 

But how could it be any different? Typically, SEO teams can’t modify the code via their CMS. Your dev team, at the same time, doesn’t understand the importance of adding that markup and is usually too busy to prioritize such time-consuming SEO projects. 

Then, there is the issue of scale. 

• There are far too many pages to add a markup to by hand. Even a team of developers wouldn’t be able to add and maintain schema on your site within a reasonable timeframe. 
• And too many people edit those pages regularly. Eventually, someone is bound to make changes that’d break your schema, forcing you to start over. 
• Development resources and a tech stack is limited to implement this and other enormously critical schema markup elements. 

If this sounds like you, you’re not alone. 

Many enterprise SEOs struggle with execution. They lack the technology and dev team’s buy-in for projects like schema, and as a result, it never gets done!

With the launch of Schema Optimizer,  you can actually add schema markup to your enterprise site - quickly and without constricting dev resources. 

How to Deploy Review Schema at Scale

Schema Optimizer is seoClarity’s latest technology that allows SEOs to deploy and manage structured data sitewide or in sections of a website all by themselves. Plus, doing so requires no technical knowledge, and the whole process takes no more than a couple of clicks.

The only dev work required to use Schema Optimizer is adding a snippet of JS code to your website. Once that’s done, you can easily deploy a new schema on pages and test it to see whether everything is working. 

To add schema to a page, you just need to add relevant properties in Schema Optimizer’s interface, and the tool will deploy the markup on the page for you. 

You can also deploy structured data to the entire site or its sections based on various criteria:

• Single URLs, in case you want to add or manage the markup on a specific page.
• URLs that match a specific pattern, i.e., example.com/products
• URLs by Regular Expression (RegEx patterns_ allowing subsets of complex URLs to be matched; i.e., example.com/wine/merlot-red-wine/australia  

Naturally, Schema Optimizer allows you to deploy any type of structured data, not just the review markup:

• WebPage
• Organization
• FAQPage
• Product
• Review
• ... and thousands more.

RECOMMENDED READING: Types of Schema Markup in SEO

How to Test Your Review Schema 

Implementing schema is only the first step of the process of enriching your search listings with ratings and reviews. 

Once you’ve added the markup, you need to validate it and ensure no errors prevent it from being picked up by the search engines. And then you should also monitor whether Google and other search engines do so and display your reviews.

Measure the Impact of Ratings and Review Markup

Implementing review schema allows Google to enrich your listing with star ratings and reviews. Having review schema displayed in SERPs leads to increases in clicks, impressions, etc. 

However, it is the increase in organic CTR that communicates the true impact of the review schema. Seeing a greater CTR means that users notice the review schema. It also means that those ratings and reviews resonate with them and attract them to your listing. 

Using SEO Split Testing to Measure Results

SEO split testing focuses on measuring the impact of various changes on SEO performance. In practical terms, running SEO tests means testing a group of statistically similar pages to measure the impact of a particular change (such as deploying review schema).

We have a solution to that problem too. In fact, seoClarity is the only SEO software on the market that covers the full scope of the schema project. 

• Schema Optimizer lets you deploy the markup without relying on the dev or engineering team. 
• Site Audits validates whether the code is correct and should be picked up by search engines to enrich your listings. 
• Split Test Analysis will let you run split tests to determine the impact of having a review schema on SEO performance. 

Conclusion

Review schema, like many other markup types, is incredibly useful for attracting attention to the SERP listing, building trust, and generating a higher organic CTR. 

Unfortunately, for many SEOs, adding it is nothing but a pipe dream. Lack of technology to do it coupled with disinterest from dev teams mean that such projects rarely get done. 

But remember, there is another way. You can use a dedicated tool like Schema Optimizer to deploy and manage the markup without relying on anybody’s help, including the dev team. 

Want to learn more?
Check out the SchemaOptimizer overview here.