Promote your local businesses reviews with schema.org markup

Friday, August 12, 2016

Since the launch of
critic reviews
last year, we have been focused on supporting more types of reviews, like restaurant reviews,
cafes, or any other type of a local business. Recently we’ve
announced
the availability of critic reviews for local businesses. By incorporating structured data to their
sites, publishers can promote their content on
local Knowledge Graph cards
and users can enjoy a range of reviews and opinions.

Critic reviews are available across mobile, tablet and desktop, allowing publishers to increase
the visibility of their reviews and expose their reviews to new audiences, whenever a local
Knowledge Graph card is surfaced. English reviews for businesses in the US are already supported
and we’ll very soon support many other languages and countries.

Publishers with critic reviews for local entities can get up and running by selecting snippets of
reviews from their sites and annotating them and the associated business with schema.org markup.
This process, detailed in our
critic reviews markup instructions,
allows publishers to communicate to Google which snippet they prefer, what URL is associated with
the review and other metadata about the local business that allows us to ensure that we’re showing
the right review for the right entity.

Google can understand a variety of markup formats, including the JSON-LD data format, which makes
it easier than ever to incorporate structured data about reviews into webpages! Publishers can get
started
review structured data with our
documentation. And as always, if you have any questions, please visit our
webmaster forums.

Posted by Jaeho Kang, Software Engineer