UGC and SEO: A Sales-Boosting Social Commerce Tactic

How to promote user-generated content to turn commentators and readers into customers.

In a social media world, your job as a brand marketer is to encourage people to talk about your products and services by giving them the online platforms to do so: branded and third-party blogs, ratings and reviews on your site, Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, forums, ask-and-answer services, etc. But to make this customer feedback valuable from a social commerce point of view – that is, to turn this feedback into real sales – you must go a step further than just encouraging the creation of a critical volume of user-generated content (UGC) about your brand.

You need to leverage and promote this UGC to turn commentators and readers into buyers. One of the best tools at your disposal to make UGC about your brand more visible is SEO (define). Of course, UGC on its own boosts natural search results by creating a wealth of searchable content.

When companies regularly engage their customers to contribute content (questions, answers, reviews, or experiences) to their sites and branded social networking platforms, this new content automatically makes their brand sites more “findable” by search engines, delivering more traffic and potential customers. But the real value add is when marketers go a step further and index that content to drive maximum exposure to search engines and, therefore, traffic to their sites.

Marketers that have taken a laissez-faire attitude toward UGC can no longer delay in implementing a clear SEO strategy. In 2010, 70 percent of all online content will be user-generated, according to EMC. So, optimizing this information is imperative to winning new traffic and boosting conversion.

There are several ways to search-optimize UGC content, but one of the most effective is called “cross-funnel indexing” – a concept developed by search agency Range Online Media. This process involves creating and indexing UGC-rich category pages specifically designed for searchability; incorporating and indexing UGC on individual product pages; and indexing standard product pages to closely map to natural language (UGC-style) searches. Range Media offers a practical white paper on how to put a cross-funnel indexing program in place, but here are some visual examples of what these three types of pages look like:

Before you begin any program to optimize UGC for SEO, start by mining and analyzing all the user-generated content about your brand, products, or services – whether on your site or on third-party sites – to find out the most popular words and terms. You can then index and tag category and product pages to reflect these popular natural language terms so your site pages turn up more frequently in searches. Remember: people search and shop using the same language as reviewers and storytellers – favoring terms like “top-rated TV” or “flat screen with great picture quality” instead of the more standard marketing terms you might think of like “32-inch TV.” Find out exactly which words and phrases people are using to talk about your brand and products, then optimize your pages to pick up these searches.

What’s interesting from a social commerce perspective about UGC is the certain monetary value of the search traffic driven by UGC. We’ve seen a clear pattern of lower average cost-per-click and higher conversion rates from UGC-driven searches across our customer base of over 750 brand Web sites that incorporate customer reviews, stories, and answers on their Web sites.

When customers talk about your products in a certain way, leverage that. Index product and category pages to reflect this natural storytelling language, and you’ll be rewarded with not just more traffic, but higher quality traffic comprised of engaged shoppers ready to buy.

Subscribe to get your daily business insights

Whitepapers

US Mobile Streaming Behavior
Whitepaper | Mobile

US Mobile Streaming Behavior

5y

US Mobile Streaming Behavior

Streaming has become a staple of US media-viewing habits. Streaming video, however, still comes with a variety of pesky frustrations that viewers are ...

View resource
Winning the Data Game: Digital Analytics Tactics for Media Groups
Whitepaper | Analyzing Customer Data

Winning the Data Game: Digital Analytics Tactics for Media Groups

5y

Winning the Data Game: Digital Analytics Tactics f...

Data is the lifeblood of so many companies today. You need more of it, all of which at higher quality, and all the meanwhile being compliant with data...

View resource
Learning to win the talent war: how digital marketing can develop its people
Whitepaper | Digital Marketing

Learning to win the talent war: how digital marketing can develop its peopl...

2y

Learning to win the talent war: how digital market...

This report documents the findings of a Fireside chat held by ClickZ in the first quarter of 2022. It provides expert insight on how companies can ret...

View resource
Engagement To Empowerment - Winning in Today's Experience Economy
Report | Digital Transformation

Engagement To Empowerment - Winning in Today's Experience Economy

1m

Engagement To Empowerment - Winning in Today's Exp...

Customers decide fast, influenced by only 2.5 touchpoints – globally! Make sure your brand shines in those critical moments. Read More...

View resource