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Rating the Review Sites: The Top Review Sites by Industry

Mark Nicholson

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With all the different review sites, we wondered which ones might be the most important for different markets.

By looking at the review websites and how they appear in organic search results, it can help businesses get an idea of which might be the most important for them.

Since it takes more time to monitor every possible review website, knowing which ones perform better can help businesses choose.

So we took a look at what we thought were the biggest reviews sites for several of the most popular markets.

Markets included in study:

Main review websites
Restaurants
‍Home Services
Autos
‍Real Estate
‍Health
Travel
Law

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When it comes to organic search results, if you're not on page one, you're practically invisible.

For the big 3 (Google My Business, Facebook and Yelp) we were not able to examine Google My Business and Facebook independently.

Any business concerned with reputation management should monitor and manage these three. Reputation management software can help you with this process.

But the following info provides insight for other review sites to consider managing in your market.

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How to Read the charts

Below you will find a series of charts that include the following details per site, with 3 columns.

Number of pages indexed
Positions 1 to 3
Positions 4 to 10

When looking at the charts, it's the middle column (Positions 1 - 3) that is the one to pay particular attention to.

This, and the column to the right of it, represent organic traffic and page one results.

Depending how search results are displayed, the clickthrough rate (CTR) can vary, but the top results have always received the majority of clicks.

We also included the overall amount of indexed pages as it's interesting to see as well.

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So we looked at the total number of pages indexed (top 100 results) along with rankings for page 1 (top 10 results) to determine which review websites might perform better for businesses that want to select a few to manage.

This study only references Google for search engines, and is based on US search results.

At the time of this study Google has approximately 86.76% of search engine marketshare (Statcounter: Oct. 2017), and information/data was compiled using SEMrush (November 2017)

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Main Review Websites

The above shows that Yelp has significantly more pages on page 1 of Google, with about 34% more than TripAdvisor holding the top 3 positions.

Yellow Pages was a surprise and did not hold as many top 3 positions as expected.

Between BBB, Manta, Local.com and CitySearch, it was BBB that held more top 3 listings, with Manta holding more positions between 4 and 10.

CitySearch turned out to be surprisingly lower than expected.

Restaurants

Home Services

It came as no surprise that HomeAdvisor holds more top 3 positions than the others. Angie's List has a significant amount of pages indexed, but less than half for top 3 positions when compared to marketshare in Home Services for HomeAdvisor. ThumbTack followed close in third, and Porch.com trailed behind.

Autos

When it came to auto review sites, one might have presumed AutoTrader to take the lead, but it turned out that Edmunds and CarGurus hold more top 3 positions.

But AutoTrader did have the most rankings for positions 4 to 10, making a tight race between the three that could possibly fluctuate monthly for the lead.

With the second tier group of car dealer sites it was CarMax and TrueCar that stood out.

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Real Estate

The clear winner for real estate review sites was Zillow, with more than twice as many rankings in the top 3 positions compared to it's closest competitor.

Realtor.com came in second, with less than half the top 3 listings of Zillow, but a clear lead over Trulia, it's next closest competitor.

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