Rewrite the Stars: Why Reviews Deserve a Bigger Seat in Your Marketing Strategy

It’s time to stop simply chasing review stars and start rewriting what they mean.

One of the reasons I love working in local SEO is that it brings us closer to the people behind the search results — the people behind the clicks. In so much of digital marketing, it’s easy to fall into the trap of viewing users as numbers: clicks, sessions, conversions. Less human, more binary.

Yet local SEO sits at the intersection of digital visibility and physical experience. It allows us to see something richer: the experiences people have, the stories they tell, and the ways businesses shape their everyday lives.

This is the first article in a two-part series, in which I’ll discuss the culture, context, and customer experience behind reviews. Part two covers the future role of reviews in creating trust signals for people and AI engines.

Why Reviews Are More Than a Ranking Signal

While reviews do serve as important signals for algorithms, more importantly, they’re real human voices, sharing moments of delight, frustration, loyalty, and trust, amplified through words, images, and video.

Real stories from real people, shaping how others perceive and choose businesses. That’s why reviews have become one of my favourite aspects of local strategy and why I believe they deserve far more attention, consideration, and leverage than they often receive.

Consider this: Every star tells a story. Behind every online review is a real person, a real experience, and a choice: to share what mattered to them.

For many of us, this is where local search begins. A potential customer googles a nearby store or service. They glance at the star rating, an initial indicator of trust, but often they want more. So it’s the review content they dive into.

The stories. The small moments. The aesthetic and atmosphere they experienced. The warm welcome they were given. The satisfaction of finding exactly what they needed. The delight of discovering a hidden gem. The names of helpful staff. The frustrations or praise that reveal what it was really like to walk through the door.

Reviews reveal the moments that matter.

And they are powerful. They serve as a goldmine of insights, building a picture for search engines, for generative engines, for customers, and for businesses to capture and leverage.

What’s Holding Brands Back from Review Success?

Too often, reviews are treated as a numbers game, a tick-box exercise. But when we see them for what they really are — signals of trust, loyalty, and learning — they can transform how brands connect with customers and with their own teams. They deserve a bigger seat at the strategy table.

It’s easy to agree that reviews matter, but far harder to build a culture and get buy-in for a strategy that truly harnesses them. In my experience, there are a few common patterns that tend to hold businesses back.

Review Pain Points

1. Reviews are undervalued
   

   I’ll say it again: Too many brands focus purely on star ratings and/or review volumes, ignoring the richness of review content, or these brands fail to connect review strategy with wider business goals.

2. Reviews are mismanaged
   

   Without clear ownership or a structured process, reviews often fall through the cracks. Momentum is short-lived, responses are inconsistent, insights go unanalyzed, and opportunities to strengthen trust or improve experiences are missed.

3. Reviews aren’t measured meaningfully
   

   Focusing only on star ratings or review counts overlooks the deeper value reviews can bring: keyword signals, sentiment trends, and actionable insights.

4. Review insights aren’t actioned
   

   Even when reviews highlight clear opportunities for improvement, many brands lack the processes to turn feedback into action.

5. Reviews are disconnected from the people who drive them

   Frontline staff are the people delivering real customer experiences. They are rarely involved in review strategy, yet they have the greatest ability to influence it.

Let’s stick with that last point for a moment, because it’s a theme I see time and time again, and one I can easily get on my soapbox about! Not just from my experience as a local SEO expert, but also from my previous career on the frontline of retail management.

Your Store Teams Are Your Most Powerful Review Engine

The best reviews don’t come from clever marketing campaigns; they come from great customer experiences. And those experiences are created every day by the people on the ground.

Yet too often, store teams aren’t equipped or empowered to play an active role in generating reviews. In my experience, when businesses bring these teams into the process — with simple tools, clear context and purpose, and genuine recognition — they lay the foundation for a more authentic and sustainable review culture. And that’s where real momentum starts to build.

As Miriam Ellis, a true local SEO muse, often points out, local business reputation isn’t built in isolation. In a Moz article, How to Improve Google Business Reputation, she emphasizes that real-world community interactions and responsive local teams are what create meaningful, trusted reviews. I couldn’t agree more. It’s a reminder that encouraging rich feedback isn’t just a marketing strategy; it’s a community strategy, rooted in human connection.

Make Reviews a Shared Mission, Not a Solo Task

It’s all well and good targeting staff to ask for and earn new reviews, but if they don’t understand why, it can feel like a chore. The difference comes when brands:

• Explain how reviews help their store, their team, and the wider brand

• Make review culture part of everyday operations, not a box to tick

• Recognize and reward staff for review success and customer compliments

I often think back to the pre-online review days, when physical feedback forms were available in stores, restaurants, and hotels. Staff were actively encouraged to ask happy customers to share a few words about their experience.

In my former retail management career, I remember choosing the type of customers to talk to about leaving feedback wisely and then feeling proud of receiving one of those cards from head office (where customers sometimes mailed them). Customers recognized my friendly service, issue resolution skills, or product knowledge, and we’d proudly display this feedback both in the staffroom and on the shopfloor.

The same mindset applies today; it’s just the medium that’s changed. Having something tangible to support the review conversation really helps. Here are a few simple ways I’ve seen work:

• Review request cards staff can hand to customers and have readily available at pay or information points

• QR codes at tills, on receipts, or on printed materials

• Smart NFC tiles that customers can tap with their phones to leave a review

And, of course, it all starts with delivering great customer experiences.

That might sound obvious, but it’s amazing how often you can avoid negative reviews simply by acting on previous feedback, improving operations, or giving staff the right training and support.

If you want your staff to be people-people, you need to have a people-first culture as a business. Empowered teams create better experiences, and that’s what earns the reviews you want.

From Insight to Action: The Review Success Cycle

Local SEOs have long recognized the power of reviews in influencing visibility in the local pack. Uberall talks about key local SEO ranking factors and highlights just how central review signals have become, drawing on insights from what many consider an industry bible: Whitespark’s well-respected Local Ranking Factors report.

To make review generation a sustainable part of local marketing, having a clear, repeatable framework can really help — one that supports ongoing improvement and builds review culture over time. That’s why at Croud, I often use a simple Review Success Cycle to bring this concept to life when helping brands shape their local and review strategies. It’s a useful way to move teams beyond reactive management and one-off projects and toward an ongoing loop of earning, learning, and improving.

We can break this down.

Review Strategy

Every strong review cycle starts with a clear strategy. You give the process focus by defining what you want to achieve, whether it’s improved star ratings, richer review content, stronger local visibility, or better conversion. It also ensures that teams at all levels understand why reviews matter and how they contribute to wider brand and business goals.

The strategy typically focuses on three core areas, which also form key parts of the Review Success Cycle.

Review Acquisition

This is where the cycle comes to life in stores. Empowered staff, in-the-moment prompts, and simple tools help encourage consistent, genuine reviews. The goal isn’t just volume; it’s building a steady stream of authentic, timely feedback that reflects real customer experiences.

In particular, two signals stand out as increasingly critical: recency and frequency. While traditionally, review strategy has focused heavily on volume and star ratings, there’s growing evidence that when your reviews are written can be just as important as how many you have. Businesses that earn a steady flow of fresh reviews often see improved rankings and greater user trust. Google even marks newer reviews with a “New” tag, offering added visibility and signalling relevance to potential customers.

Supporting this theory, a 2023 case study by Sterling Sky found that businesses with more recent reviews tended to see improved local rankings compared to competitors with similar ratings but older review activity. This was more recently reinforced by a Whitespark study, showing that consistent review activity (rather than sudden bursts) can improve visibility and trust, especially in competitive categories.

In other words, a steady stream of fresh, high-quality reviews may now carry more weight than a backlog of older feedback. All of this reinforces why review collection shouldn’t be treated as a one-time campaign, but as a continual part of day-to-day operations.

Review Quality

The quality of reviews has a direct impact on customer perception and search performance. Reviews that mention products, staff, experience, location, and include imagery help both customers and algorithms understand the brand better, influencing rankings, trust signals, click behaviour, and even LLM training data.

Review Responses

Timely, thoughtful responses show both customers and search engines that the business is engaged and, critically, that it cares. This builds trust, helps consumers recover from less positive experiences, and strengthens local reputation.

Well-managed responses can help drive conversion and improve click-through rates, especially from Google Business Profiles and local search results. Increasingly, AI systems may also begin to factor in review replies as part of how they evaluate and describe a business, adding another layer of visibility and credibility that feeds into the success cycle.

Driving Local Visibility, CTR, and Conversion

As reviews improve in volume, quality, and recency, and as engagement grows through responses, the impact is felt in local search visibility. Higher placement in local packs, richer profile displays, stronger brand trust — all of this drives higher click-through rates and conversions. Positive reviews can also influence paid ad performance (especially for location extensions) and feed into brand signals used by LLMs and generative search outputs.

A word of caution: In local SEO, quick wins rarely win for long. Buying reviews or gaming the system are sadly widely used tactics, but the risk is that they can and often do tank your visibility and credibility. Search engines and savvy customers reward consistency, relevance, and honesty. Trust takes time. Play the long game: Genuine reviews, earned over time, keep your rankings (and reputation) strong.

Insights and Operational Improvements

Reviews are an ongoing (and free) source of customer insight. Regularly analyzing trends helps identify service gaps, training opportunities, and experience enhancements. Acting on this insight closes the loop, improving experiences, earning better reviews, and feeding the cycle. Failing to leverage these insights is a huge missed opportunity, but it’s surprisingly common.

All of the above hopefully demonstrate why review strategy shouldn’t be treated as a one-off campaign. It needs to be embedded for the long term, woven through both marketing and operations to drive lasting value and keep the success cycle going.

Case Study: How a Proactive Review Strategy Moves the Needle

We partnered with one of our global office space clients, where there had previously been little focus on reviews, to trial a more proactive, staff-driven Google review strategy across a cohort of 124 locations in the US.

We began by benchmarking current review volume, average star ratings, and general sentiment over the six weeks leading up to the test. We then created review QR codes for each location to display and produced clear guidance on review targeting (with the goal being a steady stream of high-quality reviews over time).

We also created a bespoke, easy-to-follow Google Reviews Guide for staff, covering:

• Why customer reviews are important, with key statistics

• What a great review looks like, with strong examples

• How store teams can help, when to ask, what customers can write about, and prompts to encourage photos
  What not to do, including a direct link to Google’s guidelines

• How to handle negative or erroneous reviews

• Response policy, as responses were handled centrally

Over six weeks, the test cohort earned an additional 907 reviews, improved their average star rating from 3.37 to 4.74, and saw:

• 144% increase in GBP impressions

• 151% increase in GBP clicks to the website

• 9.5% increase in click-through rate

To further validate the test, we also ran the same tracking against a second cohort of 124 locations that were not given access to any of the created resources or guidance, and were not told about the test. After six weeks, this control cohort earned significantly fewer new reviews, their average star rating declined slightly, and most notably, GBP impressions, clicks, and CTR all decreased.

This clearly demonstrated to the client just how powerful this approach to reviews can be when implemented well.

Uberall also helps global brands like Barcelo and Crate & Barrel transform their review strategies by leaning into smart review management tools, local enablement, and long-term review culture. As a result, they achieved stronger ratings, better visibility, and greater customer trust.

What the Stars Are Really Saying

It’s clear that reviews aren’t just an SEO lever; they’re a mirror of how customers experience your brand. They capture the moments that matter: the helpfulness of a staff member, the quality of service, the feeling a store leaves behind. They tell important stories we’d be foolish to ignore.

It’s time to stop aiming for five stars and instead aim for five-star stories worth telling.

When businesses stop simply chasing stars and start listening to what those stars reflect, they unlock something far more powerful than rankings: trust, loyalty, and the kind of insight that drives real-world improvement.

It’s exactly these trust signals that I’ll be exploring in my second article: From Trust Signals to AI Signals: the Future Role of Reviews.