Review schema is essential to have marked up on your site, if you publish reviews or offer products. Having review structured data for these pages will improve your site’s CTR and drive more organic traffic from the search results on Google.
Read our guide on how to create and add review structured data to your site pages in as little as 30 minutes.
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Schema markup, otherwise known as structured data, is a type of code that allows search engines like Google and Bing better understand the content on your website.
Schema can take the form of three coding types: JSON-LD, RDFa, and Microdata.
While structured data isn’t required to rank on Google or Bing, it helps these search engines better determine the relationship between your content, and how it should rank for a given query. Schema markup can improve your keyword rankings, and drive more traffic to your site by improving your page CTR with rich results.
Below are three types of schema markup that you can utilize for your review and product ratings.
The single review schema type is most applicable for marking up individual reviews. Here are some example fields that are often included for single review schema:
For reviewRating, Google defaults to a 5-point scale, but you can also define this to match your own custom rating system, if you use something other than the 5-point scale.
The AggregateRating schema markup type differs from the one I mentioned above, in that it’s used in cases where you have multiple reviews available and an average rating is calculated. It’s also often used in conjunction with LocalBusiness schema. Here are some example fields that are often included for AggregateRating schema:
This type of schema doesn’t differ much from the ones I mentioned above. The main difference is while SingleReview is an author reviewing a product, AggregateRating is often used to show the average review rating for a business, while product is to show user reviews regarding specific products.
In recent years, Google has become more strict in how sites use the AggregateReview schema markup. Here are some dos and don’ts based on Google’s Guidelines:
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Now that we’ve walked through the basics, here are a few different ways to implement reviews and add review schema to your site. While SingleReview and Product schema are straightforward, AggregateReview schema requires extra steps to make it eligible for rich results, which I’ll walk through below:
There are review systems that you can opt in for that will do most of the heavy lifting for you. Two of these review software are Trustpilot and Whitespark.
While Trustpilot is pricier than Whitespark, it’s an industry staple for curating reviews to display as widgets on business websites.
Whitespark’s reputation builder is designed to help local businesses collect and monitor reviews. It also offers a built-in Review Widget feature that allows users to properly mark up their reviews with appropriate schema.
If you don’t want to opt into a third-party software like Trustpilot or Whitespark, you can create a basic review system for your website, which I’ll walk through below.
First, you’ll need to create a reviews page, and populate that page with customer reviews.
You’ll also need to include a “leave a review” form somewhere on your review/testimonials page. You could build a system to moderate submissions and publish them on the page, like Trustpilot or Whitespark do, but it isn’t necessary.
For product review schema, you’ll need to aggregate customer reviews for each product, and display the reviews on those specific product pages. Similar to the review/testimonial page, you can build a system to moderate/publish submissions onto the page.
Next, you’ll need to create your review schema markup. You can do this manually, but I prefer using Structured Data Testing Tools, like Juris Digital. Further in this article I provide a few other schema markup tools that you can also use, but if you want to go the manual route, I would recommend going to schema.org and read the examples they have outlined for each markup type.
Next, you’ll add your schema markup to the website page’s source header. You may need to reach out to your developer to make this change, but if you’re using WordPress, there are multiple plugins that allow you to insert code to your header on a page level.
Now that you have your aggregate review page, you can add aggregateRating schema to your other web pages. A few notes:
The last step is to test your schema markup using the structured data testing tool. You’ll need to clean up any errors that are found, for the schema to be eligible. If there are no errors, then great! You just published and created your own review schema.
I referenced Juris Digital as one schema generator that you can use to make review schema, but here are three other tools that are also worth mentioning:
Schema-Creator.org is one tool that offers the ability to generate SingleReview schema. Simply fill out the required fields on the form, and it will pop out the code to add to your site header. Required fields include:
Merkle’s Schema Generator is my favorite markup tool to use. While it offers several types of markup, you can use this for Product - Offer, AggregateRating, and Review schema. Like schema-creator.org, simply fill out the required fields.
Web Code Tools form is another good tool for creating aggregate rating markup. You’ll need to fill out the following fields:
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