The Facts About Hotel Review Scores and Rankings on Google

A majority of travelers begin their planning on Google. And what do they find in their Google search? Your hotel’s review scores, which are powered by TrustYou. Understanding what impacts these scores and your hotel’s local search rankings is crucial for hotels interested in improving their Google presence. Read on for facts about hotel review scores and rankings on Google, as well as tips on how you can influence them.

There is much chatter these days about TrustYou data on Google and what really drives improvements in the TrustScore, review summaries and local search rankings for hotels on Google.
In an effort to increase transparency, let’s take a look at the facts:

1. TrustYou provides hotel review scores (TrustScores) and review summaries for more than 300,000 hotels on Google. This is visible on Google when clicking the question mark next to the hotel’s review summary. These review scores and summaries are calculated based on an analysis of quantity, quality and recency of reviews across the web as well as from the survey platform, TrustYou Stars. TrustScores and review summaries are also seen on hundreds of sites like KAYAK, Trivago, Hotels.com, Skyscanner, Wego, and more.

2. Earlier this year, TrustYou launched TrustYou Stars, a first-of-its-kind survey solution that allows hotels to collect reviews that influence the TrustScore. This solution also allows guests to push their reviews to Google as a Google review that is shown on Google below the review summary.

Influence
Hotels that want to make use of all reviews collected from guest satisfaction surveys to influence TrustScores and review summaries can benefit from using TrustYou Stars. With TrustYou Stars, 100% of the surveys collected impact a hotel’s TrustScore and review summary, and typically about 10% of guests will also push their review to Google as a Google review, impacting the TrustScore as well as the full text Google reviews that are shown on Google below the review summary. Clients using TrustYou Stars see 8% higher review scores compared to reviews from other sources, and on average about 50% of all reviews ever posted about a hotel come from TrustYou Stars when using this product.

Scope
Because reviews from TrustYou Stars are analyzed and integrated within a hotel’s TrustScore and review summary, they influence TrustYou’s entire review eco-system (Google, KAYAK, Trivago, Wego, etc.) which reaches hundreds of millions of travelers a month.

Website Optimization
Hotels have the opportunity to use TrustScores, review summaries and full text reviews from TrustYou Stars to improve their own websites as well. TrustScores and review summaries can be annotated as rich snippets to promote your hotel on Google and encourage travelers to book. TrustYou Stars reviews can also be incorporated onto a hotel’s own website for SEO benefits and to encourage more direct bookings.

Search Rankings
To understand how this all impacts a hotel’s rankings on Local Search and Maps, let’s look at a recent Google blog post that explains the three key factors that influence rankings on Local Search and Maps. Google states that:

“Local results are based primarily on relevance, distance, and prominence.”

The blog post then provides more detail on each of these factors. Relevance is described as how well a hotel’s local listing matches a user’s search criteria. The way to impact a hotel’s relevance is by updating your hotel’s business listing and through review snippets (TrustYou’s review summaries). Google links to a second blog explaining this in more detail:

Google also states the following:

“Google review count and score are also factored into local search ranking—more reviews and positive ratings will improve a business’s local ranking.”

Since TrustYou Stars allows hotels to influence their review count by collecting more reviews on Google, hotels could expect this factored into the local search ranking. We have released a couple of interesting case studies around this topic here and here.

Truly desiring that our partners succeed in ways even beyond reputation, we have also launched All Things Google: A Guide For Hotels, a free eBook dedicated to helping hotels understand the why and how of increasing Google visibility – from hotel ads to the new mobile interface.

ABOUT TRUSTYOU
TrustYou’s Mission is to positively influence travelers’ decisions. Reviews and user-generated content rank #1 in influencing travelers’ hotel selections and industry reputations. Digesting all of these opinions, however, is beyond any one person’s capacity. Each day things become more complicated because millions of new opinions in thousands of formats and dozens of languages enter the fray. TrustYou searches, analyzes and distills hundreds of millions of opinions scattered across this vast, fragmented market.

TrustYou´s products are extensively used by suppliers – hotels, accommodations, restaurants – to provide travelers with better services and enhanced offerings by monitoring, surveying and acting upon all worldwide guest feedback. Travel intermediaries – OTAs, meta-search, destination marketers – use TrustYou’s Meta-Reviews™ to help travelers purchase wisely.

TrustYou’s Meta-Reviews™ are based solely on verified travel reviews. They do not include data from TripAdvisor. For more information, visit www.trustyou.com.