Improve your Local SEO with Star Ratings & Reviews

Do you know what it takes to get the stars to show up in your Google search results? You know the stars that your eyes are drawn to when you search for contractors, doctors, products, movies, and restaurants?
Run a search for “Star Wars” and you’ll get a preview of the rating for the movie right in your search listings. There is no need to go to a secondary review site to see what people are saying about the movie because google provides a review snippet with the results.

Why does this matter you ask?
In today’s review economy you need to be recognized by google and you need to shine above the competition.
88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendations — invesp
The rest of this article will show you how this works in Google and how Recruitsy will manage local SEO for your staffing & recruiting agency using a trick called schema markups.
What is Schema Markup?
Schema markups have been used in SEO for a while now, helping websites stand out from the competition in Google SERPs.
Schema.org is the collaborative community responsible for creating this semantic vocabulary to implement into your website, and is sponsored by Google, Microsoft, Pinterest, and more. Simply put, schema.org markups are nothing more than code that tells search engines and other products, how to understand bits of information from your pages and display this additional information in a useful way for the end-user.
Schema markups can be used for a lot of different purposes across your website, but a great variety of these schema types are helpful for enhancing your content in the Google SERP in so many ways you didn’t even know possible.
Schema.Org supports a few different code formats but recently suggests JSON-LD.
Meet JSON-LD
To get the review stars preview within google search listings, we’re going to use JSON-LD and “AggregateRating” that are generated from http://recruitsy.co . Don’t worry, it sounds more difficult than it actually is.
To illustrate, let’s check out the simple code below:
<script type="application/ld+json">
{
"@context": "http://schema.org",
"@type": "Organization",
"@id": "http://recruitsy.co/acme-recruiting",
"name": "Acme Recruiting & Staffing",
"image": "http://recruitsy.co/acme-recruiting/logo.jpg",
"sameAs": "http://acme-recruiting.com",
"address": {
"@type": "PostalAddress",
"streetAddress": "555 Water Street",
"addressLocality": "Ponte Vedra",
"addressRegion": "FL",
"postalCode": "32081",
"addressCountry": "US"
},
"telephone": "+9045555555",
"geo": {
"@type": "GeoCoordinates",
"latitude": 30.240005,
"longitude": -81.385262
},
"aggregateRating": {
"@type": "AggregateRating",
"ratingValue": "4.9",
"bestRating": "5",
"worstRating": "1",
"ratingCount": "175"
},
"review": {
"@type": "Review",
"url": "http://www.recruitsy.co/agency/acme-recruiting.html",
"author": {
"@type": "Person",
"name": "Lisa Kennedy"
},
"datePublished": "2014-03-13T20:00",
"description": "Reputable staffing agency with great recruiters.",
"inLanguage": "en",
"reviewRating": {
"@type": "Rating",
"ratingValue": 5
}
}
}
</script>This is the code we’ve added to the Acme Recruiting & Staffing page on our website. As you can see, we supply your organization profile information from your Recruitsy profile as well as the reviews and ratings that have been captured on our website. By providing this content on the pages, google will index and identify the script <script type=”application/ld+json”> and recognize it as a review snippet. BAM — we’re done. We’ve done the heavy lifting for you.
TL;DR
To remain competitive in today’s review economy you need a solid strategy for generating candidate and client reviews for your staffing agency and getting noticed by Googles SERP. Recruitsy manages local SEO for you using JSON-LD along with the reviews generated through our review platform https://www.recruitsy.co/recruiter.
Shoot for the stars and outrank your competition — ask about our Local SEO practices.
