Writing a quality product review takes time. So if you’re going to put in the time, you want to get the best results, right?

Thankfully, there are some tried-and-true tactics that you can start implementing in your reviews to help make them more effective.

Not only will learning how to write a product review make your reviews more helpful to your readers, but these tips will also help you increase your reviews’ conversion rates, which is important to your bottom line if you’re monetizing your site with affiliate marketing.

In this article:

Here are 10 tips you can implement today to start writing more helpful and effective product reviews.

At the end of this post, we’ll also include a product review template that you can use as a rough guideline for your reviews.

1. Avoid the “High School Essay” Introduction

As with any blog post, your review’s introduction is one of the most important elements because it’s what convinces readers to engage with the rest of your review.

However, it’s easy to fall back on the introduction style that you were taught in school, AKA the high school paper introduction.

Let’s say you’re writing a review of a mattress.

The high school essay introduction would go something like this:

“Mattresses are a very important part of every bedroom. Everyone needs a mattress to sleep on and there are a lot of options to choose from. What’s more, mattresses can be expensive, so it’s a big decision to make. No one likes wasting money, so you’ll probably want to do some research before you choose your mattress. You’ll also want to make sure your chosen mattress fits your sleeping style…”

None of that content is wrong – it’s just not really helpful to the person who’s reading a product review.

Someone who’s reading a review of a mattress already knows that choosing the right mattress is important – that’s why they’re reading a review instead of just purchasing the first mattress they come across!

A better introduction would get straight to the point with something like this:

“Is the CoolMattressCompany Model X mattress the best value mattress in 2022? To help you decide, we purchased this mattress and ran our own set of 20 hands-on tests.

In general, this mattress makes a great option for side sleepers who sleep hot, but back and stomach sleepers will probably want to stay away.

To learn where our conclusions came from and see all of our hands-on testing data, keep reading our full CoolMattressCompany Model X review”.

In a few sentences, this introduction builds trust, shows readers you actually tested the product, and shares some key conclusions so that readers start getting value from the post right away.

2. Showcase Your Expertise and How You Tested the Product

If you want people to trust your opinion, you need to give them a reason to.

Some of the people reading your review might already be fans of your website, in which case they’ll inherently trust your opinions because they know who you are.

However, a lot of people will also find your review from Google search, so they won’t have any preexisting reason to trust you when they start reading.

When they first land on your review, they’ll be asking themselves questions such as the following:

• Who is this person?
• Does this person know what they’re talking about?
• Did this person actually test the product?
• Why should I trust this person’s conclusions?

Ideally, you’ll want to showcase some expertise near the beginning of the review, as this can help convince visitors to keep reading.

The Sleep Foundation does a great job at this, with a summary box at the top that lists the review’s author qualifications and testing methodology. Readers can also click on the author or methodology to see more information in a popup.

For high-value products, you might want to go further and explain your actual testing methodology. That is, how you tested the product, what objective tests (if any) you ran, and so on.

For an example of a more in-depth methodology section, Wirecutter also does a great job of building trust by including an entire “How we tested” section that showcases the full testing methodology, along with real pictures from the testing (more on that a bit later).

3. Format Your Review to Make It Scannable

When you write a product review, you need to satisfy two very different types of readers:

• “Just give me the facts”-type people who just want the conclusions and don’t care about all of the details.
• “I need to know every single detail to make my decision”-type people who want to read all of the details and see all the test results.

While these might sound like two polar opposite objectives that are impossible to satisfy in the same review, you can cover both scenarios – you just need to focus on formatting.

The basic idea is that you want to use formatting to offer short, scannable conclusions for people who just want the high-level details, and then detailed explanations and data for people who want more information.

For example, consider another mattress review from Sleep Foundation – it offers a scannable information box at the top to quickly communicate the key details and then deeper explanations in paragraph format right below:

RTINGS.com is also one of the best here, with a tabbed summary box that includes pretty much all the information that “just give me the facts”-type readers will want. People who want more depth can keep reading to see where all of the conclusions come from, which RTINGS.com also includes below the summary.

If you’re using WordPress, you can use blocks to easily create custom callouts and summary sections.

4. Highlight Real Use Cases or Solved Pain Points

When you’re writing a review, it’s important to highlight a product’s features. However, features aren’t really what people care about.

Instead, readers are more concerned with how those features help them in the real world and solve any potential pain points that they’re dealing with.

For example, here’s a feature:

“Mattress A offers high-density Corelite foam”

Now, if that weren’t a made-up technology that was created just for this example, people who were really into mattresses might already know why “high-density Corelite foam” is important.

However, most of your readers who are just looking to replace their mattresses won’t have a firm idea of why they might want such a mattress.

For that reason, you want to go further and also explain why/how that feature will make the reader’s life better/easier.

Here’s an example:

“Do you ever wake up sweating in the middle of the night? Mattress A offers high-density Corelite foam which means the mattress actively moves heat away from your body. This helps keep the mattress cool to the touch all night long and lets you avoid those mid-sleep sweats”.

Now, the reader knows about the feature and how that feature will actually improve their life if they purchase the product.

5. Include Pros and Cons

If you want to write a quality product review, you can’t just focus on the good parts of a product – you also need to cover the bad parts.

There are two big reasons to include positives and negatives:

1. It demonstrates authenticity to your human readers and helps them make better decisions. Most products are not perfect and there are always trade-offs, even if they’re minor. Highlighting those tradeoffs will help people be more confident that the product is still right for them (or that an alternative might be better – more on that later).
2. Google has emphasized its desire to see pros and cons in its various Product Review updates, which means that not adding any information on a product’s downsides could make your review less likely to rank in Google.

However, you are free to play around with your “framing”, depending on how you prefer to approach your reviews.

The “standard” approach for product reviews is to use “pros” and “cons”, which will be universally understood by your readers.

If you want a more aggressive framing, you could do something like “what the product does well” and “what the product does poorly”.

And if you want a softer framing, you could do something like “what the product does well” and “where the product could improve”.

There’s no right or wrong here – it really just depends on your website’s tone of voice.

6. Tell People Who the Product Is For (And Also Who It’s Not For)

When writing product reviews, it’s easy to focus on telling readers how they will benefit from the product. And that’s important – it was tip

4 on this list!

However, it’s just as important to highlight the scenarios in which a person won’t benefit from the product (or at least where the product isn’t optimized for that scenario).

This is similar to the idea of pros and cons, but it’s about taking the “cons” and applying them to real-world use cases that the reader might be considering.

Highlighting use cases where the product is not a good fit serves two purposes:

First, the obvious purpose is that if the person does fit in one of the scenarios where the product isn’t a good fit, it will help them make a better purchase decision.

However, the slightly less obvious purpose is that it also makes people more confident in purchasing the product that you reviewed if they don’t fit into one of those scenarios.

For example, consider the conclusion of our review of the Gravity Forms plugin for WordPress. A user who only needs a simple contact form would know that maybe there are better options for them, while a user who wants to create more advanced types of forms would be even more confident that Gravity Forms is the right option for them.

For another example, here’s a different mattress review from a site named Sleepopolis that does a great job of highlighting both types of recommendations. Better yet, it also uses the “who it’s not for” section as a place to direct readers to products that might better fit their needs, which leads to the next point…

7. Recommend Alternative Products

It’s rare (almost impossible) for the product that you review to be the best option for literally every single person reading your post.

As we’ve discussed already, trying to position a product as being the perfect option for every person in the world will rightfully feel inauthentic to your readers.

Instead, be upfront that other products might be better in certain situations. Then, include those products and when the reader might want to choose them over the product that you reviewed (along with their drawbacks).

Here’s an example:

“While we think that Mattress A is the best option for side sleepers, back sleepers might not find it quite as comfortable. If you exclusively sleep on your back, you might want to consider Mattress B instead as it offers better support and comfort for back sleepers.”

Price is also a common reason for searching out alternatives, and it’s always a good idea to recommend some cheaper alternatives. If you highlight the drawbacks of these alternatives, they can even serve as a foil to highlight the advantages of the product that you reviewed.

The Wirecutter does a good job of always recommending a budget pick and also explaining the tradeoffs of going with a cheaper option.

Beyond being helpful for human readers, Google also looks to see alternative product recommendations as part of its Product Review algorithm updates.

8. Include Real Product Pictures or Screenshots

Sadly, the online product review space is not always a pillar of honesty and it’s common for some sites to “review” products that the writer hasn’t personally used.

Typically, these writers will just read existing reviews for the product and then summarize that information.

This causes two big issues if you want to make people take your reviews seriously:

• Savvy readers will be on the lookout for red flags, and a lack of original imagery is one of the biggest red flags there is.
• Google has been trying to target and de-rank these types of reviews with its many Product Review search algorithm updates. To help do that, original images are one of the factors that Google looks at when ranking review posts.

While showcasing your expertise and testing methodology is one way to assure visitors that your review is legitimate, another good strategy is to make sure to take your own unique product pictures and screenshots.

For physical products, it’s easy to display unique pictures because every shot you take will have its own unique background and framing.

If you’re reviewing software products, though, it can be a little trickier to highlight that your images are unique because every user experiences the same interface (more or less).

To address this, try to make use of any user input fields to show that you’ve really tested the product. You can then make sure to include that information in your screenshot.

For example, in our review of the Gravity Forms plugin, you can see how we used the form title and description to show that we really are using our own version of Gravity Forms for the review:

9. Highlight Important Purchase Details (Pricing, Variations, etc.)

This tip won’t apply to all products…

However, some products, especially digital software products, can have more complex pricing and licensing options.

For example, a piece of software might have different licenses that affect usage limits, features, support policies, and so on.

In these cases, it can be helpful to explain those different options to readers and guide them towards the variant/license that best fits their needs.

On the other hand, if you’re reviewing, say, a blender…you probably don’t need to spend much time on the purchase details because there’s only one option that people can purchase.

Instead, you can just link out to some of the best shops and call it a day.

10. Recap Important Conclusions at the End

To conclude your review, you’ll want to summarize all the important information from the previous sections and then end with a call to action.

You can start with a recap of the product’s pros and cons, along with the real-world use cases that it handles well (and poorly).

Then, you can finish with a CTA to purchase the product if it fits the user’s needs, along with some recommendations for alternative products that do a better job at handling the reviewed product’s weak spots.

The idea is that both you and the reader benefit whether or not the product is a good fit for them:

• If the product does fit their needs, the CTA will encourage visitors to go to the store and make their purchase (which might earn you a commission if you’re using affiliate marketing).
• If the product doesn’t meet their needs, the reader will have recommendations and links to other products that better match what they’re looking for (and those products also could contain your affiliate links if that’s part of your monetization strategy).

Copy and Paste This Product Review Template

Before writing your next review, copy and paste this template into a document, and keep it on file. By following each of these steps, you can ensure every review you write covers everything your reader needs to know:

1. Straight To The Point Intro that builds trust, shows readers you actually tested the product, and shares some key conclusions so that readers start getting value from the post right away
2. Author Summary that shows the expertise and credentials of the reviewer
3. How You Tested methodology / summary to build trust
4. Quick Scan Ratings / Summary for “give me the facts” visitors
5. In-Depth Details for “tell me everything” visitors
6. Highlight Real Use Cases to show how it solves actual pain points
7. Present Pros and Cons to verify authenticity
8. Show Who It Is For and Who It Is Not For to help people make the right decision
9. Recommend Alternative Products for the “this is not the right fit” crowd
10. Include Product Photos or Screenshots that you personally took to verify authenticity
11. Highlight Important Purchase Details for More Complex Products such as pricing plans, licensing terms, and so on
12. Summary / Recap with Calls To Action (CTAs) to purchase this product as well as the recommended alternatives

Another Tip to Improve Your Product Reviews

Beyond following the product review template from the previous section, another great way to improve your product reviews is to, well, read a lot of product reviews!

More importantly, read product reviews from successful sites in competitive areas.

If you noticed above, we included a lot of examples from websites reviewing mattresses.

There’s a reason for that – the mattress/sleep space is one of the most competitive spaces when it comes to product reviews, so a lot of the successful sites go above and beyond when it comes to structuring/formatting their reviews in an optimal way, testing their products (and showcasing their methodologies), highlighting the authority of their writers, and more.

Another example of a competitive niche would be headphone reviews. Sites like RTINGS.com also go above and beyond when it comes to showcasing their testing methodology and formatting their reviews.

While you might not be able to set up a full testing lab like RTINGS.com or some of the mattress review sites, reading reviews from these types of sites with a discerning eye can help you discover all types of strategies that you can take and apply to your own product reviews.

Start Writing Better Product Reviews Today

If you want to write helpful, effective product reviews, you need to go beyond just surface-level praise for a product.

First, you need to get the reader to trust you. You can get this trust by writing a strong introduction, showcasing your expertise, explaining your testing methodology, and including real images of the product.

From there, you want to highlight both the good and the bad of the product. More importantly, you want to connect those pros and cons to real-world scenarios and paint points.

You also want to explain any potentially confusing areas, such as pricing policies for software products.

Remember that you’ll have different types of readers. Some of them will want to read all 3,000 words of a detailed review, while others will just want the high points. To that end, try to add callouts and summary boxes that provide quick access to key information.

Finally, end with a recap of all the important information and clear calls to action that guide readers toward the best products for their situations.

If you’re ready to start publishing your own product reviews, WordPress.com offers an easy way to get started.

You can be up and running with a working website in just a few minutes and WordPress.com gives you all the tools you need to format your reviews in an optimal way, including summary boxes, buttons, and more.

To get started, create your WordPress.com account today. You can use the free plan to begin and then consider upgrading to the WordPress.com Business plan to access tons of useful plugins to improve your product reviews.

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How do you write a good product review?

Use this step-by-step guide to help you write a successful product review:.

Introduce the product or service. ... .

Empathize with your readers. ... .

Identify your target audience. ... .

Explain benefits and features. ... .

Include additional social proof. ... .

Summarize your review. ... .

Publish your review..

How do you write a good review example?

Helping Your Customers Craft the Perfect Positive Review.

“I highly recommend this business.”.

“Their customer service is second to none.”.

“The product quality is consistently outstanding, exceeding my expectations every time.”.

“I was completely impressed with their professionalism and customer service.”.

What are 5 star positive reviews examples?

Here are 10 positive review examples from satisfied customers:.

“I could not be happier with my results. ... .

“Quick service & very trustworthy. ... .

“Took care of my insurance needs. ... .

“Jon and the entire Valley Roofing Staff were very professional and were great to work with. ... .

“Amazing car buying experience! ... .

“Carlos was the best!.

How do I write a review on Google?

Log into your Google account, and search for the business you want to review. Find the reviews area (next to the star rating in your search results, or under the establishment's name in the sidebar in Google search) and click on the blue font that says “WRITE A REVIEW.”