SEO Test Shows No Visible Impact on Organic Traffic When Adding Ratings and Reviews Structured Data to Local Pages

This test looked at adding ratings, reviews, and their associated structured data markup on two sets of local pages: some that were content-rich and some that were not.  The new page component included well-populated reviews of each given location along with a snippet indicating the average star rating. On pages that had existing content, the reviews appeared above the content.

Both of these tests had an inconclusive impact on organic traffic.

While we expected that having the star ratings in the search results would encourage more users to click through, it didn’t seem to have the anticipated effect. Perhaps users would have clicked through regardless of the store’s rating if they knew that was the store brand they were looking for anyway.