Trying to improve SEO? Your customers can do it for you.
When it comes to SEO, content is always held up as crucial. But what about user-generated content (UGC)? Should it be part of your SEO strategy?
UGC, like customer conversations and reviews, can provide incredibly meaningful data, particularly when you’re looking to improve SEO.
This data can help you work out what language existing customers are using to recommend your product or service to others and what potential customers are thinking about – and how they articulate it – while considering your product or service.
Heads or tails?
UGC can help you get into your customers’ heads when they’re searching on Google. Consumer interactions (that could be from reviews, comments, questions, answers or whatever else) from UGC provide you with a selection of long-tail keywords; the three and four keyword phrases which are extremely specific to your product or service, and are being used by your customers.
Whenever a potential customer uses highly specific search terms, or long-tail keywords, they tend to know exactly what they are looking for. And then buy it.
It follows that if you can show up on the search results for long-tail keywords using your consumer reviews and interactions, you could end up with better search rankings and more valuable search traffic with a higher conversion rate.
It’s simple: use your customers’ own words when they’re looking for a product or service and feed them straight back in to your meta descriptions. This brings the purchasing journey full circle.
Click with customers
Long-tail keywords often have less competition than more general search terms. By using specific phrases that come up time and time again in your UGC, the cost per click rate in your campaigns could decrease dramatically.
Using the same language as your customers also generates an experience that has authority – but at the same time breaks down the usual business-to-consumer dynamic. UGC will help your brand talk in the language your customers are using, and address the concerns they have. It’s the kind of stuff that ‘clicks’ with customers and encourages them to trust your brand.
It’s simple: use UGC to speak your customers’ language in campaigns and customer service.
Consumers often know more about your product than you do. - Highlight to share -
Keeping up with your consumers
User-generated content can be an amazing source of long-tail keywords including models and their numbers, colour variations, specific add-ons and applications, as well as common queries and problem issues. It’s refreshing to realise that consumers often know more about your product than you do!
It also means you can keep up with them at all stages: from the beginning of the purchase journey – from the ‘just about to buy’ stage – for example, when they need to know if a baby seat will fit in the back – through to what people talk about while buying – for example, when booking a holiday – to those little moments, like what they like to do on road trips or what they look for in a fridge – and then, that glorious moment when they start recommending it to others.
It’s simple: keeping your page at the top of the search rankings is a continual process. Making sure your UGC (and your analysis of that UGC) is up to date will help with that process.
Use UGC as your dictionary. It can help predict what potential customers are searching for, generate long-term keywords and improve SEO – helping both potential customers and existing users.
