Brand content marketing has increasingly created a lot of noise and consumers have become wise to the practice, making it less effective.
Additionally, ideating and creating targeted new content for SEO consumes a lot of resources and might not yield intended results.
There is a high need for authentic content that resonates equally with your shoppers and search engines.
Collecting UGC is a lean way to address this need with unique and authentic content.
Because this content is generated by customers, brands don’t have to use much of their own resources to build this out.
The practice of deploying UGC demonstrates that brands aren’t just talking at customers, but that customers have a way to dialogue with the brand.
For marketers, the SEO results are unrivaled with other marketing tactics.
Sites are optimized for search engines through a system of basic attributes including keywords, titles, backlinks, and internal links.
When it comes to reviews, customers do all the work while shaping SEO with appropriate links and keywords.
Because customer testimonials tend to be product-centric, customers often include phrases and links associated with the product that help naturally strengthen SEO.
Long-tail keywords are specific search phrases with low search competition that are much easier to rank highly for.
These keywords consist of phrases that users search for but brands may not think to include in their consumer marketing.
For instance, a beauty retailer may have optimized one of its products for “Skin Cleanser,” but if they’re facing a large amount of competition for this keyword, it makes it difficult to rank high.
Conversely, “skin cleanser for darker skin tone,” may have much less competition and be searched by users with a specific intent to find and buy this product.
Your users, by posting what they love about your product, can give insight into how your audience talks about their pain points and what they search for.
And knowing which long-tail keywords resonate with shoppers makes a huge difference as it enables brands to unify customer opinion as keywords for on-site SEO.
UGC helps SEO through social media optimization (SMO) on visual platforms such as Instagram and informational platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.
UGC gives social media managers new types content to fill a professional images void.
Sharing your customer photos or reviews instills greater trust with your followers, increasing the likelihood of shares, likes, and comments.
More engagement generally means increased traffic from potential new customers looking for a similar experience. For example, topics that relate with users in a brand’s social footprint will likely rise to their attention.
Automated search engine algorithms use spiders that look for customer product reviews and testimonials to evaluate a website.
Additionally, companies like Google employ search quality raters to manually evaluate a site’s reputation to rate for key tenets like mastery of the topic, authority of the author, and truthfulness in content, which can easily be obtained from your customers’ content.
Content submitted by your customers gives marketers a legitimate shot to earn SEO points from both from quality rating systems.
This tactic should be a vital part of any SEO checklist, as reviews and ratings can make it easier to provide exceptional results to search engine queries.
In addition to increasing conversion rates, boosting customer trust and powering word-of-mouth marketing, UGC helps brands get more traffic from search engines.
With the customer buying journey largely starting on Google, it’s important for brands to leverage one of their strongest marketing tools – UGC – to establish social proof and effectively power SEO.
Debdut look after the technical side of the business, SEO strategy, consultancy, and building an interactive dashboard with Google data studio and Tableau. Outside work, he enjoys watching cricket and cooking over the weekend. Also, he loves coding with Python when he has time.