How You Can Build Links Easily With Product Reviews

The art of building links to increase search rankings has been a big topic in the SEO community for a long time. This always seems to be the topic of discussion at the Search Engine Optimization meetings I attend each month. Everyone seems to be looking for the latest and greatest ways to increase in-house […]

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The art of building links to increase search rankings has been a big topic in the SEO community for a long time. This always seems to be the topic of discussion at the Search Engine Optimization meetings I attend each month. Everyone seems to be looking for the latest and greatest ways to increase in-house links.

All of the examples below are great ideas that any link builder can use at an agency or in-house. In my experience, my business (empirecovers.com) has shown to benefit from each of these tactics and we’ll touch on each in the following.

Empire Covers has consistently targeted keywords such as boat covers, motorcycle covers and car covers, and ever since we moved link building in-house, we’ve been in the top 5 for all keywords we target.

If you know anything about Search Engine Optimization, you know there is a correlation between building text links and higher rankings. These are the steps we go through in order to build links.

The first thing we do is search through Twitter to find people with active followings and who are also engaged in the blogging community. We follow these Twitter users because they seem to be more willing to respond to tweets.

We also send mass emails every month in efforts to get people to review our product, but we have actually found Twitter is a much better tool in reaching out to people.

Also, Twitter seems to work faster in a sense, since people respond to a question much faster on the Twitter platform than via email or even Facebook.

Here are some more things to think about when engaging people:

  1. Try to enter or sponsor any contests they may be having.
  2. Do not talk about links or text links right off the bat. Try to engage them in their company or something that they are interested in.
  3. Even if it’s a YouTube video and not a text link, be happy with what you get. I have used many of the YouTube videos that people have produced for me  on our site and it is a great for the social side.

Using Product Reviews To Get Links

The most valuable and effective way to build links is to offer to send them a free sample of your product to review. I’ll note here that I was once at a conference and talked to someone from Bing that was in charge of their spam and SEO, he explained product reviews are a sort of grey area, but in my mind, any grey area is a green light.

Product reviews are an easy way to obtain publicity and feedback regarding your product or brand. We have averaged around 40 to 60 quality links per month via reviews and that seems to be working well for us.

Here are a few of my favorite example reviews and contest sponsorship links which we’ve obtained in this manner.

Video Review

This guy was extremely happy to find an RV cover that fit his abnormally large RV. The video he created was just the icing on the cake. Also, notice how we strategically asked him to add RV cover and empirecovers.com to the video. All in all, he created excellent review for us and gave us an SEO boost to boot.

Simple Step-by-Step Review

This is a great review for a boat cover that just happens to be very interesting.

Contest Sponsorship

This is a contest we sponsored last month for an RV cover, which generated a lot of community interest as well, since  RV people love to comment on links. It was extremely cool to do, but honestly, also extremely hard to put on, taking three people to manage the contest.

Kids Demo How To Use Product on YouTube

You’d likely have to pay an agency top dollar for that review. Everyone in the office and the Web loved it and we got a lot of hits because of it.

Blogger Creates Social Proof

This is a review we absolutely love and use on our site. This guy lived in Panama during the monsoon season and used our covers. Once we put up the video on our motorcycle page, our conversion rate went up by about .5% to 1%, so from that perspective alone, it was pretty amazing.

I believe this method of link building is beneficial in many ways, since it’s good for the customers and also helps with everyday content on your site. This stuff is priceless when it comes to free advertising, and if a cover company can do it, why can’t you?


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.


About the author

Jake Goldblum
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