SEO Friendly Review websites?

[Souk]

What are some SEO friendly online review websites?  I remember Google Reviews used to show up high in the rankings but i'm not sure what the best place to direct customers to write reviews?  Yelp is strong on Bing and Yahoo...but what's good on Google?

[Ted_Cullen]

We really like YotPo - for a few reasons.  As an e-commerce site, submitting reviews by customers can be a hassle - as most "native" review systems require the customer to come to your site, login, and then write the review.  YotPo has a a really cool system where they send the emails and those emails are so special, the customer need only write the review IN THE EMAIL they are looking at - not sure how this works technically - but YotPo will get you a lot more reviews than any native ecommerce system.

In our experience, YotPo does require tech-saavy integration to get the full features.  One of these is to allow for crawl-able reviews.  IT IS DO-ABLE, but you need to look for their advanced integration instructions.  This has something to do with the review content being seen by google as being on 3rd party site, and thus not part of your site.  Trust me, you CAN fix this with Yotpo.

I do hope this is helpful.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Souk!

Good question. I'm not totally clear on what you mean by SEO-friendly reviews. Any review that can be found and crawled will be a help to your customers and to bots, so I wasn't sure if there was something beyond this you were asking about.

If your business is local, than in nearly any industry, the two major players are going to be Google and Yelp. There are, indeed, others like Bing, Yahoo, etc. and beyond these basics, there may be industry-relevant review platforms where you want to be sure you are listed.

Phil Rozek of Local Visibility System authored the most comprehensive post on this topic back in 2013. Not too much has changed in the review world in the last 1-2 years, so I believe you'll find some really good info here on major players, plus some tips for determining review platform quality:

http://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/2013/10/24/comparison-of-local-review-sites-where-should-you-focus-now/

Beyond the majors, you should research industry-specific sites that support reviews. Diversity is very healthy when it comes to this area of marketing.

[MonicaOConnor]

Google plus reviews are great, so are reviews on BizRate, YotPo or any other 3rd party site where reviews can be left. Have you thought about getting involved with Google Trusted Stores? That is an awesome review system.