How detailed customer reviews improve the SEO performance of ecommerce sites

Customer reviews impact the SEO of ecommerce sites only under certain conditions. Rater we speak about advanced customer reviews.

Customer reviews located on the product page have been and remain an invaluable source of the ecommerce site SEO performance improvement. Of course, here we speak about 1st-party reviews on the product page. 



Do customer reviews really influence SEO performance?
Customer reviews provide two significant signals for Google. These are high quality content and positive reputation of your site. If we open Google General Guidelines, we can see quite many confirmations of the above said.
Firstly, Google considers a customer review on the product page as a part of the main content.
Secondly, Google takes positive user reviews as a sort of evidence of the site’s positive reputation.
Thirdly, customer reviews can be helpful for assessing the reputation of a store or business. As we can see, General Guidelines recommend their QA to read customer reviews because it’s not only about the number of your customer reviews which matters, it’s also about their  content.
Google Search Guidelines are not the only source of confirmation. However, they fairly reflect the importance of customer reviews. The experience of many weshops and SEO professionals is subjective because the site rank depends on many factors. Of course, we can notice some growth of traffic after the customer review functionality has been enabled.
Well, such cases are real. Reviews can improve the SEO performance of ecommerce sites.
Moreover, customer reviews help turn visitors into buyers. In other words, product reviews influence the buying decision of the site visitors.
However, many site owners face some SEO problems and ignore 1st-party customer reviews on their product pages.

In real life, people don’t like to write review
This theory is pretty good. But if we visit a big part of ecommerce sites to read reviews we won’t see many helpful reviews. Why does this happen? Because people are hard-pressed to leave a review. People visit ecommerce sites to buy and don’t leave their reviews. Finally, many people generally don’t like to write something.
Reviews typically come from the smallest and most vocal group of customers. These customers leave reviews when they have the most positive emotions or the most negative experience. The part of customers are fans. In many cases, they are a small group of customers which does not exceed 1%.
There are some ways to get more reviews on your site.
Many experts recommend to engage customers to get more customers reviews. This approach is a quite complex and long-term solution. Other experts suggest to stimulate customers. For example, to exchange coupons for reviews. Honestly, this way isn’t good because it looks like bribery. While the biggest part of customers prefer not to write reviews,
sending notifications to remind them to leave a review is pretty good practice.
However, the main problem is to get really helpful reviews from customers. Many people will write just something like “It’s a good product” or “I like it”.
Thus, you need to help customers write more qualitative product reviews.

Detailed review forms are one of the ways to get qualitative customers reviews 
How does a standard review form look on the ecommerce site? There are three or four fields in them: user name, title, review text, and email (is optional). So, only fans, extremely angry customers, or pleased people will leave their reviews. Some part of customers will leave them having received a notification which reminds of doing it. Some people will leave something like ‘amazing’, ‘good’, or ‘ love it’. Nevertheless, the biggest part of customers won’t write any review. That’s because white text field doesn’t engage people.
You need to ask relevant questions to engage people.This means the site owner needs to create detailed review forms to ask relevant questions.
Which additional fields does the site owner needs to add to the review form?
The detailed review form includes two content sections. They are the  ‘About customer’ section and the ‘Product review’ one.
The more info about your customers you get, the more trustworthy your site becomes for both your visitors and Google. The section doesn’t collect any personal information. It can be general information about the customer, such as age, gender, city or some specific info, such  as weight, height, and body type.
The ‘Product review” section is the great opportunity to collect a bunch of keywords and answers to queries and to get really useful reviews. Obviously, questions should cover all significant features of the product. Moreover, it would be better to add a few questions about the e-store’s services (for example, its delivery). Customer photos and videos can give additional media content.
Thus, detailed review forms allow customers to write more qualitative reviews.

This is real customer review on Magento 2 webshop (detailed review form was created by Detailed Product Review extension MageWorkshop)

Technical limitations and opportunities
Unfortunately, many ecommerce platforms don’t have a default solution. That is why site owners often have to buy special modules (Magento 2 product reviews extension) to cover their needs. In some cases, they need some help from developers to create custom code solutions.
However, e-store owners can get opportunities on the code’s part.
You can use functions which improve UI, such as filters, search in the reviews, sort of the reviews, etc. Also, you may use voting, store admin response function, most popular positive or negative reviews, detailed 5-star product ratings, etc.
The protection of customer reviews is no less important. Spam-bots and spammers like to open forms. Spam on your page has negative impact on SEO and your customers’ trust. Recaptcha and integrations with anti-spam modules will protect your customer reviews.
In some cases, it may be useful to use review sharing on social networks.
Actually there are many opportunities to create additional functions to engage visitors.

Conclusions
Honestly, it is difficult enough to find ecommerce sites with detailed review forms. Also, customer reviews aren’t a silver bullet. Your sales won’t be immediately boosted.
However, living in a highly competitive era we understand that even small improvements provide benefits.
Customer reviews are a great resource which affects SEO and attracts visitors. The importance of content for SEO  is growing with each passing year. That is why it makes sense to pay attention to the customer reviews. The more detailed your review form is, the more detailed and really useful information it gives. Thus, you can prevail over your competitors.