A tidy solution for displaying Google Places reviews on your site (aka Google Business listing reviews)

Hey everyone,

I’m doing a website for a client at the moment who needs his Google Places reviews (aka Google Business listings) displayed on his website. I looked at a few options out there for doing this, however the only solution I found that worked was an outdated jQuery library.

So instead I wrote my own custom script to do this and made a simple to follow screen cast playlist where you can see how I set it up. This could be handy for anyone else out there who has this same requirement.

You can check out the Google Places reviews app I built here as a demo.

If you want to see exactly how this app is set up, just go to my read only link here and check out the custom code in the page settings. Some screen shots of the demo app are below:

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Fantastic work @jasondark

Again!

2 Likes

Hello @jasondark,

Thanks for the good work here, I plan to add these to my new website. I just had a couple of questions for you and perhaps others in the community.

I’ve been researching the whole Schema markup used to add review stars to Googles search results. As far as I can make out we are only allowed to do this using reviews generated on our own websites and not third party review websites. So in this case would using your code to add Google reviews to my website mean that although they are from a third party review website (Google Reviews) they would qualify as being generated on my site and therefore usable in the Schema markup?

Any insights to this would be greatly appreciated, I believe having this would greatly improve CTR which is why I wanted to investigate it further. I also read that you can be punished by Google if you do this wrong so didn’t want to do anything before I talked to people who had experience with it.

Thanks!

Hey Kevin, glad you’re finding this useful!

In my example site I have preloaded a business so that there is always something showing when the page loads. This does come from an external service (being the Google Places API) and is not a “static” part of my site. The reviews, stars and everything else to do with the reviews changes when you select a different business.

For this reason I am not sure how well it would or would not work with something like the Google Structured Data Markup Helper. Maybe someone else in the community has some experience with this?

I agree, being able to show something like this in search results would be great.

I’m not an SEO expert, hopefully someone else in the community reads this and can shed some light!

Hello Jason,

Thanks for taking the time to reply, really appreciate it!

I will try to use just my business and see how I get on.

I’ll post any results here!

Hello Jason,

Thank you for this, absolutely perfect, and just what I was looking for. Quick question however. Would it be possible to limit the reviews to a certain amount, and pull a minimum star amount?

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Hi @jasondark

I was able to utilize your script and use it n my website; however, all the reviews are being posted in English.

Would you know what to do to have them appear in the original language, and why the limit is 5 reviews?

Thank you again!