Winning “Best Of” Rankings for a Tech Publisher
Client: An affiliate publisher site in the competitive high-end home audio niche.
Challenges We Faced
The client’s “best of” review articles were being outranked by e-commerce stores and larger publishers.
Losing “Commercial” Keywords
Their “best bookshelf speakers” (commercial) article was on page 3, beaten by BestBuy and Wirecutter.
Poor Content Structure
The articles were long blocks of text, not structured for easy comparison, and failed to match the user’s “investigation” intent.
Low Affiliate CTR
Users were reading the content but not clicking the affiliate links, as the value proposition was unclear.
Intent Mismatch
The “best of” articles were full of “how to set up speakers” (informational) content, diluting the commercial message.
No Rich Snippets
The pages were not winning Review or FAQ rich snippets, making them “invisible” on the SERP.
Win Your “Money” Keywords
“Tired of losing ‘best of’ rankings? Our search intent optimization will restructure your content to match user intent and win back your traffic.”
Our Approach – How We Solved These Challenges
Commercial Investigation Optimization
We completely re-wrote their top 10 “money” pages.
We added clear comparison tables, “Best For” labels (e.g., “Best for Small Rooms”), and concise pros/cons for each product.
Content-to-Intent Matching
We moved all the “how-to” (informational) content from the review pages to separate blog posts.
We then linked from the review pages to these new guides, creating a clean user journey.
On-Page & SERP Feature Optimization
Implemented Review and FAQ schema on all commercial pages. This helped them immediately win rich snippets, increasing their SERP real estate.
UI/UX & User Journey Analysis
We used User Survey & Feedback Tools (like Hotjar) to understand why users weren’t clicking. This led to a redesign of their “Check Price” buttons, making them clearer and more trustworthy.
Results
| Metric | Before | After | Growth |
|---|---|---|---|
| Affiliate Link CTR | 3.5% | 9.0% | +157% |
| Rankings for “Best [Product]” Keywords | Avg. Pos. 18 | Avg. Pos. 3 | +15 spots |
| Organic Traffic (Commercial Pages) | 4,000/mo | 19,000/mo | +375% |
Free Commercial Intent Analysis
“Losing your most valuable keywords? Request a Free Commercial Intent Analysis and let us show you how to beat your competitors!”
Advice for Marketers & Brand Owners
- Analyze the SERP. For “best of” keywords, Google always shows comparison pages. Match that format, but do it better.
- Make your content scannable. Users investigating a purchase want quick comparisons. Use tables, lists, and bold text.
- Review schema is a must for commercial content. It builds trust and dramatically increases click-through rate.
- Give users only what they want. If they are comparing products, don’t bog them down with a 2,000-word history of the technology. Save that for an informational post.
Extra Factors That Made It Work
- A heavy reliance on SERP Analysis Tools (Ahrefs, SEMrush) to reverse-engineer the exact page structure Google wanted to see.
- Implementing Review schema with aggregate ratings was a key factor in winning high-CTR snippets.
- Separating informational content from commercial content allowed both page types to rank for their respective intent.
