At this time of year, you are probably buying — or at least planning to buy — Christmas presents for friends and family. However, you need to educate yourself on exactly which products you ought to purchase — and that’s where product reviews online can really help.
You obviously won’t be the only person who could benefit from them, either — and that’s why you might be seriously considering endeavouring to make money from writing such reviews yourself. However, Google has a few things to say about how to pen them in an SEO-friendly manner.
Why might you write product reviews of your own?
Google’s Search Central hub provides guidance on writing high-quality product reviews, with Google citing three examples of the types of people who might already be in the habit of publishing them for the purpose of generating revenue, such as from affiliate links.
Word for word, here is how Google describes the three examples:
“An expert staff member of a merchant that guides shoppers between competing products.”
“A blogger that provides independent opinions of products.”
“An editorial staff member at a news or other publishing site.”
One simple reason for you to heed these guidelines is that, otherwise, the product reviews you write for your website could end up being needlessly hampered in the level of visibility they garner on Google search engine results pages (SERPs).
How will Google assess product review content on your website?
You might have heard on the grapevine about the “Google product reviews update”, an algorithmic tweak that, according to Google executive Danny Sullivan, “works primarily to evaluate product review content on a page-level basis.”
In its details of product review best practices, Google clarifies that these are for product review pages rather than just product reviews. In this part of the Google documentation, the word “reviews” was recently replaced with “review pages”, as Search Engine Journal shows.
This basically means that, if there is a section or mechanism on your website for its visitors to post their own reviews to it, you are unlikely to need to worry too much about whether these adhere to Google’s product review best practices.
Nonetheless, Sullivan warns that, “for sites that have a substantial amount of product review content, any content within a site might be evaluated by the update”.
Are you looking to post some product reviews on your website?
Of course, there’s always a flurry of new products hitting retail shelves, leaving you with no shortage of inspiration for what your site could review next.
However, if you aren’t exactly a dab hand at writing product reviews, you could hand the responsibility to our digital copywriters. When penning the content, these professionals can subtly insert affiliate links in a way that prevents them from looking ‘salesy’.
When consumers buy the reviewed products via the affiliate links, you can take a cut of the money spent on those purchases. If you are eager to add product reviews to your website, we can further advise you by phone, email or online contact form.
