Trustpilot VS Google Reviews
When comparing Trustpilot and Google reviews, we’re actually comparing very different feature sets – that curate to very different objectives.
- If the objective is to be more discoverable, i.e. found by more prospective customers, Trustpilot will almost never fit the bill, except in the very specific case of Google Ads Star ratings. And while Google will make a local business more discoverable, it won’t affect an online business’ discoverability – at all.
- If the objective is to generate testimonials so you can show them on your website, social media, etc. – then both platforms can help, but it’s kind of hard to justify Trustpilot’s price point when Google reviews are entirely free, and there are so many review management solutions that provide much more, at a much lower cost.
#1 Discoverability
The number one reason people look at reviews is usually to be found more on platforms like Google Maps, Yelp, TripAdvisor, Amazon, etc.
Trustpilot is an open review platform that comes with a number of features to help you collect reviews from your customers, and a brand that sort of helps prospective customers believe those reviews are legitimate.
However, there is zero discoverability potential. Having millions of reviews on Trustpilot will not make your business easier to find for your target audience.
Nobody ends up on a Trustpilot page listing businesses in a specific category, or location, or anything. Trustpilot’s traffic almost exclusively consists of brand traffic, from people looking for customer reviews about a brand.
On the contrary, Google reviews are critical to being found on Google Maps. They are also made visible in the knowledge panel when googling a brand, and they are somewhat trusted (to an extent, more than Trustpilot reviews) despite Google explicitly saying they do not validate reviews.
So the more reviews on Google Maps, the more visitors for your local business. This is not true of Trustpilot reviews.
If your business is local, we’ve probably answered the Trustpilot VS Google reviews at this point.
But what if your business isn’t local, and you operate only online?
Google Ads Star Rating
Google Ads star ratings are an entirely different story.
And really, this is where Trustpilot makes sense.
On Google Ads (so not organic rankings), you can also show a star rating. It’s called a “Store ratings”.
To get those stars to show for a product on google shopping, or for a page on google ads, you need to set up a review feed, using reviews that come from one of Google’s approved partners.
Here’s a list of all the approved partners
If you want to show ratings on your ads on google, you’ll need to use one of Google’s approved review platforms, and you’ll need at least 100 reviews over the past 12 months in every region where you want them to show.
Google does provide an alternative now, called Google Customer Reviews, which is managed from the Google Merchant Center, but since you’re going to need volume, you might as well make those reviews publicly available to leverage the social proof aspect too.
SEO
I’ve added this section completely ignoring common sense and basic logic, but I’ve read a lot of reddit threads where SEO was somewhat included in this debate.
The star-ratings you see on SEO (organic) listings are generated by schema.org markup. This is a specific syntax that a few search-engines agreed on years ago, and that allows website owners to signal specific information to search engines.
When it comes to user ratings & reviews, there are two specific objects called “Review”, and “aggregateRating”, which if included on the source code of a page, can get you stars on the Google results pages.
Using a public and open review platform has absolutely no impact on whether the stars will show. In fact, you can’t signal where those reviews are coming from in the schema.org syntax, so you can’t even tell search engines that your reviews are legit.
Using Google reviews, Trustpilot reviews, or your own (fake) reviews will result in the exact same result. The (very relative) difficulty here is writing up the schema, and adding it to the webpages of your website.
Anyone telling you otherwise is either knowingly lying to you, or unknowingly completely ignorant.
Long story short, SEO is not a valid objective when considering a review collection system or a review platform.
#2 Social proof
If your objective is to generate testimonials and reviews from happy customers to generate social proof, let’s break down the requirements
- You need happy customers – No platform can help with that
- You need to ask them for a testimonial or a review
- You need to show those reviews somewhere, either on a Trustpilot page, on a google my business listing, on your website, or anywhere else (social media, etc.).
Asking for reviews: Trustpilot VS Google
Trustpilot will help here, including in their free plan, with up to 50 invitations per month. If you need more than that, you’ll need a paid plan, starting at $259 per month.
Google does not offer any sort of review collection features, except for a “review link” which you can share with your clients. To generate Google Review links and QR codes, check out our free google review link generator.
However, there are a million tools that also help with collecting reviews or testimonials, including on Google. Reviewflowz is one of them, but if that’s your core use-case there are much cheaper (and probably even free) options.
Some cheaper solutions like Senja or Testimonial even allow micro-businesses to collect their own testimonials and showcase them on their website. They allow their clients to pretty much write or edit every testimonial themselves for a few dollars a month.
So you don’t even need Google or Trustpilot, you just collect, store, and showcase your own reviews, and hope that people believe they’re real. To be fair, video testimonials help a lot with trust here – even though most of the text testimonials are probably fake.
The point is, Trustpilot might feel like a sound answer here since they do offer review collection services, including in their free plan, but going for that free plan won’t solve your problem for very long, it’s not a very difficult problem to solve in the first place, and when you’re out of invitations, you’ll need to either migrate everything and start from scratch, or basically spend $3000 per year on your review system.
For context, $3000 would get you some really advanced stuff with any review management software provider.
Showing your reviews: Trustpilot VS Google
It’s a very similar story here.
Except there’s no free option on Trustpilot.
So you’ll need the first plan at $259 per month to show your reviews on your website.
Google does not provide a widget either, so in both cases, unless you’re already a paying customer at Trustpilot for reasons beyond your control, you’d probably need a third party review widget solution.
There again, there are two options.
You can go for a widget that leverages the open review platforms’ credibility and allows you to show trustpilot or google reviews on your own website. There are a million of those.
Reviewflowz is one of them, but if you’re just starting out, there are many cheaper options.
I can’t really think of any valid reason why you wouldn’t want to leverage Google or Trustpilot’s credibility, but if that’s the case for some reason, you can also go for a widget that allows you to collect (and edit) the reviews yourself – a “closed” review platform – and show the ones you want, like Senja or Testimonial.