This article looks at the best integration methods for displaying organic stars.
Our 'On-Page Reviews' Integration (Full Integration) and our Reviews API (Customised Integration) are the only integration methods that aid the generation of Google Stars or provide Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) benefits. They offer the opportunity to include additional mark-up around the reviews which Google can interpret to generate a 'rich snippet' which can include stars for associating with organic or natural search engine results.
With On-Page Integration, Feefo has included all the necessary mark-up so there is nothing to add. To achieve the same benefit with the Reviews API, structured data needs to be added to mark-up the content so that Google has a greater understanding of its context thereby giving more accurate search results which in turn gives a broader distribution of the content to users. Marking-up content properties can make it eligible for inclusion in ‘rich cards’ and ‘rich snippets’ which for some content types, allows users to engage directly with your content from the search results.
As it stands now only Product mark-up and particularly 'AggregateRating' can achieve Gold star ratings in search engine results pages. Take a look at our 'How Do I Get Organic Stars?' article for our recommendations on schema mark-up.
Your website will need to be fully indexed by Google before the organic stars appear and then the stars are generated by the rich snippets. Do keep in mind that it is totally at the discretion of Google whether to show the stars. For the best chance of success, it is of paramount importance that all mark-up is tested for correctness using Google’s Rich Results Test Tool. This can be found at https://search.google.com/test/rich-results
Even if the mark-up does pass the structured data tester successfully, the page may still not be eligible for stars if some of the parameters are missing. For more mark-up advice from Google, see https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/intro-structured-data or check out our article for possible issues here.