Must have structure data for content: Aggregaterating

Must have structure data for content: Aggregaterating

For the past year, I've been experimenting with Structure Data from schema.org. I've mastered the basic schema.org categories like Website, Organisation, Breadcrumbs, Sitelinks, Person, etc.

I've managed to integrate Google My Businesses based card results when searching my name on a local level amount other cool stuff.
But the best structure data implementation that had the most significant impact on all websites I'm currently managing as an SEO expert, were BlogPosting + AMP and Aggregaterating.

I've talked about BlogPosting + AMP before - they really make a great team providing nice picture based snippet results with the AMP icon for all mobile searches. This will increase your overall organic CTR which in turn will force Google to give you better positions and rankings for those specific pages.

So what is Aggregaterating and how can it help increase your organic traffic?

Have you ever noticed some google results content that 5-star rating snippet? That's implemented with a schema.org AggregateRating category; you can find it here: http://schema.org/AggregateRating.

The only catch about this is that you need to give users a real and workable way actually to review your content. They need to have the option to give your article a 1-5 star score, otherwise, if you just implement the AggregateRating markup inside the page code only, Google will penalize you for faking this system.

Once you have AggregateRating markup implemented properly at the end or beginning of your content, Google will index your pages with the star snippet as well as on how many votes that rating is based on. Just like this:


Keep in mind the above example shows you a rating for a product. Products pages, in general, need to have comments based review with a user's name assigned to each review.
When it comes to content just a star rating feature will do, you don't need to implement comment reviews.
Something like this at the end of each page should be enough:


So how do you implement AggregateRating?

Well, if you have coding skills you do it yourself if you are using anything else except Wordpress and you don't have any coding skills you will have to turn to a developer to implement this. But if you are indeed are a Wordpress user you can install a custom plugin to make this happen in about 10 minutes.

I used: https://ro.wordpress.org/plugins/kk-star-ratings/ - on multiple blogs and websites, and it worked fine every time without any bugs or conflicts.
It is very easy to install and configure, just used the following settings: 


Or you can configure the plugin and adapt it to your specific needs.
Just keep one thing in mind: the AggregateRating markup won't be present if it doesn't have at least one review. The trick is this plugin doesn't have an automatic way of implementing at least one fake review. So if you really want to see that start rating inside search results really fast, you will need to vote your content yourself on every page, I recommend doing it on the very important content at first and let it work itself naturally on the other pages. It makes take a while, but I think it is much better for Google to witness the rest of your pages get some natural ratings rather than just having "one vote" on all of them all at once.

If you have a website, don't forget AggregateRating markup should be mandatory! I assure you most of your big competitors already have it; you won't stand a chance if you don't have it either, so implement it because the benefits are great!
Let me know if you have questions or want me to provide additional information about this subjects.
Cheers.