We’ve known for a while that Google loves local reviews.

Google My Business, Yelp, YellowPages – Google gives lots of SEO love to local reviews.

And now the search engine giant has taken things to another level.

Google is now showing reviews in both organic and paid search results (and not just for ecommerce sites).

Here’s an example of a Google ad that appears when searching for “orange county office space”.

And here’s an organic result with the star rating for the same search:

How Do You Get Star Ratings in Google Ads or Organic Results?

For organic rankings, the easiest way to is get customers to leave a review on your Google+ and/or My Business page.

You can also scrape them directly from your website (just not the homepage), by following this handy guide by WhiteSpark.

For getting the star rating for both your organic results and in your AdWords, you can also try a platform such as Trustpilot.

Why Should You Get Star Ratings?

Google seems to be giving more and more weight to third party review sites.

This makes a lot of sense when you think about.

Nearly every business has a website, and nearly everybody searches for products and services online.

But you can’t always trust what businesses say about themselves: you trust what their customers say about them.

Reviews and ratings help establish more trust in the online business procurement process, plain and simple.

But don’t just take my word for it, here’s a few statistics straight from TrustPilot:

• Star ratings in Google ads have a 17% higher Click Through Rate (CTR) than ads that don’t
• The star rating rich snippet in organic results can lead to increases in CTR up to 30%
• Websites that include TrustPilot reviews can see increases in conversion rates up to 58%

So much of our time, money, and energy is spent on what we say about our businesses.

But it’s time to devote some of that attention to what others say about your business.

Google will reward you for it.