I've read that GMB reviews are an important ranking factor, but I wanted to quantify that idea, so I set out to do my own small study on it.
The Moz Local Search Rank Factors survey weights reviews at 15%. My experiment involved pulling up the first 160 local results for one city, across a number of business categories. Specifically, I'm searching on terms like "Raleigh dentist", "Raleigh restaurants", "Raleigh lawyers", etc.
For each category, I constructed a scatter plot of review average vs ranking, and calculated the Pearson coefficient to find the strength of the relationship between the two variables.
The results were interesting and actually vary by business category.
Restaurants and hair salons, for example, show a clear trend of ratings being associated with rankings. That said, it seems like high ratings don't necessarily guarantee much. Lower ratings, however, seem to push down rankings pretty significantly. There are plenty of 4.6-4.8 restaurants sitting further back, but anything below a 4.4 appears to guarantee a less desireable rank.
The data paints a stranger picture for lawyers, who appear to either have a 5.0, or no reviews at all. There are of course some inbetween, but the bi-modal distribution is unmistakable. I can only guess at what's going on there.
The story is pretty similar for dentists. The majority of dentists seem to have absolutely perfect 5.0 ratings. There is a slight difference from lawyers, in that there isn't the same glut of no review listings.
Plumbers were probably the strangest group I came across. The data looks somewhat similar to the results for lawyers, but there is absolutely no relationship between review rating and ranking that I could find. This might be a fluke of my data-set, but all other categories I studied had at least some statistical relationship between the two.
I would post a link to my source data and graphs, but I don't think that's allowed here.
Thanks, and I hope you guys found that interesting!
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from Search Engine Optimization: The Latest SEO News https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/f92pgl/gmb_reviews_and_local_search_rank/>
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