Your question is “How does User-generated content help in SEO?” Well, Let’s discuss.
User-generated content (UGC) may comprise any type of content which is created by users of online platforms. There is a variety of UGC, from the most creative to the common ones. The main categories include Blogging, podcasting, review sites, social networking, digital videos, product reviews, photographs, wikis, open forums, question and answer databases etc.
UGC is trusted by consumers/visitors and could impact purchasing decisions or subscriptions. UGC also is good for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Google and Bing, among other search engines, can rank websites based on whether a website’s content is relevant and useful and UGC can help a website at this aspect.
UGC can, therefore, be said to be a form of crowdsourcing that brings additional value and authenticity to a website. It can help please our target community; increase a website’s trust value and gain potential customers or loyal visitors to a website.
Nowadays, the UGC form of content is becoming more and more popular and some very famous websites are popular dominantly because of shared UGC content on their platforms. Wikipedia could be said to be one of the most popular of such websites. Such popular websites usually place reviews, comments or quotes to demonstrate their articles or content.
A few major reasons which show how user-generated content (UGC) helps in SEO; are as follows:
- UGC provides Search Engines with New and Relevant content
Marketing a brand creates a lot of noise, and over the years customers have become more aware and wise in exercising their discretion towards such projects. This has made such brand content marketing less effective.
Also, Ideating and creating new targeted content for content for SEO is resource consuming. Even such efforts might not yield the intended results. Thus, there arises a need for authentic content which resonates on an even scale with shoppers and Search Engines.
This need for unique and authentic content could be addressed by collecting UGC. As this content is created by authentic customers, brands or organisations don’t have to spend much of their own resources to generate such content.
Deploying UGC demonstrates that customers have also a way of establishing a dialogue with the brand and not just merely the brands catering to customers.
Since the content created is unique, authentic and sometimes novel, SEO results are augmented due to it. Such a tactic becomes unrivalled as compared to other marketing tactics.
- UGC shapes basic SEO attributes naturally.
Sites have their content optimised for Search Engines. This is achieved through a system of rudimentary attributes which includes keywords, titles, backlinks and internal links.
When customers contribute to a site with comments, reviews and relevant material, they in a way shape a site’s SEO with appropriate links and keywords.
Customer testimonies tend to be centred on products or services which a company’s website provides. These testimonials often include phrases and links associated with those products or services thereby naturally helping to strengthen SEO.
- UGC helps a site to rank for Long Tail keywords.
Long-tail keywords (LTK) are more specific search phrases that might be more than three or four words long. These phrases have lower competition and are much easier to rank highly for.
LTK consists of phrases that users search for but brands might not have been able to think about them or might not have included in their consumer marketing campaigns. When users or customers post about their likes or dislikes for a product or service, they give an insight into how they think and talk about their expectations and what they search for.
By gaining an insight into customers/users LTKs could be placed which resonate with them. This can make a huge difference as it enables brands to unify customer opinion as keywords for on-site SEO.
- UGC increases Social Optimisation
UGC helps SEO in Social Media Optimisation (SMO) on visual platforms such as Instagram and on information platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Social Media managers can get refreshing content due to a diversity of opinions reflected in the UGC.
Sharing customers’ photos or reviews imparts greater trust in an organisation’s followers. This increases the chances of more shares, likes and comments thereby increasing the social media footprint. Such things then capture the attention of more people; traffic to the website increases and the chances of capturing potential customer increases.
- UGC is quintessential for automatic and manual optimisation.
Search Engines algorithms (which are automated) use web crawlers that look for customer product reviews and testimonials. This helps in the evaluation of a website.
In addition, Search Engines such as Google deploys search quality raters to manually evaluate a site’s reputation to rate for key metrics like mastery of the topic, the authority of the author, genuineness in content, all of which could be easily gauged from customer posted content.
When customers submit content, it helps marketers to earn SEO points from manual as well as algorithmic quality rating systems.
UGC tactics therefore could become an essential part of SEO, this is because reviews and ratings provide ease in getting exceptional results to Search Engine queries.
Word-of-Mouth marketing which empowers SEO
UGC helps brands to get more traffic from Search Engine related searches. This is in addition to increased conversion rates, increased customer trust and powers of word-of-mouth marketing.
With most of the consumer buying journey starting on Google, brands must leverage one of their strongest marketing tools – UGC – to establish social proof and effectively empower SEO.
A word of caution, things to watch out
If one allows UGC on a website, then such things need to be monitored quite frequently.
There is no doubt that enabling reviews, comments and testimonials are a great way to enable UGC, but this also can have drawbacks. An unfavourable review from a customer can impact our brand awareness and promotion badly especially since such reviews are not properly and adequately responded to.
In addition, it is important to choose the right spam filter to avoid comment spamming. A spam comment is usually not favoured by search engine algorithms and may result in penalising a webpage or website, which is not good at. This would hurt a website’s ranking; poor reviews would also lower the website’s authority and the traffic would also decrease.
Indeed, UGC is a great option to boost SEO, but it needs to be managed properly with a strategy to take maximum advantage of it.