2017 has been the year of changes for Local SEO’s. There has been more product modifications and major additions (upgrades?) than I can remember happening in a single year.
One of the new features we have seen rolling out (or just being tested) a lot over the past week is visible review summaries showing up in the three pack and local finder. You can see an example of what I’m talking about highlighted in red below on the third local pack result on the Desktop example and on the first result in local.
Desktop Review Summary Example
Another example of review summaries in search results
Mobile Review Summary Example
You will notice that personal injury is highlighted in the example above. This is interesting as the search I conducted was for “Car Accident Lawyer” and I assumed they might highlight the keyword I typed.
I noticed that these reviews are not popping up in every market. In fact, I still see very few overall when I’m searching for them. You can also see these triggered in the local finder as you can see in the example below:
What Reviews Are Being Pulled?
In the examples that I have seen, I did not notice an immediate pattern as to why they are picking certain reviews over others. A quick glance showed me that some were pulled from most recent reviews and others seemed to have no identifying factors such. It appears to be algorithmic as to why they pick the reviews they do and how they truncate them.
Who Gets The Reviews?
This also still seems to be a bit of an unknown. After looking at a small sample set of attorneys (15) the only thing we noticed is that reviews were in the double digits in these cases. However, there are plenty of firms with 10+ reviews that do not generate the review samples at this time.
Will The Reviews Show Pictures?
From a user experience, I thought it would be cool if this feature showed the picture of the actual reviewer instead of just the blue graphic headshot. On the examples we checked we saw that many reviewers had actual pictures in their review profile and they are not pulling to the shortened review summaries. I don’t think this will change, but it reminded me a bit about the old Google Authorship photos in search results and got me excited.
There Is Still Much To Learn // Send Us Your Screenshots & Searches!
Right now this seems more like a test than a full rollout and there seems that there is more we don’t know about this test than what we do.
If you’re able to get a screenshot example with a search phrase we would love to see it! (We prefer lawyer results). Please send it to cmeraz (at) jurisdigital.com
