You just can’t afford not optimizing your website for the search engines any more. While search engines remain the major source of online traffic search rankings are directly tied to the bottomline of every online business big or small. That’s why if you want to earn a decent income online you just absolutely need to either do SEO or have it done. And since everyone’s optimizing their sites the competition in the organic SERPs is really fierce. The good ol’ ways of purely manual optimization are gone. Today you need to be equipped with SEO tools and software of all kinds to do more in less time in order to outrank your competition. That’s why you need to pick the best marketing tools you can get.
One of the most popular ways of choosing SEO software (just like any other online or offline product) is by reading reviews and testimonials first. In the real world the first thing you do is probably ask your friends and kin about there experience with a particular good or service. Since it’s highly unlikely that you grandma has any clue to what you’re talking about asking about SEO tools, the best place to look for SEO software reviews is online. So without much thinking you just go to Google or whatever your favorite search engine is, type in “SEO software reviews” into the text box and hit find. Then you just click through the results reading different reviews to compare opinions and make up your mind. Sounds easy right? But this is where the problem begins.
The thing is that instead of finding different opinions and getting to know all the pros and cons of a particular product you only find overwhelmingly positive praises and sales pitches disguised as reviews. They’ll throw at you tons of evidence of how this or that SEO software package made Jon and Jane a million bucks in the first two weeks even though they never even launched it and perhaps didn’t even have a website. Soon you’ll discover that all of them are either written according to one template or are simply identical. These are affiliate reviews which are more of sales pitches designed to make you buy the product. Sometimes they will grab your attention with a catchy title like “SEO Elite is a scam” or “Why you shouldn’t buy Web CEO”. But as soon as you start reading the review it will quickly turn the other way round stating that this is the best product you can get and how about you buy it right now.
Now don’t get me wrong. There’s nothing bad about affiliate reviews. Ethical (if that’s the right word to use) affiliates will always use the product themselves and will only promote it if it’s really of high quality and is worth the money asked for it. The question is how do you tell the difference between the scam reviews and the real ones.
The fake sales-pitch-reviews are usually found on squeeze-page websites, where you’ll hardly find anything else apart from the fake review itself. These types of sites are usually PPC powered (which means they get most of their traffic from paid search ads) and they don’t depend on returning traffic. The real reviews, the ones you can trust are usually found on trusted sources: web magazines, niche websites and blogs, news portals and blogs of authority bloggers. These people have worked hard to earn their authority and reputation in the niche and they generally won’t risk it by pushing the products that are not worth it. Even the paid reviews done by power bloggers are usually quite objective and consider both the strong and weak points of the product or service in question.
