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Hey everybody, this is Joe Burnich with bigwestmarketing.com, and in this short video we are going to talk about how Google reviews can either help or hurt your SEO rankings. So let’s get started with that right now.
Okay, so real quick before we jump in, I wanted to pull up this little pie chart, it is Google ranking factors. We got this at the last big local SEO conference that we went to in Denver in late 2019, so this is very fresh information. This is the stuff that Google looks at when they’re ranking websites for a local business. This is not a national business or big eCommerce business, anything like that, this is for local businesses in local cities.
So let’s look at these ranking factors. The Google My Business Signals is about 25%, then your links, the link building stuff, also known as Backlinks is right around 16.5%. The Website Signals, so the stuff that you do actually on the website, and this is the stuff that most people get stuck on, is only at 13.8% of the total factors: 13% of your energy, your time, your money and everything should be going into tweaking the website, so don’t spend too much time on that because Google is so smart these days with their AI that you don’t need to sit there and tweak all the crazy little stuff that people tell you on your website. That’s old information.
Citation stuff is right at 10.8%, and then the one that we’re looking at today is Review Signals. So Review Signals is 15%. 15.4% of Google’s rankings has to do with the reviews, specifically Google reviews that you get on your Google My Business account. So what we’re going to talk about right now is the good and the bad of that.
So let me pull up this website I’ve got here. So I was reading this article at brightlocal.com, which is one of the main authority websites that has to do with local rankings, and this new article that came out is talking about fake reviews and how they’re a real problem. And this article is mostly about why consumers need to be careful, and what kind of reviews they can trust or not trust, because what happens is there’s all these companies out there right now that you can pay, and they’ll go and fill your Google My Business account with fake reviews.
And in the past when Google sensed that this was happening, what they would do is they would actually just delete those reviews. I haven’t seen reviews deleted off a Google My Business account in a long time, but a pattern that we’re starting to see, and this is not completely verified yet, but I wanted to get the word out there that this may be an issue since the November Google update, November, 2019, that big update, the last big update that Google came out with, ever since we’ve seen that happen, we’ve had two websites, two clients that have had significant drops due to that update.