TLDR:
- Local Guide Google reviews stay at the top of a listing longer than reviews from non-Local Guides, making it beneficial to encourage customers to join the Local Guides program before leaving a review.
- Reviews by users with a profile picture also stayed at the top longer, so businesses should encourage customers to upload a profile picture to their account.
- There was no correlation between reviews staying at the top and the number of reviews a user has left for other businesses or the number of photos they have uploaded. Encouraging these behaviors is unnecessary.
What Are Local Guide Google Reviews?
Google Local Guide reviews are reviews posted by members of Google’s Local Guides program on Google Maps. Local Guides are a community of people who write reviews, share photos, answer questions, add or edit places, and check facts on Google Maps. Anyone can sign up to be a Local Guide through their Google account, as long as it’s offered in their country of residence. When someone registered in the program leaves a review, Google displays the “Local Guide” designation under their name.
What Does “Local Guide” Mean for Google Reviews?
On a Google review, a Local Guide badge indicates that a reviewer participates in the Google Local Guides program, but it does not mean the review is more trustworthy.
Being a Local Guide on a Google Review doesn’t mean the review is genuine or unbiased. Reviews from employees and competitors are prohibited, as are incentivized and fake reviews, but any of these types of reviews could still be written by someone with the badge.
In other words, being a Local Guide doesn’t make someone an expert or prove their review should carry more weight. Sometimes, a reviewer earns a badge simply by contributing extensively to Google Maps, but they can still leave reviews that violate Google review policy. The badge itself doesn’t tell us about the quality or credibility of the review.
That being said, many businesses still want to know whether Google prioritizes Local Guide reviews. We wanted to test that question, but we didn’t stop there: we explored what other characteristics might explain why one review stays near the top of a listing longer than another.
Our questions were:
- Local Guides: Do reviews left by local guides stay at the top longer?
- Reviewer profile pictures: Does a review with a profile picture stay at the top longer?
- Review Volume: Do reviews by people who also review other businesses stay at the top longer?
- Photo Volume: Do reviews by people who leave photos on other businesses stay at the top longer?
Do Local Guide Reviews Get More Visibility?
We hypothesized that Local Guide reviews would stay at the top of a listing longer than reviews from those who were not Local Guides. In essence, does Google place Local Guides in a higher category than non-Local Guides?
This was quite surprising to us, but the image below shows that Local Guide reviews did, in fact, stay in the top 10 longer than non-Local Guide reviews.
Because Local Guide reviews stayed in the top 10 longer, encouraging customers to join the Local Guides program is beneficial. It does require customers to complete an extra step, but it is only one click, and it’s free!
Do Local Guides Just Write Longer Reviews?
We have found that longer reviews stay at the top longer. Naturally, we wanted to know whether Local Guide reviews are just longer than those written by non-Local Guides, which would explain why they are featured more often.
However, our data didn’t indicate that Local Guides write longer reviews than non-Local Guides:
Profile Pictures:
The next variable we examined was whether a profile picture on a reviewer’s account had an effect on how long a review stayed at the top of a listing. Some users will include a photo, while some users leave it blank and Google inserts a silhouette.
At first, this was inconclusive. At least it was, until we looked into industries other than lawn care. Once we examined other industries, a trend emerged: reviews by people with a profile picture stayed at the top of a listing longer than those without. In most cases, reviews from users with profile pictures stayed live twice as long.
It seems the more Google knows about an account, the more it can trust it and, therefore, weights the reviews more heavily. Again, this requires customers to complete an extra step, but if they are willing to add a profile picture to their account, it does help reviews stay at the top of a listing longer.
When analyzing review patterns at scale, we often verify listings using unique identifiers, which is why understanding how to find the CID number on Google Maps is helpful when auditing reviews and listing behavior.
Reviewing Other Businesses:
Next, we looked at how many reviews the person has left on other listings. When a user posts a review, it shows how many other reviews they have left underneath their name. We wanted to know whether users who left reviews for lots of other businesses had their reviews stay at the top of a listing longer.
We saw no correlation – the data was all over the map. Google does not appear to keep reviews at the top of a listing longer if the user has left reviews for multiple other businesses.
Leaving Photos:
In addition to leaving reviews, you can also see how many photos a person has left under their name on a review.
We saw the exact same thing here: there is no clear correlation between the number of photos a person has left and how long a review stays in the top 10.
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