How To Write Good Product Reviews

Anytime people want to buy products online, they would check the reviews for that product on a seller’s website like Amazon or search on Google to see if there any product reviews available. People want to be cautious when buying something and generally want to avoid buying something that has a low rating or has any quality issues. They want to be reassured that whatever they plan on buying is a good, quality product that fulfills their need. A high-quality product review can help facilitate this process for buyers by providing guidance when shopping for any product.

What makes a well-written product review is presenting an overall balance of information and letting the reader reach their own conclusions.

It starts with a general overview or introduction of the product, maybe providing a history/background of the manufacturer of the product.
Provide some personal experience of using the product with some evidence or a quick story. A story can help build a connection with the reader.
Discuss about the positive and negative features of the product.
Compare this product to other similar products. How does it stack up with the competition? An example can be comparing the prices and features between competitive products.
Offer a conclusion based on personal experience and research. Ask readers to provide any feedback and/or comments.

When using Google to search for online product reviews, the resulting product reviews/content are ranked based on Google’s own automated ranking system. The factors that determine how the results will rank are based on the E-E-A-T principles, which stand for experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. It come down to how well the content / product review benefits the person and if it helped them fulfilled their needs.

Essential Elements of an Effective Product Review

Experience – Providing in-depth knowledge of the product through research and personal experience can help establish your authority on the product. Telling a story of how the product is a solution to their problem can help the buyer/reader realize it could be related to what they are looking for.

Facts – It can be helpful to provide some facts to the product review so it provides some non-biased information and establishes a reference when providing criticism of the product. When you provide the facts with your own personal insights, it shows you are a balanced reviewer and the reader/buyer is more likely to take your review with more weight.

Pros and Cons – Products have benefits and drawbacks and it is important to let the reader know before buying the product. It can help the reader decide if the trade-offs in the product is worth purchasing and if they can accept both the pros and cons of the product. Having this analysis helps establish your product review as balanced and is showing that it’s not biased toward a positive or negative review.

Multimedia – When talking about any product in a review, it helps to show pictures of what it looks like or even a video of how it works. It makes the review more engaging via a different learning style and this helps the reader better understand the product. This also demonstrates that the product was used by the reviewer and establishes trust that you know what you are talking about.

Example of a product picture from my own review page.

Accessibility – It is important to have content that is accessible and easy to navigate. This will help readers from any age or background feel that their varied viewpoints or needs are incorporated in some way in the review. Incorporating “signposting” helps the reader find the specific content in the review more quickly by placing headings, subheadings, and bullet points throughout the review.

SEO – Since product reviews are mostly found on the websites/blogs through search engines through Google, they need to achieve some high ranking on these search engines in order to be seen/read. One way to achieve high ranking is employing SEO (search engine optimizations) on the product review. This can include matching the product review to the search intent; is the person buying something or researching something? It can also include good title tags and meta descriptions which are under 60 and 150 characters, respectively that can help make the review more enticing which can make readers more likely to click on it when it shows up on the search engine results page.

Finalizing and Sharing Your Product Review

A product review itself also needs to reviewed for accuracy and clarity. It needs to be fact-checked to provide accurate information to the reader in order for them to make the right decision. It should stay focused on talking about the product and not wander into unrelated topics.

Towards the end of the product review, the reader can be encouraged to provide any feedback by writing in the comments section. This helps keep the conversation going and may answer any questions other readers might have about the review. A review with more comments tells the search engines that this content is engaging and they may rank this page higher on the results page.

In order for your review to be seen by the readers, it needs to be promoted through the right channels. The review can be posted on a blog/website where it can be discovered by online search engines. It can be also be promoted on a YouTube video, where a link to the review can placed in the video itself or in the description.

New changes to current products can occur over its lifetime like providing new features or even a recall if there are any discovered defects. Therefore, the product review should be updated with any changes in the product. To stay updated on a product, checking out the actual product website is a good first option. Any new updates would probably be first posted on that website. Another good option is checking out news websites like engadget.com if it’s a tech product or CNN.com for any general news because they are updated with new information on daily and even hourly basis.

What did you think about this guide on how to write a good product review? Did you feel this helped you in any way? Please feel free to leave any questions and/or comments below. Thanks!