Driving Traffic To Your Product Reviews

One of my most popular tutorials is on
How to Write a Product Review. It covers the 7 elements to include in a product review, and gives live examples you can explore.

Potential buyers are particularly interested in hearing about personal experience (and results) with a product, or learning things the sales copy may not have covered.

People are searching online every day to read consumer reviews before they make a purchase. A well-written product review, that answers their questions, is a great way to make sales as an affiliate. The question is: how do you get your product review in front of those potential buyers?

They Ask – You Answer

Most people head straight to their favorite search engine when they are looking for more information about a product. Sometimes they are trying to figure out what products are available and which product will best suit their needs. These are general product type searches, such as “bluetooth headset”:

In other cases, they are looking for reviews & information on a specific product (brand/model) that already has their interest. In this example, it’s the “plantronics discovery headset”:

When someone does a search, they are asking a question – or starting a conversation. Your job is to figure out what they are looking for specifically, and respond to that query with your review.

Are they looking for a solution, product comparisons, details on a specific product? This will be obvious by the search phrase they used, and you want to respond to each search query with the right kind of content.

Choosing Keyword Phrases For Your Product Reviews

For the sake of example, let’s say that you’re writing a product review of the Plantronics Discovery 975 headset to promote it as an affiliate. Once you’ve written the review, you’ll want to optimize the page for a specific keyword phrase.

I prefer to choose longtail keyword phrases for my product reviews, that contain shorter more specific phrases. Looking at the results above (image 2), I would optimize my review page for the phrase “plantronics discovery 975 bluetooth headset review”. This is a 6-word phrase that only gets ~17 searches a day, but it also includes the exact phrases: “plantronics discovery 975? and “plantronics discovery 975 bluetooth headset”. So you now have 3 potential keyword phrases that your one review page can rank well for.

To get a page (or blog post) ranking well for more than one keyword phrase, you simply use variation in the anchor text each time you link to that page/post. So you would link to it using each of those 3 keyword phrases as anchor text in various places, instead of always using the same keyword phrase as the anchor text.

The more specific phrases (longtail phrases) convert better because the searcher already knows exactly what they want. And multiple top rankings give you more reach – allowing you to reach more potential buyers.

How to Use Content to Promote Product Reviews

Once you have your product review written, optimized and published you will need inbound links pointing to it. These links will get your review page or post indexed in the major search engines, and help it rank well for your keyword phrase(s).

The more inbound links you have pointing to your page, with the keyword phrase as the anchor text in that hyperlink, the better your page will rank for that phrase.

Getting high quality, relevant inbound links to product review or commercial pages can prove to be a difficult task. It’s much easier to get links to funny videos or how-to pages, as people tend to share those naturally. For your product reviews, you’ll want to do some strategic content marketing.

Start by going back to your list of keyword phrases. Choose phrases that are relevant to your product review, and create content for each of those topics.

Using our example, you might create content for the following phrases:

best bluetooth plantronics
best bluetooth headset
best bluetooth headphones
best plantronics wireless headset
bluetooth headset reviews
how to pick a headset
top rated bluetooth headsets
bluetooth headset comparisons
bluetooth wireless headsets
plantronics wireless headsets

Basically you want to create a list of all your extra keyword phrases. In most cases you’ll find a lot of informational keyword phrases, where people are searching for how-to information on the topic instead of specific product information.

A good example in the list above would be the phrase “how to pick a headset”. You could write an article that helps the reader walk through the choices based on their needs – are they gaming, listening to music, need bluetooth or wireless, doing interviews, etc. Walk them through the process of choosing a headset for their specific needs. Somewhere in the context of the article you’ll have an opportunity to link to your product review using one of your chosen keyword phrases.

Where do you publish all of this content?

If you have a lot of keyword phrases to work with, and it’s relevant to your site/blog, you can choose a few pieces to publish on the same domain as your review. Internal links (links coming from pages on the same domain name) do count as inbound links.

The goal is to create related content that links back to your review.

You can also pitch the content as a guest post on a related blog. I often let that blogger include their own affiliate link(s) to actual products mentioned, and only request a link back to my product review in exchange for the content. This is a win/win and a great way to get a high quality inbound link from the content area of a related blog. (score!)

Other places you can publish this content include: article directories, squidoo, hubpages, and blogger or wordpress.com. Article Marketing is the same as blogging – or guest blogging even – in that you find keyword phrases your market is using and you write content for them. Where you publish it is what makes the difference between a guest blog post, a blog post or an article. Don’t get confused over the lingo or the method or the platform. In the end it’s all just keywords, content & rankings.

Writing Content For People, Not Just For Links

I’m not one to “spin content” for the sake of blasting it all over the web just to get links. That’s just junking up the web, if you ask me.

When you write content that targets a keyword phrase, you are “entering a conversation”. The searcher asks a question, your content is the response to that question. Address their thoughts and needs, and then lead into the next best click – meaning you interest them in reading your product review next.

Content will serve you best if you write it this way, with the human reader in mind. Then, not only will it serve as a quality inbound link to your product review, but it will also funnel highly targeted traffic (ie readers) to your review page as well.

Obviously you’ll do best by having each piece of related content rank well in the major search engines for it’s own search term, in addition to your product review page. That just gives you more market reach through multiple search queries.

**Free Report** How to Create Compelling Content That Ranks Well in Search Engines. Download at: http://www.seocopywritingreport.com

Best,

p.s. Next we’ll look at ways to promote products and product reviews via Social Media and various conversations around the web. Subscribe below to make sure you don’t miss the next ClickNewz update!

Category: Website Traffic Q&A