Shopper Approved provides organic schema in the review page code.

The review page code can be found by hovering over the 3 small bars in your top left-hand side of your Shopper Approved platform and selecting the drop-down menu→ Seals and Widgets→ Review Page Widget.
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Embed the review page code into a dedicated "/reviews" page on your site. Title this page “reviews” or “customer reviews.” Avoid using “testimonials” because these normally don’t have a star rating.

Most Shopper Approved customers choose to put the link to this page titled “reviews” or “customer reviews” in the header or footer. It does not have to be very visible if you do not want this page highly advertised on your site; however, the more that customers are going to the page, the more it’s telling Google that this page matters.

The link needs to be on your homepage because it links the data with the reviews page where the schema lives. The key here is linking the data. This tells Google “Hey look at me this page is important, we have reviews,” allowing Google to see your reviews pulling those stars organically into Google. Companies that have a review page but don’t link to it are telling Google that this page is for internal use and doesn’t matter to customers.

Here are some examples of what this page looks like when it is embedded into your site.

A common question we encounter is “Why is it that when I search ‘domain.com reviews’ I get a search, but when I search ‘domain.com’ I don’t?”

The Shopper Approved review page schema is designed to show stars in Google when your site is searched for by “reviews” or “customer reviews.” The title of the page is crawled for by Google and referenced for reviews using our organic schema.  

Another common question is “Can I put this review page code on my home page?” 

Google will never show stars on your homepage. Your homepage is designed to be about your company, and a directory to the rest of your site.

Another question we get is “Can you put the dedicated review page code on more than one page of your site?”

Yes, you can do this, but we don’t recommend doing this on more than five pages of your site. You can put it on pages that are about your site. These pages can be an “about us” page or a “contact us” page, pages that do not change much.  

Finally, we are asked, “Can I put this review page code on my product or category pages?”

No, these reviews are merchant reviews. They are not product reviews. Google sees this as misuse of review page code and you run the risk of having Google bury your pages. 

Shopper Approved is here to showcase your reviews on Google.  We would love to be able to provide the ability to show organic reviews when you search for certain keywords, but that is just not how our code works because we are providing information that Google looks for that is helpful to the user.  The organic stars are shown when your site is searched for domain.com reviews or when you have titled the dedicated reviews page. 

You will notice that when you search your domain reviews in Google other platforms show your reviews such as Yotpo or Trustpilot.  What sets Shopper Approved apart from its competitors is that Shopper Approved gives organic search results to your domain and not ours.  This helps drive more traffic to your site to generate sales.  Shopper Approved likes to remain transparent and organic schema is what we are best at!

If you have implemented an organic schema and the review stars are not showing?

The first question to ask yourself is have you given Google enough time to crawl for your dedicated reviews page?  Generally, a good rule of thumb is 30 days.  Allow 30 days for Google to reference this page in a search.

Does your site have embedded schema combating with our code?  To test this use the Google Structured Data tool.  You run your page URL through this tool and if errors occur you may have other product schema on your page.  You will want to decide whether to use the schema you have or ours.

Some domains can show stars for reviews in search when they are not using Shopper Approved.  They may be using a different third-party aggregate review platform, implement their own native solution, have their own dev team or they may use an app on their site.

You may have a native solution like xcart, they’ll have their own solution to set up product schema on your site.

If everything seems like it’s working but it’s still not showing, sometimes that’s the way it works.  Google controls this 100%, so we don’t have a say in it.  Google is constantly split-testing to see what works and what doesn’t behind the scenes.  A good example is to try searching for something in Bing.  Their searches seem a lot more obscure

As a final note on SEO, if you would like stars to show up in organic search for your products, you will need to ensure that there is no competing product schema on the page. If using Google’s Structured Data testing tool you can see that there are two detected product schemas on the page, then performance will be poor. It is also important to note that while you blend two JSON-LD based schemas into one, this is not allowed with other schema types. If your site’s base schema is Microformat or RDF-a based schema, it will need to be converted to JSON-LD schema.

It is highly recommended to contact the Technical Support Department of Shopper Approved if you are unfamiliar with doing this. It is also important to note that not all carts allow for this.