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Local Search Marketing for Small Businesses

Review of the WordImpress Google Places Reviews Plugin

by 5 Comments

Google Reviews Widget

First let me start by clarifying that “Google Places” is the common usage to refer to business listings on Google Maps, but the technical label is “Google My Business”. Therefore, I highly recommend you use GMB in all your references to this topic.

This is not a promotion or comparison. If you’re interested in some other options, check out BrightLocal’s ReviewBiz or GetFiveStars, just to name a few.

 

A few weeks ago a fellow WordPress fanatic and I were having a discussion about small business themes. Somewhere in the conversation he had referred me to the team at WordImpress for their Google reviews plugin.

Reviews are hot in Local SEO

Getting them is the hardest part of course, as the service providers (Yelp, Google, YP.com, etc) want them to be generated organically and not solicited.

However, we all know how often people run to leave a review for a business. They’re either pissed off or just the type of person that leaves reviews. If we as business owners are to spread the good word, we need to make it easy.

This is why I was very excited to find a plugin that shows off our preferred review locations on our WordPress websites.

You can’t leave a review on these sites from your site

There’s just no write APIs (connections to the review site to write to remotely). This is sad. However, I have respect for the review service providers as everyone has their business model.

What this plugin does help with, is linking directly to your business listing on Google. That does make it fairly easy to get reviews more organically for previous and existing customers on your site, or when you direct them there.

The same goes for each individual review plugin/widget for Yelp and YP.com. You can also get all 3 as a Business Reviews Bundle.

Plus it looks good.

Local search community scrutiny

So, with all this in mind, I went to the ultra white-hat (rule followers) SEO communities I’m in and asked around if anyone was familiar. Turns out Mike Blumenthal had given a write up last year when he discovered it. You can read the back and forth over there, but I’ll sum it up for you here.

The primary concerns were:

  1. Does it violate ToS?
  2. Does it utilize schema.org best practices?

No, and Yes.

Since it utilizes an API key, the review sites do not identify the text on your site as duplicate content and therefore does not trigger filtering.

There was once schema.org markup, but it has been removed.

From the horse’s mouth

Fortunately Matt Cromwell from WordImpress had reached out to me to inquire as to whether I had any questions about the plugin or affiliate program.

We had an email conversation that ironed out the details and cleared up any confusion. He has given me permission to share it with you here:

Me:

Hey Matt,

I asked some folks in the local search community and there’s a question of whether the WordImpress plugins violate ToS or schema best practices.
Can you verify that’s not true? Perhaps with a specific reference? I’d greatly appreciate and speak on the plugin’s behalf (it looks great!)
Matt:
Hmmm… which ToS do you mean specifically? You mean regarding collecting information? We definitely do not collect any user information. We don’t even collect YOUR information.
Our HTML markup is standard html5, but I’ll review it again for schema specific to business reviews. But can you elaborate on your ToS question?
Me:

I may have mis-spoken Matt, my apologies. I just read the blog post he referenced from last August: http://blumenthals.com/blog/2014/08/04/a-plug-in-for-adding-google-reviews-to-your-wordpress-blog/

I’m not as advanced at schema, so I can’t say exactly. Everyone I go to for schema guidance references David Deering’s work.
In regards to your first email’s question, I’ll keep you in mind for any questions or facts on your plugins. Thanks!
Matt:
Hi Tony,
I see, thanks for the clarification. Devin Walker (author of Google Places Reviews) was in communication with the author of that post when it was being written. In the end, that article and further research led Devin to strip the original schema markup that the plugin did have. It seemed that every “SEO Expert” he talked to said something different about what the schema markup should be, and Google never has come down definitively about what it should be either. So plain HTML5 markup seemed the best.
Secondly, these are the Places API Terms of Service: https://developers.google.com/places/policies#web_applications and we comply with all of this. It further points to the Maps API about caching content (https://developers.google.com/maps/terms#section_10_1_3), which says you cannot cache content for longer than 30 days. With our plugin you can only cache results for up to 1 week. So we’re also in compliance with that.
With all that said, naturally we want Google Places to be the WordPress plugin of choice for professionals like yourself. So if you do find that you wish the plugin did something or was optimized in a different way, just let me know. We’re always open to informed and professional feedback.
Me:
Thanks for the thorough response Matt and hope I didn’t stir the pot too much.

The next thing I have to look into is whether it violates Yelp’s strict brand guidelines: http://www.yelp.com/brand
For a wish list, I’m assuming there’s no write API to leave a review from the plugin? A constant issue/want in the “SEO Expert” community is to write reviews (Google in particular) more easily. There’s been some ways to link right to the review popup on the places page, but the interface is different from desktop/mobile (apologies for lack of proper dev terms) (funny how Google, who claims to be enforcing mobile, has a different experience between desktop/mobile).
Matt:
Hi Tony,

Yes, our Yelp plugin also conforms to YELP ToS. Regarding the branding, you can see the widget live here: http://yelpwidgetpro.wordimpress.com/widgets/ That little yelp icon under the business name is the “On White Background” logo.
Currently the Google Places plugin doesn’t have a way to submit reviews. I’m not positive the API even supports that, I’ll have to look into that a bit.

Comments

  2. Matt Cromwell says

    Thanks for this review Tony. It is an interesting and on-going conversation regarding schema and local SEO. We’re very open to input from users. We have 1,000’s of users of Google Places Reviews already and get very good feedback from our users overall, but we’re always looking for ways to improve it and make it more effective.

    Reply

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