Local search
Review velocity
Review velocity is the rate at which new reviews arrive.
What is review velocity?
Review velocity is the rate at which new reviews arrive. A steady flow of recent reviews is generally more valuable locally than a larger total that stopped arriving some time ago.
Why it comes up
It explains why a competitor with fewer reviews can outrank a business with more, and why review campaigns in bursts underperform.
In practice
Built with a request flow triggered at the right point in the customer journey, easy to complete on a phone, running continuously rather than as a campaign.
What it is not
Incentivising or gating reviews breaches platform policy and the reviews are often filtered, which leaves the business worse off than before.
Worth knowing because it comes up in almost every conversation about this.
Where this comes up in the work
It is part of Website Design and Development, and more specifically of Maintenance and monitoring. Across the rest of the work it shows up in:
- App Store Optimization, because keeping the release notes worth reading depends on it
- Marketplace Marketing, in which it is the first thing checked before building a listing that survives the platform’s next template change
- Content and Editorial, where it is the difference between refreshing on decay rather than on the calendar working and appearing to
- Lifecycle and Email, where getting it wrong shows up in building replenishment timing for the products that run out
What to check
Two questions that establish whether this is actually in order on a given site:
- Whether the exception somebody added two years ago is still needed
- Whether it was verified in the logs or inferred from a dashboard
Common questions
What tells you whether review velocity is in order?
Built with a request flow triggered at the right point in the customer journey, easy to complete on a phone, running continuously rather than as a campaign. Anybody with access can establish it in an afternoon.
Who owns review velocity in a business?
Whoever is accountable for deciding what this business is actually qualified to write about. Problems with this tend to persist because nobody is. Answer Engine Optimization in Bengaluru is the prerequisite. App Store Optimization in Bengaluru is what it makes possible.
How much work is review velocity?
Less than people expect to check and sometimes more than they expect to fix. Built with a request flow triggered at the right point in the customer journey, easy to complete on a phone, running continuously rather than as a campaign. Teams that get this right have usually read A/B testing programme, and argued about Analytics implementation.
Should review velocity come before other work?
It comes before work that assumes it is already handled, and after anything actively blocking indexation.
How would we know review velocity is a problem?
By measuring it rather than by argument. Built with a request flow triggered at the right point in the customer journey, easy to complete on a phone, running continuously rather than as a campaign. Pair this with Jaipur, and with Kolkata if the market is competitive.
Is review velocity just another name for something?
Incentivising or gating reviews breaches platform policy and the reviews are often filtered, which leaves the business worse off than before. The order most people need is Home and trade services first, Legal and professional services once the first one is running.
See what the first ninety days would cover
Bring the numbers you have. We will tell you which ones are measuring the wrong thing before we suggest anything new.