For Your Reviews
How to set up product reviews on retail sites for maximum SEO impact.
How to set up product reviews on retail sites for maximum SEO impact.
Word-of-mouth (WOM) campaigns are powerful sales drivers in the offline world. Legitimate WOM advertising can create buzz in the marketplace and go viral when crossing over to online user-generated content (UGC) environments. Add video streams, lab coats, diet soft drinks, and minty candy, and you’ve got an online marketing phenomenon.
Yet illegitimate or faked WOM campaigns can create a storm of consumer furor, damage a big brand, and tarnish a corporate reputation — just ask Wal-Mart about Jim and Laura. Consequently, online retailers have been a bit timid about leveraging blogs, wikis, and video as a way to build buzz or improve a two-way dialogue with customers.
Although pursuing Web 2.0 venues requires planning, time, and money, online retailers can more readily embrace another UGC segment: product reviews, as written and submitted by actual consumers.
Product reviews remain relatively uncontroversial and exceedingly influential when it comes to converting lookers into buyers. Data supporting the importance of product reviews is staggering. According to data gathered by Bazaarvoice:
Ethical WOM marketing techniques are rooted in customer satisfaction, build a two-way dialogue, and provide transparent product communication. Ethical SEO (define) provides a natural bridge for user-generated product reviews when implemented in an optimal manner.
If you think about it, online retailers’ product pages are generally the Web’s stalest, least optimal content. Natural SEO can go a long way toward enhancing on-the-page and behind-the-page elements to improve search engine visibility. But it does little to refresh the content on a naturally irregular basis, which can help maintain search engine visibility over time.
Though some CMSs (define) incorporate user ratings and recommendations out of the box, few do so in an intelligent, search-optimal manner. Consequently, outsourcing product reviews to a third-party service provider is one of the best ways online retailers can quickly and efficiently incorporate product reviews into their content mix.
There are currently two key players in the market that can help online retailers create and manage their product reviews and product rating systems: Bazaarvoice and PowerReviews.
Both enterprise-class review services are relatively easy to set up and integrate with most CMSs. Usually, product review integration includes exporting the catalog hierarchy, creating new FTP (define) setups, configuring page layouts and CSS (define) overrides, and potentially preparing legacy data to be exported, usually in an XML format. Full integration requires several layers of content reviews, links, and some residual coding. Most online retailers can get set up to go live in a couple weeks, something to consider if you’re looking at how to improve you site before the next holiday code freeze hits.
But setups aren’t with several SEO caveats. A few you can do to make certain your site’s product review implementation is released in a search-optimal format:
Bazaarvoice and PowerReviews offer flexible programs that can be customized to help add UGC to your site in a search-engine-friendly manner. Bazaarvoice tends to focus on providing syndication services for reviews, while PowerReviews focuses more on creating landing pages. Either way, you can be certain incorporating product reviews into your content mix will help harness the power of WOM marketing, particularly when you do so in a search-optimal manner.
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