Review and Service Attributes: Do they affect how long a review stays at the top of a listing?
Continuing our case study of reviews, we next analyzed the attributes of Google reviews. Google Rating Attributes is a feature that allows consumers to leave a “critical” or “positive” thought about the business or service with their star rating simply by clicking on their choice.
When a user clicks on these rating attributes, they appear under your rating (see screenshots below).
Rating Attributes:
We followed ratings in four industries (lawn care, jeweler, marketing company, and a handyman) over a period of four months to a year. We started talking about this case study in this article on review diversity. From this case study, we found that adding these review attributes doesn’t affect how long the review stays at the top of a listing. In fact, in our study, we found that reviews without these attributes actually stayed at the top for nearly 40 days longer. Of course, this could also be related to other factors such as the length of the review.
Service Attributes:
Similarly, Google also has service attributes. Full disclosure, we’re not sure if google has a term for it. In any case, there are attributes that you can click on some Industry sectors; We see them frequently in the home service industry. The user has the option to click on the service they received.
Unfortunately, the company cannot control which services are shown as they are based on what you choose for your business categories in the Google Business Profile. So flea and mite extermination can show up for a pest control company that doesn’t even offer this service. As with review attributes, we found no impact on how long a review stays at the top of a listing. Again, we noticed that the reviews without the attribute “service” actually stayed at the top of the list longer than the ones that had them.
TL;DR:
In our case study, review attributes and service attributes do not appear to affect how long a review stays at the top of a listing. So this is nothing to worry about or encourage your customers to click on.
