The SEO Value of Ecommerce Customer Reviews

Writing by Nick Stamoulis in SEO

If you own an ecommerce website and are looking for ways to improve your SEO, you might already be sitting on a goldmine of content from your customer reviews! User generated content (UGC) is often overlooked by site owners, but it can have a wildly positive effect on your ecommerce SEO when you leverage it properly. Here are three ways customer reviews provide SEO value for ecommerce websites:

More content for the search engines spiders.
A lot of ecommerce product descriptions are short on content. Oftentimes, they are the descriptions sent out by the manufacturer, so multiple ecommerce websites might be using the same description. A customer review provides unique, fresh content that the search spiders can use to help read and properly index your page. This can help your website standout among your competition that are all using the same description and not adding their own unique spin and value to the product page. Adding a few customer reviews can also help keep your website from being flagged for duplicate content.

Targets long tail keywords.
Being able to target “[product name] review” on a product page is a great way to go after long tail keywords and attract a more targeted visitor. Someone looking for reviews about a particular product is probably looking to make a purchasing decision fairly soon. They have narrowed their search down to a specific product (Nike Free Run Women’s Shoes vs. Women’s Shoes”) and are looking for specific information about it. They want to know what other people think about the product and if it’s worth purchasing—online shopping is becoming very social and reading peer reviews has become an integral component of the experience. Having those customer reviews on your site will get your site ranking for product review related searches and bring that customer to your site where they are more likely to convert then someone just searching for “women’s shoes.”

Increase in CTR.
If you were to search for a product by name in Google, chances are you’d see at least one website with a set of gold stars beneath the listing. Those gold stars indicate that customer reviews have been incorporated into the product page. Having these gold stars underneath your listing makes your website pop on the search results page, which draws the searchers eye and can help increase the click through rate from the SERP to your website; some reports have indicated as much as 10-20% increases.

In addition to the SEO value of customer reviews, there are plenty of business-centric reasons to include product reviews on your ecommerce site. Here are a few interesting and compelling statistics :

1. 50 or more reviews per product can mean a 4.6% increase in conversion rates.

2. 63% of customers are more likely to make a purchase from a site which has user reviews.

3. Site visitors who interact with reviews and customer Q/A are 105% more likely to purchase while visiting, and spend 11% more than visitors who don’t interact with UGC.

4. Consumer reviews are significantly more trusted (nearly 12 times more) than descriptions that come from manufacturers

5. Reviews produce an average of 18% uplift in sales.