Review & Service Attributes: Do they affect how long a review stays at the top of a listing?
As we continued our case study into reviews, the next item we analyzed was the Google review attributes. Google review attributes are a feature that allows consumers to leave a “critical” or “positive” thought about the business or service with their star-rating by just clicking on their choice.
If a user clicks on these review attributes, they will show up underneath your review (see images below).
Review Attributes:
We continued tracking reviews in four industries (lawn care, jeweler, marketing company, and a handyman) for a time period of four months to one year. We started talking about this case study in this article about review diversity. From this case study, we determined that adding these review attributes does not have an impact on how long the review will stay at the top of a listing. In fact, in our study, we found that reviews without these attributes actually stayed a the top longer by almost 40 days. Of course, that could be related to other factors as well such as the length of the review.
Service Attributes:
Similarly, Google has service attributes as well. Full disclosure, we’re not actually sure if Google has a term for these. In any case, there are attributes you can click on for some industries; we see them a lot in home service industries. The user has the ability to click on the service they received.
The unfortunate thing is that the business cannot control what services show up as they are based on what you choose for your business categories on the Google Business Profile. So, flea and mite extermination may show up for a pest control company that doesn’t even offer this service. As with the review attributes, we did not see any impact on how long a review stayed at the top of a listing. Again, we also noticed that the reviews without the service attribute actually stayed at the top of the listing longer than the ones that had them.
TL;DR:
In our case study, review attributes and service attributes do not seem to have an impact on how long a review stays at the top of a listing. So, this is not something you need to worry about or encourage your customers to click on.
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Thanks for the update and testing as always on top of Googs! Super appreciate. 🙂
I am surprised at these findings.
I was as well! There are a few more coming up that we are publishing in the next few weeks that surprised me too!