Will customers find your product reviews?

As a search engine optimiser, I tend to look at keywords, and I see two important keywords that are too often overlooked. CHRIS THOMAS

By Chris Thomas

Online reputation management is one of those areas usually reserved for the bigger end of town. But there’s a lot you can do as a small or medium sized business owner to protect your brand’s reputation online, and improve sales.

For example, look at Mike Preston’s news item Online consumers spread the word, about the growing number of consumers who research products online before they purchase. If you missed the article, here’s one factoid: “62% of consumers now read product reviews on the internet.”

As a search engine optimiser, I tend to look at keywords, and I see two important keywords in that news item – “product reviews”.

So of course this got me thinking, and doing some researching of my own.

To give you an example, let’s look at Audi, the car maker.

If you wander over to Google and type in “audi A4” (one of its popular models) it ranks first. So far so good.

However, if you type in “audi a4 review” they’re nowhere to be seen. Experience tells me that when someone types in the word “review” somewhere in a search string, they’re potentially close to a purchasing decision.

I also know from my own keyword research that “Audi a4 review” is typed in approximately 350 times a month in Australia, and around 3906 times a month globally.

It’s not a big step for Audi to include the word “review” or “reviews” in their title tag, meta data and possibly on page. This would definitely boost its rankings for what I would consider to be a very important key phrase.

Another benefit is the likelihood of Audi outranking potentially poor reviews, giving those reviews less chance to be read by potential consumers.

Granted, consumers prefer independent reviews rather than company “spin”, but it doesn’t hurt to be in the mix when it comes to people researching your products and services.

If you have a testimonial page, this is the perfect page on your site to optimise for “your brand/product/service review”, as your own happy customers lend credibility to your product or service offering.

Also make sure you at least create a Google Ad for “review” key phrases too.

Time for a review of your own?

Chris Thomas heads Reseo a search engine optimisation company which specialises in setting up and maintaining Google AdWords campaigns, Affiliate Programs and Search Engine Optimisation campaigns for a range of corporate clients.

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