Trust.
It's possibly the most crucial aspect of the sales process.
Unsolicited, honest feedback from other customers is one of the fastest ways to create customer trust.
If there's one thing Google excels at, it's designing products and services that appear to smoothly blend into our lives and enterprises.
When it comes to Google services for websites, there are many of those too. Google Analytics helps you learn about your website and its visitors. Google Search Console is highly helpful to improve your website SEO and rank better in search engine results. Google Adsense lets you monetize your blog like ours. And there are many if we start counting.
Google My Business is a service that aims to help local businesses establish themselves on Google Maps and eventually on search results. From the time of its inception, it has come a long way and now also shows up in search results for various terms.
If you have ever searched for your “keywords+near me” you will see a lot of top results from Google maps. Businesses with Google My Business reviews usually top these search results.
When you show these reviews on your WordPress website, it helps gain the trust of your potential customer. This might lead to sales too. Fortunately, there are many WordPress plugins that help you integrate those on your website.
Today we will look into 5 of these best plugins to integrate Google My Business reviews on WordPress.
Widget for Google Reviews
Isn't user-generated material the best kind of content? Especially if that content is presented in a way that is flattering to you and your company, as reviews may be. Even if the reviews are negative, it's beneficial to display them on your Google My Business page, which is exactly what the Widget for Google Reviews accomplishes.
The principle is straightforward: the plugin allows you to show Google My Business reviews on your website via a widget. It imports all of the reviews into your WordPress database, guarantees fast load times, allows for pagination, and displays up to five reviews per location.
At least, that's what you get with the free edition. The premium Business edition allows you to integrate Google My Business evaluations with those from Facebook and Yelp, as well as apply a minimum rating filter and sort by a range of criteria. Users can also post Google reviews directly on your website with the Business edition.
Reviews and Ratings – Google My Business
Because reviews are so crucial to businesses, you can never have too many review plugins to connect your WordPress website to your Google My Business profile – just don't activate them all at once. Reviews and Ratings – Google My Business is a plugin that displays Google reviews on your WordPress website using both a shortcode and a widget, among other things.
The plugin, for example, will allow you to change the appearance of the columns. They'll be totally responsive, and you'll be able to choose from a total of 96 different styles and themes. This plugin is all about personalization, and it even allows you to specify a customer review length range for display.
It doesn't end there, though. This plugin also allows you to select icons to replace Google's icons, see a live preview in the Settings, and hide reviews selectively. It will accomplish all of this and more while remaining completely free to use. However, you will need to provide your Google Billing Account, and you will be able to limit your API queries each day in order to remain within your free quota.
Widget for Google Reviews
This is a plugin that is new in the WordPress repository for showing Google Business reviews and ratings. The plugin has a great user interface and different styles to select from.
Its demo can be seen here: https://www.radiustheme.com/demo/plugins/business-reviews/
One of its the best features which we liked is that it can save your reviews in your website database. Which means no dependency on Google API. Saves loading time as well.
And it just doesn't stop there, you can also use it to show Facebook reviews and recommendations. Yelp reviews can also be shown by using shortcodes.
Widgets for Google Reviews
Confused with the above plugin with the same name? Me too. This is also a similarly named plugin but much more wide userbase and reviews.
This plugin has the highest number of users as per the WordPress repository. Its review count is also highest compared to other similar plugins.
In its free version, you can show up to 10 Google reviews. It comes with 35 widget layouts and 16 pre-designed widget styles. And supports all kinds of website builders like Elmentor, WPBakery, etc.
It also supports other website reviews display by signing up for a free account. Promises zero loading time.
WP Google Review Slider
This is one of the oldest plugins we have seen in the WordPress repository for Google reviews. Earlier named as WP Google Places Reviews when Google My Business was Google Places.
Although it is an old plugin, its user base is still less compared to the previous plugin we talked about. Its reviews are a little less too in comparison.
But this plugin comes with some nice features like a reviews slider and a selection of reviews to show. Multiple templates can be created for different pages and posts.
Custom CSS can be used in this plugin to create designs of your likes. Google reviews with no text can easily be hidden with this plugin.
Comes with more functionalities in its pro version of the WordPress plugin. Multiple locations and languages are included in the pro version too.
A few Extra Plugins
Post to Google My Business
These days, blogs are commonplace for many types of businesses. Some may do it because they adore the written word. Others may do it for the sake of branding. However, for many, it may come down to good old SEO juice derived from the content. Your website material can instantly become Google My Business content thanks to the Post to Google My Business feature.
You can make Google My Business posts from the back end of your WordPress website with the Post to Google My Business plugin. The plugin is Gutenberg-compatible, and the posts are published to GMB automatically. Finally, if you have a multisite, this plugin will work with it.
The plugin's premium version comes with a slew of time-saving features that can help you improve your Google My Business content game. For starters, it allows you to schedule posts for automatic publication, create Google My Business posts using any WordPress post type, specify a location per post or post to several locations, and much more.
Final Words
One of the things that makes WordPress such a terrific CMS for any kind of commercial effort is its ability to link to so many various networks and services.
To check more of the plugins in the WordPress repository, you can always check this link: https://wordpress.org/plugins/tags/google-business/
Build a Google My Business page when you want to make sure that visitors in the area of your store may find out that you're there without taking their eyes from their smartphone screen. Then you link it to your website so you don't have to repeat the process of posting or setting things up. As simple as that.
Google my business plugin is very useful. I have been using it for over a year now on my blog.