Shopping and Brand Comparison Pages for SEO

If you do affiliate marketing it is probably best to have few distracting features on your end landing page for each individual product or offer. It is best to sell it as THE ONLY option.

But in some cases it may take a while to gain enough authority to rank for individual brands or products if the market is competitive. Many comparison shoppers include multiple brands or product names in their search queries. Creating comparison pages makes it easy to rank for comparision type queries. If markets are competitive with a few top players it is easy to draw in a ton of traffic by creating pages comparing the top few brands, especially if you use key shopping or comparison review words in the page content like

  • category / product type

  • find
  • compare
  • send
  • buy
  • review
  • reviews
  • vs
  • versus
  • better
  • best
  • top
  • cheaper
  • cheapest
  • deals
  • coupons
  • fastest
  • speed
  • safest
  • power
  • feedback
  • side effects (for drugs, etc.)
  • free shipping

You can get a great list of relevant topic specific shopping / sorting words for your products, category or theme by going to comparison shopping sites like Shopping.com, Yahoo! Shopping or Froogle. You can also go to Amazon to read a ton of reviews because people will likely search for things in similar ways to how they write about them.

If your market is advanced or technical in nature and you can offer a significant amount of comparison data you may also want to create a PDF of the comparisons, as it is pretty easy to rank for most queries when you add PDF to the search query.

Covering smaller brands on some pages is a smart idea since they will be less competitive to rank for. Even if your review recommends other products once they get to the brand specific page you still can find cheap and easy traffic by creating targeted pages for those brands. Plus if they do any marketing to try to increase their marketshare many people will use search engines to look for reviews. Just like for the + PDF searches are not too competitive many of the brand term + product name + review are not too competitive (outside of the hosting industry anyway).

Published: May 20, 2006 by Aaron Wall in seo tips

Comments

May 21, 2006 - 3:08pm

Good tips. I just wordtracked some combinations of manufacturer kw and found some nice search volume for phrases I had never thought of.

I like your idea to read reviews from Amazon.com or other sites w/ reviews. Getting inside the mind/vocabulary of the searcher is essential to finding all the weird ways that they are trying to get to your product/service.

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