29 Sept 2017
Enhance your website's search engine ranking by leveraging user-generated content. Customer reviews and feedback provide fresh, keyword-rich content that search engines favor, boosting your online visibility.
User-generated content will improve your website's optimization
Publishing your customers' feedback improves your website's optimization. Content-rich feedback means content that users create for your website. Search engines are increasingly giving more weight to such content when ranking search results.
User-generated content is becoming increasingly important for website optimization. Search engines know that their users are interested in what customers say about a company. Furthermore, such content is regularly refreshed and contains terms (keywords) related to the services you offer or the products you sell. Creating and publishing new content on your website takes some of your time – why not let your customers do this work? Honest feedback is an important source for search engines and their algorithms to judge the relevance of organic results.
The prerequisite for using user-generated content as a website optimization tool is to collect your customers' feedback and publish it (also) on your website.
When preparing content for your website, you likely have in mind the keywords on which your website will appear as high as possible in organic results. And these words are probably very similar to those used by your competition. The keywords your customers use are not necessarily the same as yours, but they are likely similar to those that new customers will use to search for you, which is an additional advantage. It's also good to supplement keywords with longer phrases (3 or more words) that describe what you sell. Such phrases are more unique, and there's a lower chance that your competition uses them (literally). Sometimes it's hard to find them yourself, but reading your customers' feedback can help. Once you understand what's important to your customers, use that in the descriptions on your website (e.g., in product descriptions in an online store).
If your company is active on social media, you probably know that every like or share of your post affects the optimization of the associated website. User-generated content is very valuable for gaining social influence. A customer's review shared on your company's profile will attract a lot of interaction from your followers. It's also important to encourage customers to post reviews about your company on their own profiles, thereby increasing visibility and reach. The more posts with a link to your website you have, the better it is for your website's optimization. Additionally, these reviews will be found more quickly by potential customers who are still choosing a provider than if they were only published on your website.
Encourage customers to attach photos or even video clips of their experience with your company to their reviews. Most of the information our brains process is visual. A review will grab a potential customer's attention faster if it's accompanied by a supporting photo.