A 5 Star Review Helps: Just Make Sure It Doesn’t Look Too Good to Be True

A 5 star review may boost your SEO campaign by improving your brand’s credibility and trustworthiness. 

But not always.

There are some significant pros of this type of review and equally major cons of getting too much of this good thing. 

I’ll discuss in this Innocams blog post how to get 5 star ratings and their merits and demerits.

What is a 5 Star Review?

A 5 star review is a rating system. It is a ranking scale where 1 denotes the lowest and 5 the highest. In the context of business, a 5 star rating represents the highest quality and customer satisfaction–often exceeding expectations.

If your product or service gets a 5 star from your customers, it means they have found it more than satisfactory and are likely to recommend it to others.

The Origin & Current Use

Though 5 star ratings are used almost everywhere to express the goodness or badness of almost everything these days, this rating system was first used in travel guides in the early 19th century. 

The Origin of 5 star Reviews

The first recorded use of 5 symbols to rate things appeared in travel guides written by eminent British travel writer Mariana Starke. Starke used 5 exclamation marks (!) to rate objects of interest in her guidebooks in 1820.

After that, celebrity travel writers John Murray and Karl Baedeker used this rating system to classify hotels in their guide books. But they started using stars in place of Starke’s exclamation points. 

This is the origin of 5 star ranking and reviews.

The Current Use

Today, this 5 star rating system is used to represent the quality of movies, books, hotels, hospitals, products, services, websites, user experience and whatnot. This is now a standard method of rating things. 

The Use in Businesses

In the case of businesses in this fiercely competitive digital world, a 5 star review is something companies are ready to give their eyeteeth for. There are reasons for this craving. Here are the most important of them all:

It Boosts SEO Campaign

Search engines, including Google, consider positive reviews of products or services or user experience a serious ranking factor, especially in local search results. 

Search engines consider 5-star ratings valuable and useful to users that may help them make informed and correct purchase decisions. 

So if your product or service or site gets lots of 5 star reviews, chances of its getting a higher SERP position are high. 

It Improves Visibility

If you get a higher SERP ranking, your brand’s visibility is automatically enhanced and potential customers, who are looking for the product or service you sell, will find you easily and may do business with you. 

It Lends Credibility and Reliability

A 5 star review of a product automatically elevates its status and compels other users to take a closer look at it. It is like a vote of confidence from someone who has used it before you. 

And you take it seriously and this seriousness will influence your purchasing decision, meaning you are more likely to buy products that get more stars from customers than other similar products that don’t. 

Thus, 5 star reviews lend credibility to a product or service or website. 

More Click-Through Rates

Consumers are more likely to click based on higher ratings and reviews. A product with 5 star ranking and reviews attract more CTR from organic search results. This CTR may generate qualified leads and possibly more conversions and profits.

Helpful User-Generated Content

5 star reviews are considered valuable user-generated content (UGC), which search engines consider a hallmark of a credible, valuable and authentic site. Thus such reviews act as SEO-boosting UGCs. 

It All Comes Down to More Profits

Thus a 5 star review, in the final analysis, may help you reap more profits by improving your credibility, SERP ranking, CTR and influencing your potential customers’ purchase decisions in your favour.

5 Star Reviews: Best Practices

Since a 5 star review can do you so much good, especially financially, it is natural that you’ll go the extra mile to get some. 

Here are some time-tested guidelines for getting the highest ratings without wearing a black hat.

Offer the Best

Make your product or service or website so good it will naturally attract the highest ratings from your customers or users. Make it the best and the best reviews will automatically come to it without you doing a thing. 

This is the first thing to do. If you don’t offer something really good, all your efforts to get positive reviews will be completely unethical practices.

You can’t get a 5-star if your offering isn’t 5-star worthy.

Let Your Customers Feel Good

Every customer is an individual who cherishes individual attention. I know it is tough to respond to every review, comment or questions, but you must do it. The following guidelines will give you an idea how it can be done.

• Train your team to be sympathetic, equanimous and courteous.
• Instead of using terms like ‘Dear Customer’, use the customer’s name while addressing him.
• Be prompt in your responses to customer queries, comments or reviews.
• Respond to negative reviews with courtesy and maturity. Remember, negative reviews will reveal your weaknesses and give you an opportunity to do better next time.

Ask for Reviews

Identify your loyal customers, people who frequently interact with you. If someone writes a positive comment on your product, gently and courteously request him to write a bigger review.

Some people are of the opinion that you can’t ask for a review at all. But I think this stand is illogical. If you can ask for a backlink, why can’t you ask for a positive review, especially if you are confident that your product is of the highest standard? 

Never, I repeat, never ask for a 5 star review. 

If the customer gives you the highest rank, fine; if he doesn’t, that’s part of life. Understood? 5 star reviews either come naturally, or they don’t come at all. Even a 3 or 4 star review will help your business a lot. 

Make the Review Submission system Easier

If the customer has to surf your entire site to find out the box where he should key in his review, chances are fat they will not take the trouble. No one will click 100 times to write a 200-word feedback.

Make sure your users can find the review submission box easily. Place a link on the homepage and repeat it wherever it comes naturally.

Focus on Your Local Customers

Focus on your local customers. Someone living near you, maybe, visits your brick and mortar at times, is more likely to give you a star-rated review than someone living 5000 miles away and has never seen you.

Over time, you’ll come to personally know quite a few of your store’s habitués. Cherish them. Nurturing them, forge a strong bond with them. 

Satisfied local customers are a key source of 5 star reviews.

Optimise Your GBP

If you want a 5 star review from a customer, keep your Google Business Profile (GBP) info (NAP) accurate, up-to-date and optimised. 

This will help Google to show you in local searches and map packs. Consequently, your local potential customers can find you easily. 

You will be amazed to learn how many people neglect this highly useful and free service Google offers and lose several potential customers and of course, positive reviews from them. 

Keep Your Reputation Intact

Regularly monitor your customers’ reviews–positive or negative–and respond to it promptly. Track what your team members are doing. Remember it takes years to build a reputation and it takes a single unwarranted response to destroy it. 

Always try to do better. Make yourself your biggest rival and go all-out to beat him to it. There’s only one way to get reputation and star-rated reviews and that is to make your product or service worth a 5 star review.

Don’t Offer Incentives

Never offer any incentives, no matter how small or big, with a view to getting star-rated reviews. Your customers will inevitably consider it a manipulative tactic. No one likes to be manipulated, least of all intelligent buyers.

If your staff is good, your customers will automatically praise it without you dangling any bait in front of them. 

Never Try to Buy Reviews

Never ever under any circumstances or lure try to purchase a 5 star review. This is a gross violation of search engines’ review guidelines. 

Since positive reviews are a strong ranking signal, people with products or services that are not worth a pin, are frequently indulging in buying them. A group of unscrupulous companies have also mushroomed that are offering positive reviews for money. 

Just remember one thing, on detection you’ll face bad music played by search engines. Also remember, detection is almost certain. Search engine algorithms these days are pretty efficient in sniffing out a rat if there is one. So be careful. You’d better go without even a single star-rated review than putting your hard-built reputation and credibility in danger by paying for reviews.

Does a 5 Star Review Actually Help?

A 5 star review reveals the credibility, usefulness and excellence of a brand and its product or service. That’s why search engines consider them as a strong ranking factor. 

I’ve already discussed in detail the benefits such positive reviews yield for businesses.

Now I must inform you that too many 5 star reviews may spoil the sport completely. From the perspectives of both search engines and users, too many 5 star reviews is a red flag. Here’s why:

Nothing is Perfect

A 5 star review or rating tells us that something is perfect. Nothing can be better. Many intelligent buyers may find such reviews absurd as they believe nothing can be absolutely perfect in this world. 

They may get sceptical about such ratings and reviews, especially if you only have praises and highest reviews from your customers. No businesses can have only happy customers. There must be some unhappy ones too to make it credible.

Customers Want Balance

Remember, people who visit your pages and read reviews are qualified leads. They are already half through the sales funnel. They’ve almost decided to buy your product. All they need is honest opinions from people who’ve bought and used your product before them. 

They also know nothing is perfect in this world. 

So psychologically they are seeking a balance of good and bad. Only 5 star reviews are likely to make them think you are too good to be true.

Research Downplays 5-Star Overkill

Scientifically-conducted research also supports moderation in online reviews. A recent study by Northwestern University revealed a few interesting facts about online reviews. Here is a gist of what the study found out:

1. Online reviews have a ‘significant’ and ‘quantifiable’ positive impact on purchase decisions.
2. Products with 5 reviews have 270% more purchase likelihood than products without any reviews.
3. Most positive purchase decisions are made when a product has 4 to 4.7 star ratings.
4. Most customers are sceptical about products with a 5 star review and are likely not to buy it.

Search Engine Perspective

From a search engine’s perspective, too many 5 star reviews and ratings are also red flags. Here is a detailed breakdown of it–

• Too many 5 star reviews without supporting product details make search engines jittery as they consider them either fake or incentivised. 
• A complete absence of negative reviews and an overabundance of 5 star reviews are a red flag for search engines as this reveals a lack of balance, which is unnatural.
• Search engines are committed to providing their users with valuable and useful info. A fake or incentivised 5 star review word against this commitment and makes search engines suspicious.
• Search engines may delete such reviews or worse, remove the business with such suspicious reviews from search results completely.

Fake Negative Reviews: How to Counter?

This is a dog-eat-dog digital landscape, my friend. A rival company may flood the product review section on your site with too many 5 star reviews or too many negative reviews so you get the short end of the stick.

If you suspect such an anti-campaign, don’t panic. Remember, search engines are pretty smart. Just monitor

reviews on your site regularly. If you find any suspicious entries, immediately flag it. 

Here are the signs of fake reviews. Look for these signs and always be on your guard:

• Reviews containing foggy generic language without any specific details of products or experience are red flags.
• Be wary of reviews packed with grammatical, spelling and syntactical mistakes. They may be fake.
• Overly positive or suspiciously negative language and theme may mean something is wrong. 
• If the reviewer’s profile has no picture, has a very generic name and no clear history of previous reviews, be careful, it may be a fake review.
• Locked profiles may be useful on social media sites for individual users, but a product reviewer with a locked or private profile is always a suspect.
• A fake review, intended to harm your reputation and promote one of your competitors, may try to focus on the goodness of your rival’s product instead of properly reviewing your product or service. Be wary of such reviews.

Conclusion

A 5 star review from a legitimate reviewer may help a business rank well in search results and with its target customers. By representing your brand’s credibility and usefulness, such reviews may drive more qualified leads your way. 

However, the main downside of 5 star reviews is they look unnatural. Too many of them look downright suspicious. Studies also have shown that people are sceptical about products that have only 5-star ratings. 

So while it is a good idea to have some 5 star ratings for your product, a balance of positive and negative reviews makes more sense to your customers and search engines. The latter can’t stand fake positive reviews and punish the offenders adequately. 

So, the best policy is to offer your customers a great product: This policy always pays in the kind of reviews that can make your brand stand out.

Frequently Asked Questions