Sources of Local Business Reviews

Online Customer Reviews for Local Businesses can be found in dozens of local search engines and directories. Some local search sites will re-use customer reviews from other sites to provide a thorough selection of reviews for users. This diagram, “Sources of Local Business Reviews” highlights the biggest players in local search and the connections between each with regards to online customer reviews.

Sources of Local Business Reviews

This diagram is not intended to cover every source that feeds reviews into local search sites, but to highlight the most prominent players and review contributors in local search.

Local businesses benefit the most by pointing their customers to review sites that have the most pull in the popular local search engines. For example, besides the four most popular local search sites themselves, InsiderPages provides reviews to both Yahoo! Local and Google Maps, as well as MerchantCircle.

Ratings by customers in online reviews can influence local search rankings, but the ratings may be limited to certain sources. For example, Yahoo! Local does not include the ratings of other sources (which include lots of smaller niche review sites), only ratings from Yahoo! users leaving a review at Yahoo! Local. Pointing customers to these primary sources may provide the best impact.

While online customer reviews are not sole determinants of rankings, reviews can make a significant difference very quickly in non-competitive local searches, both in the universal one box results as well as the full local results.

Check back periodically for updates to this diagram, and feel free to contact me with suggestions and updates.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008 at 8:11 am and is filed under Customer Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “Sources of Local Business Reviews”

Max Thunder Says:
July 23rd, 2008 at 9:47 am

Chris - thanks for the diagram! I see that Google reviews don’t populate other directories/review sites. Is that true? It’ll be interesting to see if we start to see Google reviews on other sites. See you at SMX!

Martijn Says:
July 23rd, 2008 at 10:05 am

I think you forgot one of the most prominent ones in the travel sector;
booking.com and hostelworld are ones I see almost always.
I’ll keep an eye out for reviews here in europe. things tend to be a lot different here especially because we dont have yahoo local (only in some countries?), yelp and citysearch ;-)

SMX Local and Mobile Coverage - Ranking Tactics for Local Search | The Expand2Web Blog Says:
July 24th, 2008 at 6:32 pm

[…] Which review sites? Check out this diagram in his blog post: Sources of Local Business Reviews. […]

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