Many website owners overlook the fact that a large percentage of website visitors take other visitors’ ratings into account when evaluating the quality of content or products sold within a site.
Therefore, allowing visitors to evaluate the content or products on your site is one of the essential measures that increases the rate of audience interaction with your site, as they can leave a rating that contains a summary of their experience with the site content.
In this article, we will discuss four ways to create an integrated ratings system, whether in terms of showing it within the pages, articles, and products of the site or in terms of showing it in the search results page on Google and other search engines.
Steps to create a ratings system on your site
In the following paragraphs, we will learn first about how to display the evaluation box within the content pages of your entire site, and then we will move on secondly to how to create a page that contains the opinions and evaluations of the most important customers within the website, such as creating a “Our Customers’ Opinions” page, which displays the experiences of previous customers with the content of your site, which Boosts new customer confidence.
In the third stage, we will highlight the steps to create and display a ratings system within online stores, specifically on product pages, as visitors prefer to see reviews from previous customers to ensure the quality of the product before making a purchase decision.
In the fourth step, you will learn how to display ratings for your site pages in search results on search engines, which increases the chance that a visitor will enter your site instead of other competing sites.
First: Show the reviews and make them available to visitors within the website pages
The previous image shows an example of a site that allows reviews to be shown to visitors and the ability for new customers or visitors to place their own reviews within the site so that they are visible to new visitors to get a good idea about the site’s content and reliability.
In the following steps, you will learn how to build a ratings system on your site, displaying these ratings and making them available within the various articles and pages of your site.
We will first install the Wp Customer Reviews plugin , which allows us to create ready-made reviews and display them to visitors so that they too can easily rate the content.
First, install and activate the plugin on your WordPress site, after searching for the plugin by typing its name in the search box in the plugins section, and clicking on the install option as indicated in the image. Like any WordPress plugin you install on your site.
After installing and activating the plugin on the site, we will go to the WordPress control panel, then click on the “ Edit Page ” option. Here you can choose any page or article on your site that you would like to add a ratings form to at the end of the content, and you will find at the end of the article or page editing page a form. The settings for evaluations are as follows.
The picture shows the model for setting up ratings within the article or page, which includes four basic elements that must be adjusted as follows to display the ratings system correctly and correctly:
- Enable WP customer reviews for this page : You must choose ( Yes ), which when selected, the reviews form will appear at the end of the article or page it is on.
- Hide review form : Choose (No) from it, in order to allow visitors to publish reviews, so the visitor can see previous reviews and add his own review directly.
- Review format : You choose (Business) if your site offers text or image content, while you choose Product if your site offers products and not just regular content.
- Business Name : You write the name of your site or company, as this name will appear at the beginning of the evaluations form on the site.
Now you can save the page or article settings and visit it in the browser to make sure that the ratings form appears at the end of the page, and the result will be similar to the following image.
We notice in the previous image that the evaluation form form appears in the form of an “evaluation button,” which the visitor clicks on and adds his evaluation below the content. The name of the company or site appears in the form as we entered it in the previous steps, and the number of evaluations also appears, which in our example is still zero , but when any evaluation is placed by visitors, it will be published in the form automatically without your intervention.
Create and publish ready-made assessments within the website pages
In the previous steps, we learned how to adjust the settings for displaying the evaluation system on the site, and now we will work on creating and publishing ready-made evaluations of our own within a number of pages or articles on the site.
Note : Ready-made reviews do not mean that you publish false or unreal reviews; Because this will undermine the site visitors’ trust in you and is considered unethical behavior. Rather, these reviews are previous written or spoken reviews from real customers or visitors, and then you publish them on their behalf as the site manager.
To place these reviews, we will go to the WordPress control panel and then click on the addition tab. After that, we will enter the “ All reviews ” tab. A new page will appear that includes all the reviews published within the pages and articles of the site. On this page there is a button (Add New) , through which it will open. We have a page for adding a new evaluation within the site, as in the image shown below.
After clicking on the (Add a new evaluation) button within the site, the Add Evaluation page will appear, as we mentioned, which contains the following fields:
- Reviewed Post/ Page: In this field you must choose the article or page for which you want this ready-made evaluation to appear at the end of its content. You can click on the field and write the title of the article or landing page and it will appear in front of you.
- Reviewer name: You write the name of the person in whose name the review will be written.
- Email address: Put the email address of the reviewer.
- Website: The link to the reviewer’s website. It is an optional field and can be overridden or added.
- Review title: It is the most important: it is where you write the title of the review and the content of the review that you want to publish to visitors.
- Rating: Choose the number of stars for the rating.
- Admin response to review: You write the response that appears in the name of the site administrator to this ready-made review.
After adding the evaluation, you can preview the article or page to notice that the evaluations appear at the end of its content, where the name of the person who submitted the evaluation, the title of the evaluation, and the site administrator’s response appear exactly as we entered it previously.
Second: How to create a page (our customers’ opinions)
The second way to show customer reviews on the site is by creating the famous “Our Customer Opinions” page, in which a number of reviews are displayed from previous customers who tried the site’s services and published their reviews or sent them to the site owner.
The website owner places these ratings and opinions inside the “Customer Opinions” page. It is similar to adding reviews to a specific article or page, except here we have dedicated a page specifically for customer opinions and ratings.
Creating a customer reviews page is very simple and does not require any programming complexity or previous experience. The following image shows two examples of the “Our Customers Reviews” page.
As you can see in the image, the page displays customer ratings and opinions in an organized manner, so that for each review, the name of the customer who received the review, the text of the review, the number of stars, and the date the review was published appears.
To design this page, we will use a simple and distinctive add-on, the Easy Testimonials add-on , which will help us create our customers’ opinions page in very simple steps and without any programming skills.
First: Install and activate the plugin on your WordPress site
Then, after installing and activating the plugin, you will notice its tab appearing in the WordPress control panel. We will now click on the Add new Testimonial option from the new plugin settings in order to add a new evaluation to be shown on the (Customer Reviews) page.
After clicking on the Add New Evaluation button, the Create a New Evaluation page will appear in front of us, containing five fields for the data to be entered.
- Client Name: You write the name of the client who received the evaluation.
- E-mail Address : Enter the email address of the reviewer, if any.
- position / Web address / Other: You write the job or introductory title of the person submitting the evaluation.
- Location reviewed: We write the main text of the evaluation content, where a positive review can be written about a specific product or service, for example.
- Rating: Sets the number of stars to be shown with a rating from 1 to 5 stars.
You can also add a picture or symbol of the person with the review on the customer reviews page, through the Add Review page itself, where you will find on the left of the page the option ( featured image ), through which you can upload a picture of the user with the review, as shown in the image below.
You can repeat the previous step to add all the reviews that you want to publish within the customer reviews page, and after we finish adding the reviews, we will move to creating a new blank page in order to display the reviews through it.
As you can see in the previous image, we created a new page and wrote a title for it, which is (Our customers’ opinions). Then we click on the Add Components + button and choose from it the Testimonials grid component .
The component will be added to the page and its settings will appear next to it, through which we can control the form and manner in which customer reviews appear on the page, and you can specify the number of reviews you wish to appear on the page.
You can also change the appearance of the page from the Theme option. After clicking on it, you will see a list of many shapes and designs for the reviews, and you can choose from them to show the reviews in the design you want.
After choosing the appropriate settings, we have to save and publish the page, then visit it to check the customization options and ratings that we set in the previous steps. The page will appear similar to the image below.
Creating a ratings system in online stores
In this part, we will address the owners of online stores that rely on Woocommerce to create an online store that displays their own products.
Here we will learn how to set up and customize the evaluation system in online stores and enable customers to use it to express their opinion about the efficiency and quality of products when browsing and purchasing them.
The first way to activate the ratings system within WordPress stores that operate using the Woocommerce add-on to create an online store is by entering the WooCommerce settings and going to the product settings, then activating the option to make reviews available to visitors and customers, as in the following image.
After enabling this option in your Woocommerce settings, head to any of your product pages and you will notice a ratings box appear below each product, and customers will be able to add their own reviews as well.
If One of them violates the rules of ethics and conditions for publishing reviews in your store.
Advanced ratings system within your store
In the previous paragraphs, we learned about the traditional method of activating evaluations within the online store. The resulting evaluation system will be traditional and does not include professional settings, and it does not have many options that help us create a evaluation system that is more responsive to visitors and customers within the store.
To move to an advanced level of placing reviews in your Woocommerce store, we will install the Reviews for Woocommerce add-on, through which we will create an integrated ratings system that provides many options for controlling the appearance of reviews, the way they are displayed to store customers, and other options.
After installing and activating the plugin on your WordPress site, you will notice that the tab for the plugin appears inside the site’s control panel titled (Reviews) .
Enter the add-on’s settings and you will find many tools that the add-on provides you, the most important of which is the ability to send an email to the customer after purchasing the product to ask him to return to the store and post a review of the product he previously purchased, as shown in the figure below.
As we can see from the previous image of the add-on settings page, there is a box in which you can specify the number of days after the customer receives the product to send an email that will then remind him to return to the product page and evaluate the product after he has fully tried it.
After specifying the number of days after which the reminder will be sent to the customer to submit his evaluation, you will find within the same settings page a tab titled (email text) .
As the following image shows you, in this part you can customize the form and text of the reminder message that will be sent to the customer days after ordering the product.
Inside the email message box, you can write the title and text of the message sent to the customer. Note that the red shaded texts are codes that the extension provides you previously within the message text box, which do the following:
- {customer_first_name} A short code that automatically includes the customer’s name, as registered on the site, to appear in the message he receives from the site.
- {order_id} A short code that automatically includes the order number of the customer who ordered the product.
- {site_title} Includes the name of your site to be displayed within the email.
Therefore, any customer who orders a product will be sent an email to his private email after a few days reminding him to return to the site and publish his evaluation of the product based on his experience with it, which enhances the customer’s desire to return to the store again, publish reviews, and perhaps browse the rest of the store’s products and order more. of the products.
Within the settings page, you will also find a lot of tools that allow you to control the look and feel of the product rating system within your store.
One of the most useful features that the add-on also provides is the opportunity for the customer to upload photos with the evaluation that he publishes, and you can enable this option from within the add-on settings page, as in the following image.
In the “Review Attachments” tab, you will find the option (Attach Images) as shown in the image above. Enable this option to provide the feature of uploading images by customers within the reviews that they publish on your product pages.
After activating the option to attach photos, you can go directly to any product page within the store to check the option to upload photos with the rating, which will look as in the image below.
You can browse the special ( Settings ) tab in addition to more options that help you customize the product evaluation system in a professional and distinctive way.
Show reviews in Google search results
So far, we have learned about many methods and plugins that help you activate and display reviews within your WordPress site, whether it is a business website, an online store displaying products, or other types of websites.
In this part, we will discuss another distinctive strategy in customizing your store, as we will activate and display reviews with site links in search engines, such as Google and others. The following image shows an example of a website whose links appear in a Google search with 5-star reviews.
To activate the feature of showing reviews within search results on Google or elsewhere, we will need a specialized add-on, and perhaps the most prominent and simplest add-on to accomplish this task is the Yoast add-on, which provides many options related to modifying the appearance of the site in search engines, but the add-on does not provide this option in its version. Free, so we will use another simple and practical free add-on.
The desired addition is the Schema Rich Snippets add-on , which creates a Schema file for your site’s page links in a distinctive way so that you can add the star ratings element to it to make the site’s links appear in a unique and different way from the rest of your competitors.
After activating the add-on on your site, you can enter the editing page for any article or page within the site. You will find an option for settings for the Rich Snippets add-on, and the option to put stars in the browsing results will appear at the end. As the following picture.
As you can see in the settings box for adding within the page for editing articles or pages, you can add the rating data that you want to appear next to the site link in search engines, and you can also choose the number of stars that you want to appear next to the rating.
You can also activate the extension on product links if your site is an online store that displays products.
To activate the add-on on product links and show reviews with the product link in the search engine, we will go to the add-on settings tab within the WordPress control panel, as in the picture.
As you can see in the picture, you can activate the compatibility option between this add-on and the Woocommerce add-on, and click Update.
After activating the add-on compatibility option with WooCommerce, you can enter the editing page for any product in your store, and you will notice the appearance of a new options box for the add-on directly below the product edit page. Through these options, you can fill in the data for evaluating the product that you want to show with the link in search engines, as in Next picture.
Conclusion
In the end, your interest in the evaluation system within your site has become essential, as this feature makes you different from most of your competitors, and most website and e-commerce owners overlook this wonderful strategy to gain the trust of customers and visitors, and therefore adopting a distinctive evaluation system for your site will be an irreplaceable golden opportunity to gain customers and income. Strongly in the competitive online market
