A much belated Happy New Year to everyone! Yes, it’s been a while, and after a few weeks away (quite a few!), the Affiliate Docs are back in the swing again and delving into all your questions, conundrums and sites to unearth some nuggets of advice that we hope will help you to move forward over the course of 2011. On a personal level, the break was intentional as I wanted some time out to recharge and enjoy Xmas after missing it in 2009. Now that the New Year is in full flow, we’ve got lots lined up for the coming months. The Affiliate Chatroom will be relaunching in the next couple of weeks, although the Lingr room is still up and running if you fancy a chat with your fellow affiliates, and as soon as the new platform is sorted, we’ll release the details on Twitter and whack something up on site to let you know. We also have a few interviews lined up, with the first one coming in from Lammo.

So without further ado, our first Surgery review for 2011 comes from Darren who fired over the following question to see if the docs could offer some help with conversion rates on his polo shirt site …

“Hi.

Ok, so I have my site www.menspoloshirts.co.uk on page 1 of google for some decent terms, and the site is getting around 100 uniques a day, but the sales are not flowing in. What can I do to try and make more sales?

Thanks

Darren”

Site Preview [click to enlarge]:

Here’s what Carl and Lammo had to say …

Carl

Hi Darren.

I have taken a look around the site.

It seems your site has some CRO issues. Below are a few suggestions that would help increase clicks and conversions.

1. Increase the size of your images

They are currently too small. When people buy polo shirts they will look for detail and mainly want to see the stitching and logo. Also if you look to other fashion websites you will notice they always have a zoom function. Another trick would be to make your image clickable so that when the image is clicked you are taken to the merchant, it’s a little sneaky but that click may offer the visitor the greater detailed image they require.

2. Cloak all your URL’s

As everyone becomes more web savy, people look at what they are clicking on in the status bar. If a visitor see’s a strange looking URL they are less likely to click on it. If you cloak your URL’s you will have a clean URL e.g. www.menspoloshirts.co.uk/goto/bensherman.

There are various methods that are around for doing this. As your site is on built on WordPress there are plugins freely available to cloak URLs. If you know your way around your server you might want to look into editing the .htaccess file to cloak your affiliate links.

3. Tidy up your product pages

I would try to make your product pages look a little more appealing, as they currently look rather plain. Maybe offer more detail by including size, colours, additional images, but this obviously depends on the feed you are using. Use colour and style to make your product pages look a less formal.

4. Call to action

Your call to action button [Buy Now] maybe be a little aggressive, visitors when clothes shopping like to [add to basket] or want [more information] – changing the text of this button may encourage more clicks (and more cookie drops).

5. Use logos 

As you are offering a comparison service, I would make sure the logos of the retailers appear instead of your text. Visitors are more likely to click images as opposed to text. The current table looks a little plain and a little dated; by making this more appealing, you may reduce the bounce rate and increase CTR. Some of these designs on Patterntap and Six Revisions may help with the comparison tables. Highlighting the best price row will help with CTR.

6. Check your feeds

I noticed that many of the items I clicked on were out of stock which can really affect bounce rate. You may need to update your feeds more often. If you receive a lot of long tail traffic it’s likely that the visitor is looking for that particular shirt, and if it is not available the visitor will go back to Google and search again.

Another issue of course might have nothing to with your site; there maybe conversion issues at some of the merchants you are using which is something else to consider.

Let us know if you implement any of the changes.

Lammo

Hi Darren.

What keywords are you getting traffic for? Are they buyers or browsers?

If they’re searching for “mens polo shirts” then they probably haven’t decided what shirt they want to buy, whereas if they’re searching for “ben sherman romford polo shirt”, then you’re more likely to close the sale.

One thing I spotted looking at Ben Sherman and Quicksilver (and quite a few other categories) is the number of products with “no image”. In the fashion sector, you’re never going to sell items that people can’t see – I’d remove every single product that doesn’t have an image, and on the single product page, such as this one for example , I’d make the image much larger (or at least have the option for the customer to enlarge it).

I’d also try offering up some “related” shirts on these single product pages – that way if customers don’t like that shirt, you’re offering them some relevant alternatives (think similar colour/style/brand – one of each), think of Amazon’s “You might also like” feature.

Hope that helps.

Editor’s Note

Thanks for sending in your site for review Darren and hope you find the advice useful – if you need any more specifics, please fire them into the comments and we’ll get them answered. If anyone else has any suggestions or advice for Darren we’d love to hear them in the comments below …

A couple of weeks ago I agreed to come onboard with Steve and work on Affiliate Doctors. One of the first things I took over was the concept of a weekly affiliate chat. I’ve been using a service called Lingr.com for a while now, it’s free and it’s pretty awesome.

To get things moving, I’ve set up a chat room on Lingr. Feel free to drop in anytime (I’m in there most of the time and I know a few of the Docs lurk from time to time).

To keep things nice and simple for everyone to remember, the Lingr account can be accessed here:

www.affiliatechatroom.co.uk

It doesn’t get any simpler than that.

Our aim is to have a weekly session for the Affiliate Docs and other affiliates to get together, chat and talk through issues (I’ll be moderating). So this Thursday 2nd Dec 2010 at 8:00pm, we will have a few of the Docs and team in for the first scheduled drop in session.

Why Lingr?

It’s free, it’s stable, it has growl support (for you mac fans) and it has a pretty decent (and free) iPad & iPhone app.

Do I need to do anything?

Just visit www.affiliatechatroom.co.uk and signup (Steve adds – and don’t use Internet Explorer!)

See you there!

Site Preview [click to enlarge]:

Khalid asks: “Hi all.

I’ve been running CentralScotlandJoinery.co.uk for a little under two years now and I’ve achieved a page 1 ranking for “double glazing” amongst many other long tail terms.
 
The site gets just shy of 2,000 unique visitors per month but the conversion rate is under 1%.
 
I’ve recently installed ClickTale.com to assess where visitors are going and trying to ascertain where I could improve, do you have any suggestions?
 
Kind Regards,
 
Khalid”

Here’s what Dan and Carl had to say …

Dan

Hi, Khalid, how are things going?

Here are some notes that I think will help in your quest to improve your site’s conversion rate. I will keep these mainly to bullet points to hopefully keep things clear.

 
THE PROBLEM

You have 2 main conversion points on the site from what I can see. Both are ‘contact us’ forms. Neither is particularly straightforward. There is no real enticement for anyone to contact you (over & above a competitor), and each of your calls to action is very easy to miss.

NOTES ON EACH OF THE CONVERSION POINTS

Conversion Point 1: This is a little contact form on the right-hand side of most pages. Here are the issues with this:

1. It’s in an area that’s more usually used for navigation, contextual information, or ads, i.e. it’s a place that’s easy to ignore/miss.
2. The text on the form is dark grey on dark blue.
3. The call to action at the top is “We’ll Call You Back!”.

Conversion Point 2: This is reached by clicking ‘Get a FREE Quote!’ from the top navigation.

1. On this page, you’re now asking for the full address (rather than just a postcode).
2. The form is much longer than the one on the right-hand side.
3. It’s full of scary language telling people that by asking for a quote they won’t be “pressured”, it shouldn’t “ring alarm bells” and that they won’t be “pushed into buying”. (There’s no need for this, as they’ve already clicked the ‘give me a quote’ button).
4. The main area that points through to this is the top navigation, alongside that there is a graphic dumped in the middle of some other pages that doesn’t really spell out what it’s trying to say.

HOW TO FIX ALL OF THIS

Here are some suggestions that may help fixing this:

1. Create a simple PDF guide along the lines of “10 Things You Need To Know Before Hiring a Tradesman”. Use this as a friendly extra enticement for visitors to fill in your quote forms.
2. Fix the call to action on your right-hand contact form. You could trial “Claim Your Free Quote” vs “Download Your Free Guide” (with detail underneath) to see which works better.
3. Fix the text colour on your right-hand contact form so that people can read it.
4. Add a large call to action at the foot of the content area on each page – link this through to your ‘free quote’ page.
5. Remove all the scary language from your ‘free quote’ page. Trial simplifying the form. If you really want to add some extras to that page, try testimonials. (I’ve found adding testimonials below forms sometimes works well).
6. Your ‘free quote’ area in the top navigation – you could trial moving that out into the whitespace above to give it greater visibility.
7. Things like ‘Claim Your Free Quote’ on buttons often work better than ‘Send’ or ‘Submit’.

CONVERSION RATE(S)

Finally, in Google Analytics, I would monitor whether these changes have a positive effect by looking at 3 ‘before’ & ‘after’ conversion rates, rather than just 1. They would be:

1. The percentage of site visits that result in someone filling in your right-hand column form (ie. do the changes to that form increase the likelihood of someone completing it).
2. The percentage of site visits that result in someone visiting the ‘free quote’ page. (i.e. do your calls to action get visitors to reach that page, and when you make a change does it increase or decrease that).
3. The percentage of unique ‘free quote’ page views who complete the form.

If you made the changes bit by bit, it would give you an idea of exactly which had the biggest effect, allowing you to follow similar patterns on your other sites. You could run them through Google’s Website Optimizer, though it may take a while with your current traffic.

I hope something here’s been helpful. Apologies for all the bullets!

Dan.

Carl

Hi Khalid.

Conversion Rate Optimisation is not my usual specialist area – but here’s a few deas that might help you out.

1. Display your customer testimonials block higher up the page, it’s currently appearing below the fold. You want to instill immediately trust to the visitor.

2. Change the black and white images to colour, they look quite dull and miserable, making the subject matter seem boring and almost a little daunting.

3. As most people know that the majority of attention is focused on the top right of the page, I suggest moving your “We’ll call you back” to a more prominent location and emphasise that you’re willing to reduce the hassle by calling them back. This will allow for your “recent installations” to appear higher up the page – everyone loves seeing examples of work in any trade.

4. A revamp of your “We’ll call you back” will almost definitely help improve conversions. Make the form look different, maybe number each step, “5 steps to a safer, more environmentally and better looking home” using your checklist from the image on the homepage. Make the form design more interesting in the design of windows around a house, there are some great customised forms out there (see: Pattern Tap)

5. For each image of the “recent installations” gallery add the testimonial to match up – again, this will instill more trust in to your website, as let’s face it, builders don’t exactly have the best rep. A genuine letter and images work well together.

6. The top right of the homepage has a lot of white space, might be worth adding banners explaining how long you have been in business, how many installations you have successfully completed or something like “We have installed enough glass to cover Celtic park x10″, plus any builders association badges you belong to.

7. Change the colours / design of the tabs in the header menu for “Testimonials” and “Why Us” – it immediately lets people know that you’re proud of what you do and that you want them to see the work for themselves.

8. Sounds simple, but a huge red bendy arrow to “Get a Quote” should influence clicks to that page.

9. I see the site is built on WordPress, so I’d suggest using Gravity Forms to help log data but allow you to customise the forms to have more appeal and look more trustworthy; the current forms look a little amateurish.

10. With all the great images you take going forward, I suggest you have a business board in the window to prove that those windows were installed by your business, as it’s quite easy for people to take pictures of any double glazing installation.

As with any building, plumbers or tradesman website, it’s about instilling trust in your visitor and making your business seem family friendly, trustworthy and reliable.

Carl

“Hi Doctors!

My question is about analytics tracking in ecommerce.

We’re looking to set up ecommerce tracking in Google Analytics on a custom-built ecommerce website.

What are the pitfalls or issues that we should look out for when implementing the tracking?  I’m looking for any issues that people have run into that we should best avoid.

One issue that we’ve already come across is duplicate entries if the order success page (the one that contains the ecommerce tracking code) is refreshed by the customer.

Anything else we should watch out for?

Cheers!

Tim”

Dan

Hi, Tim, how are you?

To be honest, it’s not too difficult & you can’t go far wrong. Here are a few tips that may be useful:

1. Decide whether or not to include tax. You’re supposed to put it in there, but you don’t have to. If you wanted to you could even just put your margin numbers in there to help you figure out ROI more easily.

2. Think about what categories you want to track before you install the code. Often sites have categories like “Kitchen > Knives”. Decide what level of granularity you’re interested in.

3. There are some extra fields in there like ‘affiliation’. If you want you can put anything you want from your internal system into there, which you can then use later on using ‘advanced segments’. For example you could put voucher code names in there.

4. Spend a little bit of time over the first few weeks comparing the numbers & order IDs against your internal system. The numbers in google analytics will never be 100% accurate, but as long as the inaccuracy doesn’t go up/down too much you’re fine.

Hope that helps!

As soon as I had my AOL account (on my Nan’s credit card) I began publishing content to the internet and creating basic websites and scripts to prevent my younger brothers and sisters from accessing my PC (Compaq 386 50Mhz – run Doom not much else).

I quickly discovered that what was the point of creating a website if no one visited?, so began spamming the keyword and title tag of my websites and realised through monitoring my AW stats – it worked! Next was to convert the traffic I had into money. I created my first two websites which were both payday loan focussed, I then had 2 websites that were making me £70 a day in ads and lead sales as opposed to the £12 a week my friends were earning as a paperboy.

Years later, many tests, mistakes and lots of forum reading I created and sold the largest online Nintendo Wii community. I developed my hobby in SEO whilst working as a MCSE engineer before joining my first agency.

I now work full-time as an corporate SEO consultant at leading SEO agency Ayima, working alongside some of the most talented SEO’s in the world on FTSE and Nasdaq listed companies.

I run a number of affiliate and lead websites which means I have little time to blog at www.carlhendy.com (good excuse) – but enjoy helping others with site reviews and suggestions on driving traffic to websites.

My twitter: http://twitter.com/carlhendy

Carl’s Introductory Post

With over 13 years experience on the web, Carl’s early exploits and passion for IT began at an early age when he would try (and succeed in) hacking his school computer network. It wasn’t long before Carl began to hone his skills and put them to better use when he started building basic sites and learning how to generate traffic (his first journey into SEO), before succeeding to generate a healthy income through lead generation and affiliate marketing, all whilst his mates were doing paper rounds!

Carl continued to develop his SEO skills with his own sites, and while working as an MCSE engineer, he developed and later went on to sell the largest online Nintendo Wii community site. Then, Carl had a “clever idea” and decided to try his hand working in the banking sector as a “Tradddderrrrr” (something his Ayima boss, Rob Kerry likes to rib him about!). Thankfully, Carl decided that it wasn’t for him and made a swift return to the net before landing his current role as a fully fledged SEO with Ayima.

Splitting time between his home town of Norwich and where he currently lives on the Thames Estuary, Carl is keen to stress that he’s ‘not an Essex boy’. Outside of work, Carl likes to indulge his allegiance as a long suffering Liverpool fan and loves to watch Alan Partridge, Derren Brown and The Inbetweeners. A self-confessed Grand Designs addict, Carl plans to one day tackle his own development and is constantly sketching out his ideas.

Carl’s main areas of expertise are SEO, affiliate marketing and domaining. He enjoys helping and advising others wherever he can, as in his own words, “I’ve seen too many people invest too much time and money into websites that just will never work because of false promises that someone has told them”. We’re delighted to welcome Carl on board to the Affiliate Doctor’s panel and look forward to reading some insights in the coming weeks.

Welcome on board Carl.

Carl’s Bio

Steve has been moaning at me for weeks about giving you a bio so I’m going to lift the ‘about me’ from my blog…

I own Hodgetastic
I run Think Visibility
I’m a writer for SEOBullshit.com
I’m an editor for Affiliate Doctors
I’m an award winning singer & songwriter
I’m a moderator on Affiliates4u forum
I have been interviewed on Radio 4!
I’m half of the PadAddicts Podcast
I have a microblog with snippets of conversation from our office
I’ve won awards at time limited coding events –  Charity Hack (1st Prize), Warblecamp (1st Prize), Charity Hack 2010 (1st Prize)
I spend far to much time lurking on Reddit & Hacker News
I’ve created  or being involved with Magic Combos, Geekery.in, Saturday Lottery Results and Tweet Trumps
A few years ago I started MTGCast.com
I’ve spoken at a few events over the past few years (and I’m always open to new things)
I’ve organised and attended many of the UK barcamps
I’m an avid player of TF2 & Starcraft
I have a strange obsession with the music of Busted
I’m on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Lanyrd

Any questions?

Didn’t think so… you’re probably still watching the YouTube video of me singing… get back to work.

Dom’s Introductory Post

Dom “The Hodge” Hodgson is the 23 year old blogger, speaker, conference organiser, Hariboholic funny man and founder of Hodgetastic in Leeds, Yorkshire. His first encounter with t’internet was at the local library as a teenager, and as a bit of a geek, it didn’t take long before he was building his very first site on Geocities and Fortune City (but you’ll have to get Dom very drunk to extract the url!).

A familiar face on the conference circuit for a number of years, Dom set up his own conference to plug a gap he spotted and cover “the things that usually get left behind in the web design process”. In March 2009, Think Visibility was born. With four very successful and critically acclaimed conferences under his belt, Think Visbility focuses on a mainstay of subjects such as SEO, PPC and Affiliate Marketing, but covers other areas such as domaining, usability, accessibility and Social Media.

When he’s not preparing and organising the next Think Vis, Dom organises and gets involved in a number of ‘Hack days’ – for those of you who don’t know what they are, in Dom’s own words, “… it’s where you stick a load of people in a room, feed them, water them, take them out for occasional walks, give them power and WiFi and see what they build :)”.

Prior to his many ventures and interests, Dom worked as a special needs carer at a Mencap respite centre for 4 years (2 spent as a volunteer). To this day, Dom continues to help out deserving causes and charities, and at the beginning of 2010 he started a series of charitable runs under the banner of “Hodge On The Run” (when’s the next one?!).  His first run was to help raise money for a charity close to my heart, The Pace Centre. This entailed Dom wearing a pilot’s uniform and running(?) several miles around Leeds city centre with a toy car on his head. If you’d like to see more, give him a poke to sort out the next challenge!

Away from all geekery and event organisation, Dom likes to relax by sitting back, putting his feet up and, wait for it, partaking in even more geekery with a session or two of Minecraft.  With a penchant for ‘adventures’, Dom has a habit of doing silly things; to give you an idea, here’s a classic example of when he went on a bagel delivery caper!

Dom has kindly agreed to come on board and help out as an Editor at Affiliate Doctors, so without further ado, welcome on board Dom!

Dom’s Bio

Today’s review site comes from James (click to enlarge the screenshot):

“I run what I would call a semi successful website: www.enterf1.com

It looks the part in the Formula 1 niche and has occasional, if not not day to day postings about the sport of F1.

But it makes it’s money from the F1 tickets section which I have now been building up the SEO on for a few years:

Examples:

www.enterf1.com/f1-tickets.asp
www.enterf1.com/f1-tickets/britain.asp

A lot of my traffic from google is ticket related but I want to increase the traffic and therefore conversion of my ticket landing pages. I’m in a lot of top 10 positions but am fighting some big boy ticket companies making it difficult to get number 1’s.

Because of this I’ve started going after the long tail and setup small pages likes this:

www.enterf1.com/f1-tickets/Montreal-F1-2010-Tickets.asp

That one has proved a winner and is making me hundreds of pounds – but still the motivation isn’t there to keep setting them up as I’m never sure if it looks like I’m spamming Google, setting up too many small pages, how to link to them etc..

If you look at the bottom of a main ticket landing page you’ll see a grid of ‘related grand prix information’ links – this is my current method for linking to the longtail:

www.enterf1.com/f1-tickets/canada.asp

Would love some guidance on how to get to the next traffic level with this site!

Thanks

James.”

Here’s what Kieron and Kirsty had to say …

Kieron

First of all by adding smaller subpages to Google you’re not spamming it, you’re creating fresh content. This is good. My advice is that you have found something that works so replicate, replicate and then replicate some more! Google must like these pages if it’s serving them up in the index and you’re dominating for your keywords, phrases. So my first bit of advice is to make hay while the sun shines. We all know how fickle Google can be so if you have found something that works then maximise it.

With regards to other methods to drive traffic to your site, here are some suggestions:

1. Facebook “Like” Box: First of all, get an EnterF1 Facebook page set up and then put the Facebook “Like” box in your sidebar. For an example of this in action, look at the right hand side of TechCrunch.com. This gives your users another avenue to become a fan of your site and interact with you. Before you know it, you could have 10,000 Facebook fans and another revenue stream completely.

2. Facebook “Like” Buttons: On key pages and blog posts within your site implement the Facebook “Like” Button as seen on my playlist pages at http://sharemyplaylists.com/the-soundtrack-to-september-2010/. This means that anyone who views an article/page etc. on your site which displays this button can press it, and with 1 click it will appear in their Facebook wall. So for example if 20 people who have on average 200 friends click the like button on any given day that’s potentially 4,000 additional people per day who will see content from your site. Or an extra 120,000 per month. Let’s not forget that Facebook is the new internet so we should all be using it to it’s fullest.

3. Share to Twitter: Twitter is another source of traffic that you should be utilising. You can also get a whole load of “Tweet this” or “Retweet” buttons that have the same effect as the Facebook Like button.  You should also open a Twitter EnterF1 account and use it as a separate communication channel, like Facebook.

In terms of ShareMyPlaylists.com, after Google, Facebook & Twitter are my biggest referrers. So for not much work and no cost you should be able to drive your traffic up quite quickly.

Kirsty

Well, they say content is king and your successful page targeting the long tail has definately shown how effective content that targets less competitve search phrases can be.

I would definately produce more pages of this nature, but I’d be cautious about doing too many with content that was very similar or targeting subtle variations of strongly related phrases. Unless you absolutely went to town with it though, I’d say the worst that might happen is that Google will pick a few which it considers to be relevant to a wide range of search terms and ignore the rest. I see this quite frequently on my own sites where I have a few articles touching on the same subject areas. Frustratingly, sometimes the one that is “picked” isn’t always the right one!

You’re already doing a great job with news articles and forum posts on the site, drivers profiles, team profiles, as well as some very snazzy widgets to make your sales pages compelling (your next race feature on the home page for example!) – you’ve clearly put a lot into this site. If it were my site, I’d probably add 4 or 5 articles with good unique content around each of your F1 locations.  Don’t make the long tail terms too closely related to each other or it’ll probably just muddy the waters as I mentioned above. You can either link to them from the appropriate pages (not 100% ideal), or perhaps re-jig your site menu structures to link to the pages discreetly from as many other relevant pages as possible. Obviously if you add too much to the footer of your pages your site will look spammy.

To monetise it further I’d probably also add pages for each of the grand prix locations and try to sell some accommodation to people looking to go to these events.  I would also go into more depth with content around merchandise. I see you’re using ECU to create some nice looking pages around merchandise brand names, however you may want to go into this a bit deeper and target some specific items that sell really well. Just ask your network or merchant for the info and they should be happy to give it to you.

Editor’s Note

Thanks for sending in your site James, would love to do a follow up to see how things progress. As an afterthought, you have a lot of regular content going up on site from multiple authors. If you haven’t done so already, you should think about making an application to have your news articles featured in Google News and widen the site’s exposure further (there are some pre-requisites). Kieron published an article all about it here – getting your site featured in Google News.

Do you have any tips for James?

“This is a general question really and might apply to any affiliate site.

Suppose you want to feature a product that has several models and is available from several retailers. If you’re not using JS to bring in the comparisons and there’s say 12 mentions of the model, perhaps with just a model number varying…

Presumably that could suffer a keyword stuffing penalty?

So, suppose it’s also got a ~500 words of content that someone has written.

2 options – wondering which is ‘safest’ from an seo point of view:

1. Keep the content on one page with a big click-here box and put the comparison on another robots blocked page (then risk not having direct call to action on indexed pages).

2. Put it all on the same page and hope the algo doesn’t take offence.

It’s very noticeable that the big comparison sites have pages right up high in Google where there is very little original content on the page, and plenty aren’t running JS to show the comparison. So presumably those are ranked because of the site authority.

However, if you’ve got a newish site, what’s the safest option?

Also an afterthought: if you use JS to bring in comparisons that are hidden from the engines and you’re an affiliate site, aren’t you still at risk of a bad manual review if you don’t have a decent level of content as well (or is that paranoid).

Thanks Bob”

Kier

Hi Bob

I wouldn’t worry too much about a penalty or mess about keeping robots out of a certain page etc. Just build a good site and you should be fine.

It takes a lot more to annoy Google than most people think. Whilst you may not have loads of original content (although it’s always a good idea) if the comparison you’re providing is decent they’re unlikely to give you a mad manual review at least.

Of course over time Google does tweak the algo to ensure that users get the best experience so you might get penalised. Having said that you can still send paid traffic to the site and if it’s well built then it should be a good converter for you.

Lammo

Hi Bob

Personally, I’d keep it all on the one page, displaying the prices only (therefore not showing the product title, in this case slightly differing model numbers) embedded within the main content. I’d serve the prices using Java, as I see no benefit in making this content spiderable.

You’re spot on I think that the big players are ranking well without much in the way of content due to their authority overall – If you want to beat them, you’re going to need something better, whether that be a good level of unique content, user reviews, or lots of links to the product pages.

In short, I wouldn’t worry about getting a bad manual review for having a low level of content. I’d make sure I had a good level of content! The days of knocking up a quick 100,000 page “price comparison” site are long gone I’m afraid – There is no easy route to riches anymore!