Stop collecting ‘shop’ reviews — individual product reviews only.
Store level reviews do not add value in Google’s network, or in customer’s brain.
Many of my customers for Rapid Reviews still mistakenly believe that ‘shop’ or store level reviews are valuable and preferable to reviews associated with individual products.
Google has two types of reviews that it supports:
1) Reviews for in-person locations, also known as Google Business Reviews. These are what we see in Google maps. These are only for physical business reviews, not e-commerce stores.
2) Product ratings, which show in Google’s organic search results via Rich Snippets (ld+json) and in Google Shopping via the Product reviews feed. These are for e-commerce stores.
If you are running a Shopify store, shop level reviews are worthless in Google’s network. Every review should be associated with a product. Product-level reviews are better in every way: for SEO, ad buying, conversion, engagement, and so on.
Shop level reviews are not eligible to be shown in organic search results or Google Shopping. This means that your reviews will not count toward your product or collection star ratings. This is a huge loss for SEO and Merchant Center ad buying.
Even if you do have a physical location, your Google Business reviews should be aggregated separately from your individual product reviews and your product reviews software, like Rapid Reviews.
Great products with contextual reviews convert better
Shop level reviews do not convert customers as well as specific product reviews because they lack context. No customer likes to waste time sifting through 2,000 generic store reviews to hopefully find reviews associated with the product they want to buy. That’s just silly. Trying to inflate the perceived number of reviews by showing all aggregated shop level reviews under a product is annoying for the customer.
Another thing to note is that data from my Rapid Reviews customers indicates that “All Reviews” pages are uninteresting to customers and are not conversion drivers—to an extent that I was a bit shocked. Visitors will not waste time looking through reviews that lack context. Store owners think that global reviews improve brand credibility. That is true only below a low threshold of aggregate reviews for your store. Individual product pages with contextual reviews are much more influential to purchase intent.
We only get one chance to get a review; we have to make it the best for our business, and always connect it to a product.
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