This is from a user on Reddit ‘Ok-Independence-5290‘:
Hey everyone! I’m curious about how SEO professionals and agencies handle Google reviews for their clients. Specifically:
Do you encourage business owners to actively respond to reviews? Or is it something you don’t prioritise in your SEO strategy?
Do you or your agency offer review management (e.g., replying to customer feedback on Google) as a part of your service package?
What are your observations on how responding to reviews affects visibility, ranking, or overall local SEO performance?
I’m asking because I’ve noticed plenty of businesses either ignore or inconsistently respond to reviews, while others seem to have a dedicated strategy. If you have any experience or best practices, I’d love to hear them—thanks!
This is an excellent and timely question. The short answer is yes, most definitely an SEO should recommend replying to reviews. An SEO should also recommend having a strategy in place to gain reviews, and as many as possible, as long as they are good.
Reviews are a huge part of any digital strategy and a big part of Google’s E-E-A-T algorithm. Analysing a website’s reputation is a key requirement of Google’s Quality Raters, as outlined in the Search Quality Rater Guidelines.
Raters determine a page quality rating by:
Researching the reputation of the website and creator: A website’s reputation is based on the experience of real users, as well as the opinion of people who are experts in the topic of the website. – Google
This means that gaining a large volume of good reviews is a legitimate SEO requirement. The three questions asked were:
Do you encourage business owners to actively respond to reviews? Or is it something you don’t prioritise in your SEO strategy?
An SEO should not only encourage business owners to actively respond to reviews, but tell them it is essential. If the business owner doesn’t have the time, then the SEO agency should offer to do it for them. Reviews are integral to how users select companies or products, so bad reviews can result in lost leads and sales no matter how good your SEO is. Do you really want to spend thousands on SEO but have no leads or sales? This will happen if you have bad reviews. Sometimes a bad review can’t be helped, but a friendly, genuine reply from the owner apologising can go a long way towards showing other users that you are a genuine reliable company.
Do you or your agency offer review management (e.g., replying to customer feedback on Google) as a part of your service package?
Again, this should always be a resounding Yes, from any SEO agency that knows how SEO works.
What are your observations on how responding to reviews affects visibility, ranking, or overall local SEO performance?
I personally haven’t seen a direct correlation between responding to a review and an increase in ranking positions. However, reviews are part of the ‘local pack’ ranking algorithm, so the more reviews you have the higher you will rank. Responding to a review is more reputation damage control. If your website has a bad reputation, then according to the Search Rater Guidelines, your website will be classed as low quality, which means it will probably struggle to rank. So, you can look at responding to bad reviews as potentially being similar to disavowing bad links. Don’t ignore it, deal with it.
Similarly, responding to good reviews puts your business in a good light. It could be a search quality rater assessing your reviews, or it could be a potential customer. Either way, you want your business coming off as best as you can.
Looking into the not too distant future, I can see a time where AI will be conducting all of our searches. We’ll just speak into our smartphone, ‘Hey, find me the best SEO agency’. What is the AI going to do? It’s probably going to read the reviews of SEO agencies and base its responses on that. So, if you want to be future proofed, your SEO strategy should include gaining as many good reviews as you can!
Good luck!
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