Google Reviews impact local rankings, trust, and CTR. Learn advanced tactics to earn, manage, and leverage reviews for enterprise SEO success.
Customer reviews are the most influential form of local business content.
Surveys routinely reveal that upwards of 90% of consumers read reviews as they search for nearby goods and services.
In this article, you’ll learn how your multi-location business can capture the benefits of reviews and customer feedback at scale.
Why Google reviews matter for advanced SEO strategies
Google reviews are central to local search marketing because of their ability to drive business discovery, demonstrate social proof of consumer trust, and deliver conversions. Whether you’re a large chain or a small business, they’re the key way potential customers get to know your shop before actually stepping foot in the door.
Quickly communicate the power of reviews in an advanced SEO strategy to your team with these four factors:
1. Direct local ranking factor in Google’s “prominence” signal
Google’s own documentation on how to improve your ranking in Local Packs and Maps identifies three core components: relevance, distance, and prominence. And it specifically mentions reviews as a prominence-based ranking factor.
Prominence relates to how well known a business is. Google states that having more reviews and positive ratings can improve where your Google Business Profile listing ranks in the search engine’s local results.
2. Star rating impact on CTR from Local Packs and Google Business Profiles
The local SEO industry could use some fresh studies on the impact of stars on click-through rate (CTR). But past studies have captured as much as a 25% CTR increase when a Google Business Profile moves up from a 3-star to a 5-star average rating.
3. Influence on E-E-A-T signals for YMYL businesses
Experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) are signals Google trains its Quality Raters to evaluate as they assess whether Google’s algorithms are returning relevant search results.
Reviews can be tied to all four signals in the following ways:
- Reviews prove that real humans have direct experience with a local business. For example, when a reviewer describes what they ordered at a restaurant, it proves they’ve eaten there.
- Experiencing the business firsthand gives the reviewer a degree of expertise in its quality. For example, when a reviewer says a chimney sweep stopped a fireplace from smoking, the customer is speaking from their expertise as a homeowner.
- Reviews can contribute to the authoritativeness of a business because they are citing it as an authentic local resource. For example, when a reviewer says they count on a business for emergency 24-hour service, others know they can depend on it, too.
- Reviews validate trustworthiness because they document that a business is real and offers a specific degree of customer service to the public. For example, when a reviewer says they visited the downtown location of a business, others know that location really exists.
While E-E-A-T is not a set of search ranking factors, this acronym provides good clues as to the types of content Google wants to prioritize in its results. For Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) businesses in categories like health, security, and finance, focusing on E-E-A-T can lead to increased trust from both Google’s Quality Raters and the public.
4. Secondary effects: Trust, conversion rate, brand perception
Google reviews can also have secondary effects like earning consumer trust, increasing conversion rates, and improving brand perception. These secondary effects may have the biggest real-world impact on local business outcomes. Consider:
- Just 3% of consumers will trust your business if its average star rating drops below 3 stars, according to a study by GatherUp. Low ratings negatively affect conversions from your Google Business Profiles to your website or your business premises.
- 60% of consumers trust what customers say about brands more than what brands say about themselves, according to the GatherUp study. Your volunteer reviewers can be a more persuasive sales force than your paid marketing department.
Online, your reviews are your brand’s reputation. Review acquisition and management belong at the center of almost any local SEO strategy.
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Pain point 1. Review spam, fake negatives, and competitor sabotage
Review fraud is a serious roadblock to getting the most benefits from your hard-earned reputation. Review spam can include a competitor writing fake negative reviews for their own brand, writing fake negative reviews for your brand, and trying to sabotage you by decreasing your average star rating.
If a negative review stems from a poor but authentic customer experience with your brand, that’s all part of doing business. But what if the review comes from a competitor who’s trying to ruin your reputation and steal your customers?
Review fraud is a significant problem in Google’s local products. A study by the Transparency Co. of the health, legal, and home services sectors found that 14% of the reviews in these categories were deemed suspicious and likely fake.
The same study predicts that AI-generated reviews may outnumber human-written ones in Google’s system as soon as the end of 2026. This is a problem because the new technology gives review spam enterprises the ability to generate fake reviews at scale.
Google regularly removes suspicious review content via both automated and manual processes, but not at a scale that resolves the problem. Your brand can increase reputation defense via:
- Review spam detection
- Review spam mitigation
- Legal assistance, as needed
- Developing a review management playbook
Review spam detection
Review monitoring tools help you scale spam detection across multiple locations and review platforms. Popular software options include Semrush Review Management, GatherUp, Whitespark, and BrightLocal.
Each of these products alerts you to incoming reviews so you can evaluate them for signs of potential review spam like:
- A sudden, mysterious spike in reviews with ratings that are either extremely low or even just slightly lower than your average rating
- Reviews describing experiences that your records show never occurred
- Reviews from current or former employees or from personal adversaries
- Reviews directing readers to choose a specific competitor over your brand
- Reviews from suspicious profiles, such as someone who’s reviewed multiple car dealerships across multiple countries or who’s located in a different country
- Reviews using language that sounds robotic or repetitive, such as starting with “I recently had the pleasure of working with…”—which is a red flag for AI-generation
Review spam mitigation
Before you begin reporting suspicious review content on your listings, it’s vital to know that Google won’t remove any review unless it violates their prohibited and restricted content guidelines. Werecommend reading the full documentation. But in short, Google’s definition of review spam consists of content that:
- Is fake or misleading
- Stems from a conflict of interest (like an employee writing a review)
- Has been incentivized (with money, gifts, or other perks)
- Contains hate speech, harassment, or content that’s off-topic
If you’re confident that a review violates Google’s guidelines, follow the steps that Google outlines to report it.
First, don’t respond to fake reviews. Instead, create your own internal documentation.
Take screenshots and record the URLs of suspicious reviewer profiles. You may need this content if Google doesn’t respond to your first request to remove a review.
Then, go to your Google Business Profile while logged into the Google account that manages it.
Open the reviews section and find the suspicious review. Click the three dots to the right of it, and press the “Report review” popup.
Choose the reason you’re reporting the review. For example, you might choose to click on the arrow for “Fake or deceptive” content.
Then, press the “Submit” button.
Wait three days and go to Google’s review management tool while logged into the account that manages the relevant Google Business Profile. Search for the name of your business in the “Listing name” field and select the “Check the status of a review I reported previously” option from the list.
Google will tell you whether their decision is still pending, whether they’ve removed the review, or whether they don’t believe the content violates their policies.
If you need to appeal Google’s decision, you have a one-time chance to do so within this tool. Select the “Appeal eligible reviews” option. Share the documentation showing why you believe the review violates a specific policy in Google’s guidelines.
Submit your report, and you’ll receive an email from Google with a case ID. You’ll then receive a final decision within a few weeks.
If your one-time appeal is denied and you feel that Google’s final decision is mistaken, take your case ID and evidence to the Google Business Profile Community Help Forum.
Politely ask the volunteer Product Experts in this forum to review your case and escalate it to Google if they agree with you that the review violates the policy. In some cases, this may result in removal. If not, consider seeking legal counsel.
When to seek legal counsel
Review fraud is illegal in many nations. In the US, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has ruled that civil penalties can be sought in review fraud cases. If Google refuses to remove content you believe to be fraudulent, you have the option to seek legal counsel. Consider:
- Whether the result of potentially having a single spam review (or even just a few of them) will be worth the effort and expense involved in a legal case or if you’d be better off investing these resources in earning more legitimate reviews to outweigh the spam
- Whether it might be less expensive and less time consuming to tell your story of a large-scale review spam attack to the media instead of hiring a legal team—since bad publicity could motivate Google to act
- Whether a large-scale review spam attack has significantly damaged your brand’s reputation, which may merit pursuing a legal case
How to develop an internal playbook for review spam
The larger your business becomes, the more reviews you’re likely managing. Hopefully, you’ll seldom have to deal with suspicious review content.
However, you’ll be better prepared if you create a company policy and review system for coping with the reality of review spam. Use the process you’ve learned for detecting and reporting reviews to create training documentation and a plan of action for your staff.
Meanwhile, it pays to be aware of the fact that bad actors also engage in review fraud to promote their own brands and clients. To detect this type of activity, monitor your competitors’ reviews. Don’t just look at Google Business reviews, but also keep an eye on other third-party platforms like Yelp.
If you detect suspicious patterns like a competitor suddenly receiving a large volume of 5-star reviews over a short period of time, you can act on it. Click the three dots next to any review to flag suspicious content.
Pain point 2. Review velocity and authenticity at scale
The velocity at which you receive reviews is considered to be one of the top 20 Google Local Pack ranking factors. Local SEO experts believe that a steady stream of reviews (instead of sudden bursts of reviews) positively impact local rankings.
Perhaps more importantly, the GatherUp study shows that 67% of consumers say review recency is the factor that influences them the most when they choose local businesses. It’s even more influential than the average star rating.
You can check the velocity and recency of any business’s reviews by going to their Google Business Profile review section and clicking on the “Newest” button.
Given the apparent impact of review velocity and recency on both local search rankings and consumer behavior, your business needs a strategy for scaling review acquisition across locations. Here’s a step-by-step process to follow:
- Invest in review management software or plugins with multi-seat access. This gives branch managers, franchisees, and other stakeholders the necessary permissions to contribute to the review acquisition process by requesting reviews for their locations. But it prevents them from accessing non-essential online marketing assets.
- Set branch-level goals for review velocity based on competitive research. Each branch should strive to earn fresh reviews at a rate that slightly surpasses its top competitors.
- Collect customer email and SMS contact information at the time of service. Then, follow up with review requests.
- Integrate automated review requests into customer journeys. Use tools like customer relationship management (CRM) technology and point-of-sales (POS) systems.
- Develop employee training manuals and programs that teach staff when and how to ask for reviews face-to-face at the time of service. For example, employees might prompt a review when a customer seems highly satisfied with their experience.
Competitive review velocity analysis is essential to maintaining your brand’s reputation for authenticity. Not only can sudden bursts of positive reviews result in Google removing some of your review content, but you should also keep consumer impressions in mind.
Look at this screenshot through the eyes of a consumer:
The business listed second place has almost one thousand more reviews than either of its local competitors. Would you conclude that:
- The business with the most reviews is the best?
- The business with the most reviews looks suspicious because its volume is so much greater than average?
It may well be the case that the first business is the only one of the three that’s actively engaged in review acquisition. But you can see how the disparity could look odd to consumers. This is why it’s important to set review acquisition benchmarks that are somewhat (but not significantly) higher than nearby competitors for each of your branches.
A final benefit of earning a steady cadence of positive, fresh review content is that it demotes the older negative reviews that searchers see when they sort by the “Newest” filter.
Equipping branch managers and franchisees to continuously improve consumer experiences so that fresh reviews are predominantly positive is one of the smartest strategies for any brand, especially if your business has neglected customer service standards in the past.
Pain point 3. Review response governance for multi-location brands
The majority of consumers now consider owner responses to reviews an essential component of good customer service, according to the GatherUp study. Which means every review should receive a response. An enterprise-ready review response management strategy rests on three pillars:
1. A centralized playbook
Management and franchisee training materials need to set brand voice and tone, document disclaimers, and fully describe escalation paths for complaint resolution. This creates a consistent consumer experience across all branches of your business. Part of your review content policy should call out what not to say, helping establish clear guardrails for your public communications.
Dig deeper: How AI changes how we respond to negative reviews and comments.
2. Decentralized execution
Managers and franchisees need adequate training in company standards so they can defend brand reputation. Each stakeholder should learn situation-appropriate responses to both positive and negative reviews.
However, not every response should follow a script. For example, a customer may make a complaint the business has never dealt with before.
Imagine a florist that routinely handles complaints about flower deliveries being late due to a supply problem they’re trying to solve. The business can create a standardized response template for this.
But what if a reviewer states they were allergic to the bouquet they received? The review responder might:
- Express extra sympathy
- Create an internal note at the shop that the customer should never be sent stargazer lilies again
- Make some other off-script gesture of caring
Scenarios like these are why you should also identify the degree to which it’s appropriate to go off-script when responding to reviews.
3. Supportive technology
Use multi-seat review management software that allows managers and franchisees to take responsibility for responding to reviews. The majority of consumers expect fast responses to negative reviews.
When complaints are resolved, many customers will trust the business for subsequent transactions. And some will update their negative ratings to reflect an improved experience. These outcomes have a direct impact on the reputation, rankings, and retention rate of branches.
Given this, brands can support branch-level success by drafting response templates for managers to use at scale. Your brand may opt to experiment with AI to draft more responses faster.
But you should layer this approach with human oversight. As the GatherUp survey shows, the majority of consumers lose trust and motivation to write reviews when they can tell that businesses use AI to write these responses.
Pain point 4. Measuring the SEO and CRO impact of reviews
From an SEO standpoint, it’s vital to remember that review signals are just one of the categories of factors that appear to influence Local Pack and Maps rankings. You can quickly verify this by looking at a Local Pack like this:
And asking:
- Why is the third business (with 39 reviews) not outranking the second one (with 13 reviews)?
- Why is the second business (with no text reviews) outranking the third one (with a strong customer testimonial)?
Further study might reveal that the top business is winning on other factors. Like its proximity to the searcher or to the center of the city. Or that it’s earned better unstructured citations vouching for its authority or other factors.
The point is that businesses must look for correlations rather than causations when understanding the role that review signals play in SEO and conversion rate optimization gains.
As your enterprise improves its reputation management strategy across all locations, here are signals to track which may or may not correlate with actual improvements in local search rank:
- Review count vs. competitors (are you getting the upper hand over time?)
- Review recency (is your review content as fresh as that of your competitors?)
- Improved sentiment (are new commitments to customer service and active review acquisition campaigns resulting in more positive consumer feedback?)
- Improved consumer behavioral signals (is fresher, more positive, or more abundant review content correlating with increased Google Business Profile conversions such as an uptick in clicks-to-call, clicks-to-website, and requests for driving directions?)
- Improved sales (is a better rating, more recent review content, or a greater volume of reviews correlating with increased branch-level sales?
Pain point 5. Review content and keyword optimization
Reviews just keep on giving when it comes to the benefits they can provide your business. In addition to driving conversions and sales, reviews can be an unbeatable source of business and marketing intelligence.
Review mining for keyword insights and sentiment analysis
You can analyze both branch-level reviews and the reviews of surrounding competitors to understand what inspires local consumers most. In this example, customers eating hamburgers also positively note great service.
When searchers look for local businesses with certain attributes, Google frequently excerpts reviews that match search language. This is a Local Pack feature known as a local justification. There’s a great lesson to be learned in the third review snippet Google excerpts below the address line of each review.
If you saw the phrase “greasy burger” came from a negative review complaining about the food. But upon reading the review, it could also be that the customer thinks the greasiness makes the burger delicious.
Your customers are giving you the exact wording to use when optimizing your brand’s marketing content. Check reviews to find the attributes they value—from great service to great views to greasy burgers. These are terms you can use in your website and social content.
Sentiment analysis
Sentiment analysis is the process of examining customers’ words to gain insight into how they feel about your brand. It helps you identify recurring and emergent themes within each branch’s reviews.
Look for:
- What the branch is consistently getting right that inspires customers to review it. These are qualities, goods, and services the business should continue to promote.
- An uptick in complaints about a specific problem that needs to be resolved quickly so it’s experienced by as few customers as possible
Reviews provide free, real-time quality control that’s difficult to access from any other source. It may seem obvious that brands should listen to their customers. But review response neglect suggests that many major companies forego this source of insight and intelligence.
Reviews as a source of semantic richness
Here, a search for “best gluten free pizza in san francisco” returns several reviews that specifically mention this menu item.
Not only this, but conversational AI environments like Google AI Mode also pull in review summaries like this one in response to a prompt like “Does Tony’s Pizza Napoletana have gluten free pizza?”
The more specific your customers’ reviews are, the more easily Google can relate search queries semantically to review-based content.
See how your brand is currently being represented in conversational AI environments. Engage with platforms like ChatGPT and Google AI Mode by making the prompts that matter to your business, such as “who has the best pizza in detroit?” or “what does a bathroom remodel cost in San Diego.”
Identify the search phrases and AI prompts for you need improved visibility. Then, tailor review requests to ask a portion of your customers to review these specific aspects of your business.
Pain point 6. Multi-location and enterprise scalability
Multi-location businesses must evaluate performance on two different levels: at branch level and at brand level. The former creates the total business health picture of the latter.
With the right technology, brands can:
- Aggregate reviews across hundreds or thousands of locations for a global view of business health via roll-up dashboards
- Standardize review taxonomy with systematized tagging by topic, such as service, staff, and product, to identify upward and downward performance trends at scale
- Set both global and branch-level benchmarks against which marketing campaigns can be tested to prove ROI
- Experiment with AI applications for clustering reviews into actionable themes at scale for business performance, under human oversight
7 advanced strategies to leverage reviews in SEO
This article has focused primarily on the powers of third-party Google reviews in the context of Google’s local search results. But this is only the beginning of how you can leverage reviews in your SEO and marketing strategy.
Advanced use cases include the following opportunities:
- Syndicate third-party review content on location and service-area landing pages. Embed branch-level reviews from Google via the Google My Business API to increase social proof and conversions.
- Match first-party review content to product and service pages. When displaying a product or service on your site, embed first-party reviews and testimonials relating to that offering to increase consumer trust. You can do the same with location-specific feedback on location-level pages.
- Generate programmatic FAQs. Create brand-level FAQs on the basis of the most common review themes—such as policies, features, amenities, pricing, and product availability.
- Use reviews as social assets. Remarket review content across brand and branch social channels to demonstrate communities’ first-hand experiences with the brand, signaling authenticity.
- Share reviews as visual assets. Create Google Business Profile updates and image and video content from review screenshots to assert brand quality.
- Embed review schema on product and service pages. Be sure to follow Google’s guidelines for review and aggregate schema to further enhance the clarity of your content for search engine bots.
- Embed online review content into offline settings. Create consistent and persuasive consumer experiences by featuring online review content in offline assets—including on store signage, company vehicles, print marketing materials, and radio and television advertising.
Optimize your location landing pages beyond reviews
After consumers read your reviews, many may click through from your business listings to your linked location landing pages. Getting customers across that last mile to your front doors can depend on how well you’ve optimized your location landing pages.
Perfect your strategy with location page SEO best practices.
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