First Party and Third Party Reviews: Why You Need Both
First, let’s define in simple terms what are a first party and third party reviews:
1st Party Reviews: submitted directly to you by your customers.
3rd Party Reviews: submitted to a 3rd party review site.
First Party Reviews
These type of reviews are not just for eCommerce websites anymore. Local service companies can now have reviews left directly by customers and get them recognized by Google as long as they show signs of being real and comply with guidelines. Mostly:
- Making sure reviews are legitimate and collected with a transparent and established process
- Showing both positive and negative reviews
- Using schema markup when displaying them
Benefits of 1st Party Reviews
- Improve SEO performance
- Increase Conversions of visitors into leads
- Increase traffic by getting more clicks from search results (when star ratings show in results your website stands out)
- Improving based on Insights
How to collect 1st Party reviews
You can go the hard and manual way of coding a form to submit reviews from your website and use a plugin or custom code to display them or you can go the easy and effective way of using Feedb to take care of it all for you 🙂
Using Feedb you can set up the feedback request process to include the option to leave comments and not just ratings. Then, with the website widget, you can easily display all reviews in a page within your site that automatically showcases all reviews with the optimized schema format Google likes.
Third Party Reviews
You are very familiar with these reviews already, what you may not be aware of yet is that the overall star rating and amount of reviews are not the only factors that matter. The age of your reviews, how often you get new ones and how distributed they are among authority sites are also super important aspects of your overall online reputation.
Google calls these “review signals” and they include review quantity, review velocity, review diversity and others. See the 2018 Local Search Ranking Factors by Moz for more info on this.
Benefits of 3rd Party Reviews
- Better search results
- Increased word of mouth business
- Improved branding
- Increased conversion
- Improving based on Insights
How to Attract More 3rd Party Reviews
Showcase your reviews and review site logos wherever you can, your website, your reception area, your work van, business card, uniform… wherever you can!
Train your team so everybody understands the key role reviews play in your business and keep them a part of the regular customer conversation mentioning for example that you take pride in your great online reviews.
Using Feedb makes requesting customer feedback a natural part of your process. It also shows your customers an easy way to post reviews, showing your top review sites to them at the right time, usually right after a transaction takes place and in a very convenient fashion so they are more compelled to take action.