Write high quality product reviews on your ecommerce website
Publishing high quality product reviews on your ecommerce or product review site can help shoppers learn more about a product before purchase. For example, reviews can guide shoppers between competing products, helping shoppers pick the best make or model for their needs and budget.
To help shoppers discover your product reviews in Google Search and on other Google surfaces, follow these best practices:
- Evaluate the product from a user’s perspective.
- Demonstrate that you are knowledgeable about the products reviewed – show you are an expert.
- Provide evidence such as visuals, audio, or other links of your own experience with the product, to support your expertise and reinforce the authenticity of your review.
- Share quantitative measurements about how a product measures up in various categories of performance.
- Explain what sets a product apart from its competitors.
- Cover comparable products to consider, or explain which products might be best for certain uses or circumstances.
- Discuss the benefits and drawbacks of a particular product, based on your own original research.
- Describe how a product has evolved from previous models or releases to provide improvements, address issues, or otherwise help users in making a purchase decision.
- Identify key decision-making factors for the product’s category and how the product performs in those areas (for example, a car review might determine that fuel economy, safety, and handling are key decision-making factors and rate performance in those areas).
- Describe key choices in how a product has been designed and their effect on the users beyond what the manufacturer says.
- Include links to other useful resources (your own or from other sites) to help a reader make a decision.
- Consider including links to multiple sellers to give the reader the option to purchase from their merchant of choice.
Product reviews often use affiliate links to products listed on an ecommerce site, so that if a shopper finds a review useful and follows the provided link to purchase a product, the creator of the review is rewarded by the seller. See also Google’s position on affiliate programs.
Product reviews can be a great resource for shoppers when deciding which product to purchase. When writing reviews, focus on the quality and originality of your reviews, not the length, following as many of the above best practices as you are able. This will deliver the most value to shoppers reading your reviews.
Product reviews update and your site
Update On Wednesday, December 1, 2021
Back in April 2021, we shared a product reviews update that was designed to promote high quality product reviews. We are now rolling out a new update, the first major update since April, that may change how your product reviews rank in search results. In particular, if you have made positive changes to your content, you may see that improvement reflected as part of this latest release. However, note that our automated assessment of product review content is only one of many factors used in ranking content, so changes can happen at any time for various reasons.
Over time we have received more feedback from users on what type of review content is deemed trustworthy and useful, motivating us to provide additional product review guidance. Users have told us that they trust reviews with evidence of products actually being tested, and prefer to have more options to purchase the product.
Therefore we are introducing two new best practices for product reviews, to take effect in a future update.
- Provide evidence such as visuals, audio, or other links of your own experience with the product, to support your expertise and reinforce the authenticity of your review.
- Include links to multiple sellers to give the reader the option to purchase from their merchant of choice.
These best practices, combined with the best practices shared back in April, have now been merged into a single documentation page, Write high quality product reviews.
For additional advice on creating great content or questions on the product review best practices, please check out Google Search Central help pages and our public forums.