Searches for your old products are valuable!

A friend recently asked for advice on choosing a new laptop within a particular budget. I browsed some sites that I trust to provide quality reviews, and then started looking at retailers in that country to see what was available.

What a mess.

Each laptop has dozens of different model numbers and sometimes the same model has different names in different countries. The model reviewed may have been superseded by a newer model, so the old one exists in some websites but not others. There can be models selling on Amazon that don’t exist on the brand’s own website and vice-versa.

If I see a glowing review of a laptop in a US website, it can be almost impossible to understand whether I can buy that laptop in India, or UK, or Australia.

Tech companies spend time and money getting products reviewed, and then lose much of the benefit over time and in other regions.

If you got a great review for one of your products in a big publication, then people (from many countries) are going to see that review and try to find that product. Possibly months or years after the review was written.

How to capture the value of these searches: permalink

It’s not difficult to capture any searches for that product code and take the user to a landing page that says “Hi, in your country, model abab12 is called acac11, and here is where to buy it”. Or “Model abab12 has been replaced with the newest version acac11 which is even better”.

Don’t remove old products immediately from your website. Instead use the searches they generate to promote your newer versions.

You should also track search volumes, both on Google and on your own website for different models. Are people searching for a model that doesn’t have a page on the site?