Ric Rodriguez with Jason Barnard at Digital Elite Day

Ric Rodrigues talks to Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy) about reviews in SEO.

Ric is the first guest to ask specifically for the song. Apparently it haunts his dreams! Ric is really into local SEO, and so he is a big fan of reviews. I start on the obvious advantage – reducing Google Ads costs. Ric suggests takes it much further. He gets very excited about the amazing insights we can get from analysing the reviews data we have. Trustpilot have seen a 40% uptick in organic traffic due to the E-A-T updates … Three factors for local search – proximity, NAPS, credibility (and accuracy, so four!). Google are looking for trust in you as a brand, and trust in the information it has about you. Reviews help enormously with both. I mention inferred reviews back in June, two months before Bill Slawski’s article about Quality Visit Scores Patent (Granted: July 30, 2019). Then we get into Android tracking – both direct and indirect, touching on probabilistic and deterministic wotsits for tracking (I get a bit confused). We debate whether Jim Carrey in Yes Man could be tracked by his behaviour.

Then into the BIG (and most interesting) chunk of the conversation – aggregating and using review data ourselves, where reviews are being used by Google, and where they might be taking this. Reviews are the pulse of your clients. By doing analysis of the sentiment pre and post offline marketing campaign, you can measure the success. Reviews feed into E-A-T, the Knowledge Graph, brand measurement, We agree that everyone in SEO should be looking into reviews. During the conversation, Bill Slawski comes up a few times, and every time, we both get unreasonably enthusiastic.