Putting quoted reviews into Google search results

[Dr Mike Oxgreen]

Mrs Oxgreen is a Latin tutor, working online. She gets the vast majority of her clients through her web site, which performs phenomenally well, particularly for the search term “Latin tutor” for which she is top result with her business highlighted in the right-hand side bar.

Her main competitor performs similarly well for the search term “online Latin tutor”, being top result with a side bar.

The difference is that the competitor, in common with many businesses, has a few positive reviews that are quoted under “Reviews” in the right-hand side bar. Mrs Oxgreen has more Google reviews than her competitor (18 versus 5), and would like to do the same for some of her many positive reviews - but for Mrs Oxgreen’s side bar there are no quoted reviews.

So, the question is:

How do you get those quoted reviews on your business’s side bar?

Here is a redacted screenshot from her competitor’s search results:






And here is Mrs Oxgreen’s side bar. As you can see there are no reviews quoted in that section:

Edited by Dr Mike Oxgreen on Thursday 9th February 09:27

[Dr Mike Oxgreen]

By the way, I have no idea what’s going on with the red shape on the map, either.

Mrs Oxgreen hasn’t mentioned that, but the shape bears no relevance to her business, which is based entirely in the U.K. (although some of her clients are abroad.)

If anyone can cast any light on that as well it would be a bonus.

Thanks!

Edited to add: Editing the business profile, and under “Location”, if you add one or more “Service Areas”, this is what drives the map, it seems. We’ve now got it centred on our home town, which is better. It seems to be a glitch in the “United Kingdom” service area, which includes a point roughly on Cyprus. By selecting “Great Britain” we can get it centred on the British Isles, albeit with the incorrect polygon still visible and disappearing off the edge towards Cyprus.

Further edit: By setting her Service Area to England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland we’ve managed to get the map centred on the British Isles and the polygon now encircles the U.K. as well. Yay!

Edited by Dr Mike Oxgreen on Thursday 9th February 18:03

[FlyingPanda]

Is that perhaps a function of the fact that there are more reviews, so Google can’t show excerpts as there isn’t space? Presumably as soon as you click the ‘reviews’ link you then see the same style of excerpts?

EDIT - scrub that thought, I have just found one with 180+ reviews and they’re still showing the excerpts.

Edited by FlyingPanda on Thursday 9th February 10:03

[outnumbered]

Does your wife use Google Ads to promote her business ? If not maybe that's the difference.

[Lynchie999]

it's also more of a case of Google sometimes shows results differently for different people... the quotes might show for some people and not others...

[Dr Mike Oxgreen]

Mrs Oxgreen doesn’t use Google Ads, and we don’t know about her competitor. I guess it could be related to that, but I thought that was more to do with placement rather than the content of the search result.

And as far as we can see the presence or absence of the quoted reviews is consistent across different users, whether logged in to Google or not, and across different browsers and devices. I’m pretty sure it’s something to do with her web site, or something to do with Google’s data about her business.

[P4ulB]

Dr Mike Oxgreen said:

By the way, I have no idea what’s going on with the red shape on the map, either.

Mrs Oxgreen hasn’t mentioned that, but the shape bears no relevance to her business, which is based entirely in the U.K. (although some of her clients are abroad.)

If anyone can cast any light on that as well it would be a bonus.

Thanks!]

The red shape appears when a physical address has not been specified in the Google My Business listing, but rather areas covered have been added instead. Hence, it draws a line around the specified areas.

A physical address would result in a pin locator on the map.

[Dr Mike Oxgreen]

P4ulB said:

The red shape appears when a physical address has not been specified in the Google My Business listing, but rather areas covered have been added instead. Hence, it draws a line around the specified areas.

A physical address would result in a pin locator on the map.

Yes - we figured that out. Her Service Area was set to “United Kingdom”, but it appears there’s a glitch in the points defining that area so it appears to include Cyprus. Setting it to “England”, “Wales”, “Scotland” and “Northern Ireland” solves the problem.

We don’t want to give our physical address. It’s irrelevant anyway - she works entirely online so Google punters don’t need to know where we live.