How To Get Review Snippets In Google Using aggregateRating Schema Markup

Brandon Lazovic, September 4, 2020 | SEO

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.

What Is Schema Markup?

Schema, 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.

Schema Markup For Reviews and Product Ratings

Below are three types of schema markup that you can utilize for your review and product ratings.

Single Review/Rating

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:

itemReviewed
reviewBody
Author
datePublished
reviewRating
Publisher
bestRating
worstRating

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.

AggregateRating Schema

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:

itemReviewed
ratingCount
reviewCount
ratingValue
bestRating
worstRating

Product Review 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.

Google’s Guidelines For AggregateRating Review Schema Markup

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:

Don’t use aggregateRating on your homepage
The aggregateRating score needs to represent actual reviews that are visible to users on your website
Pages that have aggregateRating markup need to be related to your site’s reviews
Your reviews need to be unique, and not pulled from Google or Yelp, to be eligible for the review schema type
Users should be able to add reviews and you need to have their permission to publish their words
Your site needs to be authoritative - pages with backlinks and are highly trafficked are more likely to generate review rich results in the SERPs.

How To Add Your Review Schema

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:

Option 1: Use Review Software

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.

Trustpilot

While Trustpilot is pricier than Whitespark, it’s an industry staple for curating reviews to display as widgets on business websites.

Whitespark

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.

Option 2: Create Your Own Review System

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.

Step One: Make A Reviews Page

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.

Step Two: Create Review Schema Markup

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.

Add Markup To Site Header

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.

Add Markup To Appropriate Pages

Now that you have your aggregate review page, you can add aggregateRating schema to your other web pages. A few notes:

Don’t place this schema on your homepage
Avoid placing this schema on too many pages; the less, the better. I recommend including it only on your most important pages, so Google doesn’t flag it as spammy or against its guidelines
Remember, that each page you add this review schema on, needs to show the reviews, or include a link back to the original page with all the aggregate reviews. This can also be done for product schema.

Test Markup Using Structured Data Testing Tool

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.

Schema Generator For Reviews

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

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:

Author
Date Published
Item Reviewed
Review Body
Rating
Rating Scale Minimum
Rating Scale Maximum

Merkle’s Schema Generator

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

Web Code Tools form is another good tool for creating aggregate rating markup. You’ll need to fill out the following fields:

Item reviewed
Rating on a 5-star scale
Number of votes for this review rating
Total number of reviews

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