Think about the last purchase you made online. What was the first thing that you took into consideration? Today, online business keeps evolving, and so, many tactics have been introduced with the demand of time. Marketing has got a new flavor by dint of the internet and has shaped into a whole new dimension by itself. Ratings and reviews now play an important role in consumer purchasing decisions, so adding them to your website can help change consumer perception.
Online Marketing Has An Especially Unique Place In All Aspects Of The New Generation.
Reviews and ratings are one of them that has made online businesses handier both for the consumers and business. Especially for a review website and e-commerce store, reviews are the must-need features that help increase consumer engagement.
Did you know… 90% of the total consumers read online reviews before visiting a business and 72% of the total consumers will take action only after reading a positive review.
Nowadays, people are buying things lying on their beds after analyzing the respective product’s reviews. They use the internet to research various products and services before taking the final action.
However, it’s a tough job to identify the best resources out there in the marketplace. To help consumers find their suitable products, these platforms introduced reviews to help make decisions easier, and day by day they are becoming popular.
What Are Ratings?
If we simplify the answer without writing a bookish definition, then we would say that Ratings are the customer’s feedback or measurement based on the quality of the products. They can be provided based on different criteria. In most cases, ratings are given by the consumers in the form of stars, numbers, percentages after using the respective products and services.
What Are Reviews?
When customers provide opinions through written text after using any service or product, then, the contents are called reviews. Reviews are feedback provided by customers and are displayed as the customers write them after using the respective product or service.
Why Are Ratings And Reviews Important?
Reviews and Ratings are interrelated to each other. Ratings provide pictorial feedback of consumers while Reviews show textual feedback of customers. Both are used as potential references for the respective products.
Potential consumers can get an understanding of the products and services after reading or watching from the respective website. They also help establish a relationship between the product owner and consumers.
May it be e-commerce, e-learning, real estate, or anything else. They provide a way for consumers to say something about the products based on their experience after using the respective products practically. In short, they give a consumer voice that helps future buyers purchase the right product and services without wasting time.
Moreover, they also make the website more interactive by addressing the products as authentic to the consumers. However, the only concern is, these reviews need to be visually attractive and eye-catching so that readers notice them. Stars and bars are generic, your reviews can stand out if you tweak them to blend well with your website.
How Can You Style Ratings & Reviews?
You can style and design your website in different ways that can create a positive impact on your expected customers. To get the maximum benefits from the metrics, it’s crucial to understand how to style them on your website. Certain things need to be considered while styling.
[N.B: Using a dynamic, feature-rich WP Review Pro can cover all the styling aspects that are mentioned in the text below.]
Now, we are going to explain about the tips and tricks to style such metrics on your website. Let’s take a close look at how we can get things done!
1. Use Different Rating Systems As Per Your Website Design
When it comes to purchasing anything online, the first thing observed is the Rating of the product. Though both are the important elements of a store, the ratings are the first to be considered.
Think about Amazon – when you go to the store and choose a product, you look at the ratings first. Then if the ratings satisfy you, you go to read a couple of reviews. This is how things happen, usually!
There are numerous types of ratings to add to your website like stars, points, percentages, thumbs-up, circles, etc. To make the most of ratings on your site, you need to learn about the proper usage of ratings.
Sometimes you might need to use a star rating, sometimes the thumbs-up rating might suit; it depends on the demand of a particular style that matches with the respective product demonstration. Sometimes, you can even use multiple review styles simultaneously while demonstrating any product. Usually, the more ratings a product or service gets, the better.
Here are some of the different rating formats that can be used for your website:
Star-based Ratings
Star-based ratings are the most commonly used and standard rating system all through the web that you can use for your website. You will find this way of evaluation in almost all the review-related websites and e-commerce sites like Amazon.
If you want to review any product or service, this can be one of the smart ways to style and demonstrate them on your website. For instance, Amazon uses star and point ratings to evaluate its products. Usually, in a star-based rating system, the quality of any product or service is measured using one to five stars.
One study by BrightLocal says that star ratings in the SERP can increase CTR by 25%. Star ratings also boost up the whole SEO performance of a website.
Another study shows that 94% of consumers consider a business that has a four-star rating whereas 53% opt for those that have a three-stars. It is important to know though that ratings below 3-stars can harm your business rather than help it.
Point-based Ratings
Point-based ratings are another type of rating system that can be used to evaluate products on your site. In this system, usually, the quality of a specific product or service is measured by the number that ranges from 1 to 10.
A lot of popular websites use point-based rating systems. A popular example is IMDB, which uses a point-based rating system to rate any specific movie on its website.
Percentage-based Ratings
Sometimes people like to hear the percentage of anything, that’s why in some cases, percentage-based reviews are used to evaluate products and services. In this type, the quality is measured in terms of percentage from 0%-100%. You can style your review in this way depending on the products or services.
For instance, along with the star-based rating, Amazon uses a percent-based rating system to rate any specific movie on its website.
Thumbs-based Ratings
Thumb-based reviews, also called like-based are divided into two categories – like (thumbs-up) and dislike (thumbs-down). Here, the quality of a product is evaluated by counting the number of likes and dislikes.
Likes-Dislikes Thumbs Based ratings
The more the number of likes, the better the quality of the product. On the other hand, thumbs-down determines the vulnerability of a specific product. Moreover, some blogs use a thumbs rating after each post on their website. You also can use this type of review style on your website.
YouTube – the best-known video sharing platform has made likes and dislikes really popular amongst the masses.
Circle-based Ratings
Circle-based ratings are another type of feedback style. If you are running a review website, you can use this type of rating system. This type of review is the most specific of all and gives a precise, relative idea of all the parameters of the product.
2. Implement Google Rich-Snippets with Reviews
When you style your reviews, make sure that they are set up in such a way that the page displays a proper rich snippet in the SERP. Google usually takes data from the structured markup, and this helps to increase the click-through rate on your website.
There are several types of rich-snippet designs for your website. However, it depends on the site you are dealing with which one you should take. Moreover, rich-snippet results are eye-catching than that of typical search results that have no rich snippets. Furthermore, using a proper rich-snippet can lead to a higher organic CTR on your website.
For an e-commerce site, star ratings (out of 5) with reviews can be displayed in their rich-snippet area on SERP. This is a smart way to demonstrate products authentically. Here is an example of this type of snippet shown in Google search results when you use the reviews on your website. The same thing happens for online courses as well.
Usually, rich snippets are placed along with reviews. This is a pretty ideal way to display, and you should make sure that you have both designed in a proper way as they are supposed to be.
3. Place a Rating Under Each Blog Post
Blog posts are the key source of traffic for any website. You can design your blog page with reviews. Star rating can be used after each post on your website. You also can use thumbs ratings instead of star ratings.
Adding a review box below each blog post could be a great way to engage your audience. It increases the authenticity and clarity of that blog post. In this case, you should maintain quality posts on your blog as they will determine the quality of your reviews. Otherwise, the post that gets poor reviews will not be an engaging one for your website.
4. Add User Comments
Commenting is a great way to engage traffic on your website. But this should be designed with ratings to create a better impression on the target audience. You should showcase your reader’s opinions along with ratings which will be more engaging. Include options for reviews so that your readers can submit their comments with a score.
That means when someone wants to comment on a particular blog post, they will get an opportunity to measure the specific post by rating with a review simultaneously. Even readers can mark others’ comments as helpful or not.
This will engage the potential audience and help to increase the conversion at large. Moreover, here, the comments also work as a personal reviews.
5. The Google Places Review Style Format
Style your website according to Google Places Reviews as it will increase the reliability of your business. Google Places Reviews are used to embed your Google Places Business Reviews directly on your WordPress website.
This type of review helps your business to gain additional exposure and gain online credibility. In this case, you can showcase the business address with the direction and client ratings as well.
This is a pretty cool feature provided by Google for any business owner.
Suppose, you have a restaurant business and you are maintaining a website for this business. Let’s say your business has some amazing reviews on Google and you want to display those reviews on your website.
In this case, if you set up a Google place review on your website, people will likely be more interested in your restaurant. They will find your restaurant with the website address listed and directions as well.
For WordPress users, you can simply use a review plugin like WP Review Pro or WP Product Review for setting up such reviews.
6. Styles for Mobiles
A study by OMG National reveals that 38% of people read online reviews using a mobile app. Another study by VENDASTA shows that consumers who read reviews on a smartphone are 127% more likely to buy items than those who are on desktops. Moreover, mobile users are increasing rapidly these days. So style all them in such a way that they could be visible perfectly on mobile devices as well.
7. Integrate Yelp Reviews
If you have a Yelp business account and want to show that you are trusted by consumers, and want to convince your site visitors that your offers are worth spending money on, you can add these reviews on your site to maximize your impression.
This could be an easy task if you have a review plugin for WordPress that integrates Yelp reviews onto the website. This will help you demonstrate the existing ratings on your Yelp profile on your website. Furthermore, you can even add a redirect button that takes buyers to your Yelp page so that they can write a fresh review.
You can feature all Yelp reviews you have on your Yelp account into your website by importing them. This will ultimately increase your business credibility and make your business more authentic to the consumers.
8. Embed Facebook Reviews
If you want to be more successful in generating reviews, you can embed Facebook reviews on your website. This will allow you to reach out individually to every customer without any hassle. Facebook reviews also help to build trust among your potential consumers.
To make this happen, you can use a reliable WordPress review plugin that can embed a Facebook review on your website. Using the plugin, you can import all the reviews from Facebook instantly.
9. Implement Google Product Review
Embed Google product review feeds into your website. If you are running an e-commerce site, you can enable the product review feed in your WooCommerce setting on your website. This will help consumers make effective decisions, and that will ultimately drive more qualified shoppers to your site.
A qualified WordPress review plugin can do a lot in this regard. Using this plugin, you can also supercharge the feed with additional metadata that will be displayed on SERP.
10. Use Custom Image Ratings
To create a variation in custom ratings, you can use images, icons, and even different types of symbols. Using a WordPress review plugin, you just need to upload a custom icon or image; then everything will be done by the plugin. Then you can use the custom rating to be shown to the consumers while they rate products on your website.
Besides this, you can add additional texts alongside your custom ratings. These additional texts can help you to explain more about the ratings you want to show and provide a value that will be more engaging to your consumers.
Final Note
Ratings and reviews serve numerous purposes for different products and services. They also provide a better understanding of an individual’s preferences and present better personalized user experiences.
When it comes to implementing those styling features efficiently, as we mentioned above, you need a WordPress Review Plugin to set up these ingredients altogether.
While we have covered some ideas on how to style different systems, experimenting within your website while styling reviews may help you find a more definitive answer.
We hope this article helped you to know more about how to style reviews on your website.
