Projects Made customer reviews show up in Google search results
Made customer reviews show up in Google search results
A mattress retailer’s WooCommerce store needed its Bazaarvoice reviews readable by search engines, not just by visitors.
- How long
- 2016
- My role
- DevelopmentSupport
- Kind of project
- IntegrationSmall project
What the business needed.
Zinus, a US mattress-in-a-box retailer, ran their store on WordPress and WooCommerce and wanted to add Bazaarvoice, a third-party product review system, to their product pages. They needed the full setup: a product feed so Bazaarvoice knew what to collect reviews on, the review widgets on the site, and tracking so they could see the return on it.
What I did.
I wrote the integration myself and packaged it as a separate plugin rather than building it into the theme, since that’s easier to maintain long-term. That covered implementing Bazaarvoice’s JavaScript API and customising the WooCommerce single product and category templates. I built an XML export so the client could send Bazaarvoice their product catalogue and keep it updated as new products were added. The harder part was SEO: Bazaarvoice loads its reviews with JavaScript, which search engine crawlers don’t reliably read, so the review content needed to be injected server-side into the page as well, with proper schema.org markup, so Google could actually index and display it. I tested the whole thing in Bazaarvoice’s sandbox environment before switching it over to live, since their servers reject anything that doesn’t match their format exactly.
What they got.
A working reviews system on their product and category pages that also counted for search, not just for the person already on the page.
For your technical person
Stack: WordPress, PHP, MySQL, Bazaarvoice Conversations API (JavaScript-based). Custom integration code, packaged as a separate WordPress plugin rather than built into the theme, for long-term maintainability. Custom XML product export/feed for Bazaarvoice’s product-set import. Bazaarvoice ROI beacon setup. Server-side content injection via WordPress hooks so review content is present in the initial HTML for crawlers, since Bazaarvoice’s own widget is JavaScript-rendered. schema.org markup added for review rich results. WooCommerce template customisation: single product page and category pages. Built and tested in Bazaarvoice’s sandbox before promoting to their production environment. Project size: small. Delivered 2016.
Related work.
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