By now most people have seen businesses with ratings when they perform a search. However, it has never really been correctly shown. What we mean by this is that it hasn’t ever necessarily shown the businesses with the top ratings at the top. Well, that was until, what appears to be, now.
There has been a lot of chatter on the web about Google serving up local listings more and more based on ratings. For example, if someone searches for “best criminal lawyer in nyc”, the results being showed by Google are as follows:
When searching locally for "best", Google now defaults review score to "4.0+" for local pack results @ndyjsimpson @JoyanneHawkins #LocalSEO pic.twitter.com/OOztM3M6Aa
— Dave DiGregorio (@deegs20) April 25, 2017
Although we tried several local searches here in South Africa, we couldn’t trigger the local listings to appear ordered already, but our guess is that it won’t take too long before we start getting results like this. What we can see now, though, is the ability to order by “Rating”:
Chances are, if you’re searching for a restaurant or the likes, you’ll probably filter for the restaurant with the best reviews.
What does this mean?
- You need to make more effort to get reviews for your business.
- You need to keep your level of service as high as possible (reputation management).
- Google are clamping down on fake reviews.
- Click here to learn how to remove fake reviews.
If you know someone who runs a local business, especially in the hospitality industry, this would be a good article to shoot across to them.
