You search for your own trade in Raleigh. A competitor has little gold stars under their result. You do not. So you dig through your Google Business Profile settings looking for the switch.
There is no switch. That is the good news and the bad news.
Why do some businesses show stars in search and others do not?
Because "stars in search" is two different things wearing the same costume.
One is the rating on a map listing. The other is a rating that a website describes to Google in its own code. Owners lump them together, then hunt for a setting that controls both. It does not exist.
Once you know which kind your competitor has, the fix gets much clearer. It also gets a little less mysterious, which is nice.
Stars on your map listing and stars on your website are two different things
Map listing stars come from reviews people leave on Google. Your Business Profile shows the average and the count. You do not edit it. You earn it, one customer at a time.
Website stars come from markup. That is a block of structured data in your page's code that tells search engines, in a format they read easily, "this business has this average rating from this many reviews." It is invisible to visitors.
Those two can disagree. A site can show nothing while the map listing is glowing. A site can also claim a rating the map listing does not match. Both are common.
If you want help with the review side, our reputation management work covers it. The markup side is the rest of this post.
Where should the review figure on your website come from?
One place. Not two. Definitely not "whoever last typed it."
Here is how it usually goes wrong. Someone types "4.9 stars from 87 reviews" into the homepage. Someone else types a different number on the About page. A plugin adds a third in the code. Six months later nobody can say which is right.
The fix is boring and it works. Keep the review figure in one record. Every page that shows a rating reads from it. Every block of markup reads from it too. Change it once and the whole site follows.
Why every page and its search markup must show the same rating
Google compares what a page says with what its markup says. When the visible text says one thing and the code says another, you have given a search engine a reason to ignore both.
It is also a trust problem for people. A visitor who sees one number on your homepage and another on your service page does not think "typo." They think "which one is made up?"
So the rule is simple:
- The number visitors read is the number in the markup.
- The count of reviews is the count in the markup.
- Every page agrees with every other page.
What A New Leaf Painting did about it
A New Leaf Painting Contractors paints homes and businesses across Jacksonville and Northeast Florida. Its site has hundreds of pages, including a page for nearly every town the crews serve. When we rebuilt it, we made every business fact come from one source so that pages could not drift apart.
The review figure got the same treatment. It comes from one place, so every page and its search markup agree.
We will not tell you that earned a particular result in Google. Nobody can honestly promise that. What it did was remove the one problem that was fully in our control. You can read the whole build in the A New Leaf Painting case study.
Should you combine reviews from Google, Facebook, Houzz and Yelp?
For A New Leaf, we brought reviews from all four onto one page, beside the customer films. For most Triangle businesses with reviews scattered across platforms, we think that is the right call.
Why? Because your customers did not all go to the same place. A homeowner who found you on Houzz left a review on Houzz. Leaving the others out makes you look smaller than you are.
One caution. Combining is a content decision. Do not casually fold every platform into one blended average and call it your rating. Decide what the figure means, say so on the page, and keep it consistent. A blended number needs a source behind it that you can point to.
Mark each review with where it was first posted
Every review on that page should say where it began. Google. Facebook. Houzz. Yelp.
That label does three jobs:
- It tells the reader the review is real and checkable.
- It credits the platform where the customer actually wrote it.
- It keeps you honest with yourself about what you can source.
On A New Leaf's site, each review carries the place it was first posted. A reader can go look. That is the point.
What to check this week on your own site
Block out thirty minutes. You do not need a developer for most of this.
- Find every rating on your site. Homepage, service pages, About, footer. Write down each figure.
- Compare them. Do they all match? If not, you have found the problem.
- Compare to your Google profile. Your site's figure should not claim more than your public reviews support.
- Ask who updates it. If the answer is "whoever remembers," that is the fix.
- Ask your web person what markup the site publishes. If they cannot answer, that is information too.
If you want a second set of eyes, our SEO and analytics team does this kind of audit.
What not to do: copying reviews you cannot source
Do not paste in reviews from a competitor. Do not retype a customer's email as a five-star review and credit it to a platform it never appeared on. Do not round 4.6 up to 5.0 because it looks better on a banner.
Each of those feels harmless on the day. Each one is a rating you cannot back up, and that is the exact thing search engines and customers are both trying to catch.
If you cannot say where a review was first posted, leave it off. A smaller, true number beats a bigger one you have to defend.
Your next step
Open your homepage and your busiest service page side by side. Find the review figure on each. If the two numbers differ, or one of them does not match your Google profile, fix that before you touch anything else. Stars may or may not follow. A site that tells one story everywhere is worth having either way.