Star ratings are used to rate just about everything, from movies, to restaurants, to road safety tests in the automobile industry. As consumers, we understand the star ratings system and use it to help inform our purchase decisions. This includes our travel decisions.
Star ratings help us determine the best airlines, cruises, attractions and hotels to book. For this reason, most major travel websites today have embraced star ratings, including review sites like TripAdvisor, OTA channels like Booking.com, meta-review sites like Trivago, social media platforms like Facebook, and even search engines.
In this article, we take a deeper dive into Google’s star rating system and how to use it to your hotel’s advantage in organic search results.
Why Star Ratings Matter
Having a star rating appear next to your hotel in Google search results can be extremely beneficial. Star reviews are eye catching, helping your property stand out from competitors on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). They provide an important element of social proof for travel shoppers, invoking a sense of confidence in your hotel based on what other guests have said. Furthermore, star ratings have been found to boost click-through rates by up to 29%, increasing traffic to your website, and potentially more bookings.
How the Google Star Ratings System Works
Google first introduced a star ratings system (known as “seller ratings“) back in 2010. This feature made it easier for people to identify highly-rated merchants when searching on Google.com.
Seller ratings were originally intended to be used by Google Adwords and Google Shopping to accompany paid advertisements.
However, Google soon extended its use of star ratings to organic search results as well. For this, Google uses something known as rich snippets. Rich snippets are a form of structured data that makes it easy for Google to extract relevant information from a webpage and display it as a “sneak preview” in Google search results.
For example, if you use a review widget to embed reviews on your website, Google is able to read that structured data and extract important information, like the review rating, user name and their comment, and display it within an organic search listing. The intention is to help searchers find exactly what they are looking for on Google with minimal effort.
