Most of us have noticed that some websites have star ratings next to their listings and others don’t. And if a website has this rating it gets more clicks as it attracts more attention. In addition, it creates the impression that there is likely a quality product or service. Also, many SEO experts think that having good star ratings and reviews can help you move up the search results. Actually, it’s logical, because the more your website clickable the more probability that Google will put it higher. As one of main Google’s goals is to provide us with information that best matches our queries.

If you’re using WordPress and looking for a free solution to gathering customer reviews, the best option is the WP Customer Reviews plugin. But in order to get the star ratings, you need to use something called “schema.org markup”, “structured data” or “microdata”. This is a standard for how you mark data on your website letting browsers and bots read it and know what it’s about.

The easiest method is to use the plugin WP SEO Structured Data Schema plugin. Firstly you set up such data as your organization name, logo, telephone, and so on. Then, on those pages where you would like to have a star rating, you set up the “Aggregate Rating” option. Don’t put ratings on every page, because you may get a warning from Google about the possible penalties. That’s pretty much it.

For those who don’t use WordPress, you can add do this manually:

Or even if you use WP, but prefer not to use plugins, then you just need to put the structured data in the footer on your pages. There are a lot of different types of data defined in schema.org. For example, for a Local Business, you need to tell Google the business name, address, provide a logo, opening hours, telephone number, and email address too. In order for Google can interpret data on your website, you’ll need to use some HTML code with “itemscope” and “itemprop” labels. 

• Itemtype, you need to choose your type of business
• Itemprop “image” – provide a link to an image representing your business or your logo. This doesn’t get displayed in the main search result listings so it’s not super important but you do need to provide it.
• Itemprop “name” – the name of your business.
• Itemprop “address” – your business address.
• The “telephone” and “email” –  your telephone number and email address.
  And that’s it for the definition of your business. Then, we come to the Star Ratings. You will need to put these into the footer of your website:

<span class="rating-desc" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/Product">
 <span itemprop="name">Bereshka Web</span>
 <span itemprop="aggregateRating" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/AggregateRating"> Rated <span itemprop="ratingValue">5</span> / 5 based on <span itemprop="reviewCount">5</span> reviews. | <a class="ratings" href="https://www.bereshkaweb.net/review">Review Me</a> </span>
</span>

As soon as this data is up on your site you can test it on Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool.  You may get some warnings about the star ratings. If so, you will need to manually enter them. And that’s it. Good luck!