What are the must have features of a review site?

Before you buy a product or sign up with a site, everybody always looks for reviews first. Review sites are used to compare various providers or to  read experiences of a product that you would like to purchase. Most review site owners can make a really good living from this. If you want to build a review site as well or if you are already building a review site, you will of course wonder which features a review site must have in order to be successful and how you can make money from it. This article will go into more detail about the features a review site must have. 

Full control of what goes where

It is very important to have total control over your own review site. You need to be able to set the rankings of your offers, in some sort of top 10 for example and to create a layout that fits your needs and niche. Do you want an editorial ranking? Or do you want your consumers to rank an offer on your website? It’s important to have both options. Sometimes you want to give a ranking yourself, but sometimes you leave it up to your visitors. 

Do you want to keep your site clean with just a few offers? Or do you work with categories? When you set up your site, sometimes you want no distraction, so your visitors go straight to the proper offer. However if you have a lot of content you want decent structures so it is easy for your visitors to navigate. 

You need to have a search function on the site 

When you have review sites, it is extremely important to place a search function for users and visitors of your site. The Search option is the essential mechanism of a website for evaluating services or products, because users want quick results / answers to their search query, especially if they want to buy a certain product or if they want to sign up with a certain service. 

Users must have the possibility to post a review of a product or a service 

It is also important to give users the opportunity to post reviews on the site. This way other users and visitors of the site can read how others have experienced the use of a service or a product. It also helps them decide to buy a product or make use of a service. When building a review site there are several options that you can use to make it possible for users to post a review on your website. The most common method is to simply add a star rating and write feedback in a special form. 

Since submitting a review is an important function, it should be intuitively easy to find and use. You can suggest reviewers to write a review in special fields.

Let your visitors edit and change their comments

While many websites do not require registration for someone to rate and write a review, most sites do require at least an email or social login to verify the reviewer or allow the company to reply and comment or to respond to negative or positive reviews. As a user, you should be able to update, edit or delete your consumer review.

Installing a dashboard

Dashboards allow review site owners to view the statistics of valuable parameters at a glance. You want to keep track of the ins and outs of your website, check newly written comments or reviews and to see if your content is up to par with Google's guidelines.

Allow users to go directly to goods or services

When creating a review site, your visitors should be able to directly go to the website or offer they are interested in. Of course you want to add your affiliate in there discreetly, because this will be the way for you to make money. Without proper affiliate link tracking, you won’t have any conversions.

Automate your review site

Getting screenshots of the offers on your review site, cloaking your links, getting the proper meta description etc. can take up a lot of your time. Look for as much automation as possible. Inventing the wheel the first time is great, but doing this over and over again is just a waste of time.

Optimally post Blogs to see your visitors number increase

The advantage of creating a review website is that your users will create content themselves when they add reviews; However, it is still important to try to attract new visitors with informative articles, news reviews, guidelines, recommendations, surveys and research.

Make use of a feature to detect fraud and spam

Since reviews are an important tool for influencing customers and their purchasing decisions, it is expected that companies will try to use this to increase positive reviews of goods and services by paying people to write fake reviews. This problem mainly affects major review platforms. Smaller players should also be aware of the growing problem with spam and fake reviews.

To prevent fraud, website owners take measures such adding anti-spam services like recaptcha, and identifying suspicious behavioral patterns. 

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