Google Adding Review Previews to Local Pack

During a recent local search, one of our digital marketing experts discovered an interesting new feature popping up on listings. It seems that Google has added snippets of business reviews to local pack listings, particularly reviews that include keywords from your search. This doesn’t appear to be a standard feature yet, but one that’s currently in a test phase.

You’ll notice that certain words are bolded in the review, correlating with keywords from the search. The reviews that show up depend directly on what keywords are used in the search query. So, depending on the wording of the search, the reviews that show up for each business will change.

For businesses that don’t have any—or many—reviews, this could become an even bigger disadvantage when competitors have verified reviews showing up directly in the local pack. However, businesses that do have a variety of reviews about their services have an advantage when it comes to standing out because they are more likely to have reviews that match the search term. It also encourages businesses to continue getting reviews, and rewards businesses that already have put in the effort to gain quality reviews.a

An articleby TheSEMPost brings up the potential downside of this feature.

“ The trade off is the fact that it pushes regular organic down further on the page, and pushes additional pack results further down the page when viewing the expanded pack .”

This affects the organic listings on a page, but not the paid ads, which still appear above the local pack results.

Will we be seeing this as a wide-scale feature in Google’s local pack in the near future? It’s too soon to tell. Google hasn’t made any mention of the testing, which means it will likely remain in a beta phase for a while longer.

One thing this does confirm though, is how crucial reviews are for businesses, especially when it comes to showing up locally.