Add Star Ratings in Google Organic Search Results

You’ve seen these review ratings on websites in Google’s results before:

They’re called Rich Snippets. They lead to more attention and ultimately to more clicks.

And now you can get them for your website too. The review score widget automatically adds them for your website by adding structured data to it.

Why is it important to have a star rating?

Review stars are eye-catching. They pop out on the otherwise color-neutral Google search results. Having review stars on your results can increase the Click-through-rate (CTR) by 30% and more.

How to add them to your website

It’s fairly simple. All you need is an active ReviewForest account with the Premium or Pro plan.

Install the review score widget or the 2 in 1 bade widget on your website. Our help pages explain how to.

During the setup process, make sure to enable the option to show the rating in Google’s search:

Voila, now your website provides the correct data in the Schema format to get the star rating.

Not on your homepage

As Google recommends in their guidelines the review snippets shouldn’t be displayed on your homepage.
E.g.
❌ website.com/
✔️website.com/subpage

The ReviewForest’ widget does this automatically. It hides the data when it’s installed on your homepage. Normal users of course still see the aggregated review score.

Test if it worked

Google provides the Rich Results Test to test whether the data is properly structured on your website.

Enter your website and click ‘Test URL’. If everything worked, it should look like this:

No guarantee to actually get the star rating

As anyone working in SEO can tell you, Google’s algorithms are full of mysteries to us outsiders. As such it’s also not clear when Google actually uses the structured data on your website to display the review rating in the search results. As long as you made sure the Rich Results Test didn’t give you any errors, your chances are good that Google will eventually display them.