Star Ratings in Google Search Results

Our widgets can get your star rating to show up right in Google’s search results. Search results with stars like these are called rich snippets. They stand out in the list of results, so they usually bring you more clicks. The widget adds the code to your page on its own, as long as the switch for Google stars is on for that widget. If you create a widget on the Premium or Professional plan, it’s already on. For widgets you created on the Standard plan, you need to turn it on once yourself.

What you need

• A Premium or Professional plan. On the Standard plan, the switch for Google stars is greyed out.
• A widget that supports it. These widgets support the stars: Review score badge, 2 in 1 badge, Mini review score widget and Carousel widget. The Review forest widget and the tree counter widgets don’t have this switch.

How to turn on Google stars

1. In the menu on the left, open Website widgets and switch to the Your widgets tab. Or go straight to app.reviewforest.org/website-widgets/installed.

2. In the widget’s row, click the gear icon in the Actions column. When you hover over it, “Edit” appears.

3. Click Next at the bottom until you reach the Widget behavior step.

4. Turn on Star rating in Google Search.

5. Click Update widget.

The switch only applies to this one widget. Repeat the steps for every widget where it’s still off. You don’t need to touch the embed code on your website. The change takes effect the next time your page loads.

After upgrading to Premium or Professional

On widgets you created or edited on the Standard plan, the switch is off. So the stars won’t show up on their own after the upgrade. Turn them on for each of those widgets as described above. You don’t need to recreate any widget or swap the code on your website.

Which page to place the widget on

• On subpages. On the homepage directly under your domain (for example www.your-business.com/), the widget doesn’t add the code for the stars. Your visitors still see the widget there as usual. On subpages like www.your-business.com/reviews, it does add the code. Pages that are about your reviews work best.
• One widget per page is enough. Each widget with the switch turned on adds its own code. If you show several widgets on the same page, you only need to turn on the stars for one of them.

Check that it works

Note

Whether the stars show up in search results is up to Google alone. We have no direct influence on that, so we can’t guarantee it.

With Google’s Rich Results Test you can see whether Google picks up the code on your page. Enter the address of the subpage the widget runs on. If everything is in order, you’ll find a review snippet in the structured data section.

How fast the stars appear depends on how often Google crawls your website. This usually takes a few days. If you have a Google Search Console account for your website, you can speed things up: enter the subpage’s address in the search bar at the top, confirm it, and then click “Request indexing”.

Google Search Console also shows you whether your rich snippet is set up correctly. In the menu on the left, go to the “Enhancements” category and open “Review snippets”. There you’ll see errors, warnings and valid pages.

For more background, read our blog post Add Star Ratings in Google Organic Search Results.