Do Reviews Impact Local SEO Rankings? New Study

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In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, for those of us in the local SEO world, one thing is clearer than ever: if you want your business to make an impact in your locality, a strong local presence online is an absolute must.

In addition to maintaining a complete and accurate Google business profile, engaging with list of laos consumer email users and obtaining ratings and reviews are two key components of a solid Local SEO strategy .

But do ratings and reviews really impact local SEO? And if so, how?

Our 2021 Local SEO Rankings study looked at just that. To find out, we studied 5,624 business-oriented keywords and analyzed the results of the Google Maps Local Pack and the Desktop and Mobile Local Pack.

How Reviews and Ratings Affect Local SEO for Google Maps
For listings on Google Maps, we found that a listing's average number of reviews has a significantly stronger impact on its performance than its average rating .

In fact, we found that the average rating was not correlated with top three rankings.

Here is the breakdown of the average rating for all the cards analyzed in all categories: