User-generated content has been a mainstay in digital marketing (especially social media) to boost engagement and build audience loyalty. The photos, reviews, and videos created by everyday customers help create a tighter-knit bond between brands and their audiences, as these materials serve as social proof in the eyes of the beholder.
Can such content help your brand improve its rankings? This article aims to find out just that.
What Is UGC and How Can It Improve SEO?
User-generated content is any type of content that’s created and shared by users. It can be anything from simple text posts to videos and photos. UGC comes with a myriad of benefits, including:
- Improved audience engagement
- Content creation cost optimization
- A positive impact on sales and conversions
- Improved brand trust and loyalty
- Better search engine rankings.
This type of content comes in a broad format, including testimonials, ambassadorships, and even surveys. Videos and photos can demonstrate product or service features for customers while creating an emotional connection with potential buyers.
Reviews are also essential marketing tools, as nothing can beat when legitimate, everyday buyers talk about their experiences with your products and services. A positive review can get rid of doubts and positively influence purchase decisions.
But how can UGC help with SEO?
Regularly updating your site with unique content and supplementing it with UGC can help maintain site relevance for search engines with the right keywords. In addition, you will also provide your visitors with essential information that can increase metrics such as time spent on site and overall engagement.
UGC can also help enrich your site with organic keywords that can help fill gaps for various user queries, helping you attract more target visitors.
How to Use UGC for Better SEO Performance
User-generated content is versatile, effective, and generally underutilized. Even though some experts quote that UGC can improve website conversion rates by 73%, only 16% of brands have a dedicated UGC strategy.
How can this SEO trend help you improve your rankings? Marketers say that UGC is more about getting your audience involved. It’s about listening to what they are saying and using their words to engage and attract others.
Use UGC in Key Site Sections
Content that’s already engaging, such as user-generated videos or photos, can be great assets on landing pages, product pages, and your site’s testimonial sections. Authentic visual storytelling boosts user engagement and makes visitors stay longer on your site, which can improve your SEO.
UGC also lets you diversify your SEO strategy, as photos, videos, and text reviews bring a mix of relevant topics and keywords to your site, helping your brand appear in more searches. For example, your optimized video may use different keywords than your articles or written reviews. This can automatically help you capture a wider range of actively searching users. Additionally, videos often include conversational phrases and specific use cases, which can satisfy more diverse search queries.
Transcribing videos and adding them to your site provides search engines with additional content and context, further enhancing SEO value.
Boost Local SEO With UGC
UGC can greatly boost your brand’s relevance for local SEO, especially if you encourage users to share their thoughts with your business/products/services on your Google Business Profile (GBP).
Customer reviews are quintessential for local SEO, helping you boost local rankings and attract more traffic. Data suggests that around 92% of consumers trust reviews and recommendations from others more than any other brand-generated claim.
You can also use UGC to your advantage in your local SEO strategy and build an entire local community. Just like in the case of social media community management, user-generated content can help you create a sense of community surrounding your products and services. Encouraging users to share your brand in their stories or post photos of your products with branded hashtags will not only boost your social presence but also help improve your relevance on search engines.
Improve Your Blog Posts With UGC
When you add UGC videos or photos to your blog articles, you add real-life context and unique perspectives to your online content, making it more trustworthy and relevant. Such authentic blogging can yield better results than relying on AI-generated content to help your rankings, and adding UGC into the mix may boost your organic traffic by 45%, according to some sources.
In this regard, UGC SEO helps you with keeping visitors engaged and can boost the chances of generating even more precious UGC backlinks as the featured users become more inclined to share your posts on their social media or their site.
Get Better Click-Through Rates in Your Email Campaigns
Adding UGC testimonials to your email campaigns can greatly improve their effectiveness as the user-generated content serves as social proof for your subscribers. This can help you drive more targeted traffic to your pages when the emails directly link back to your relevant pages, improving your SEO indirectly.
In addition to this, the more user-centered approach may also help you improve the overall conversion rate of your email campaigns. To be more specific, only 1% of millennials think that traditional branded ads are engaging enough to get them clicking.
Create a Dedicated Gallery and Use UGC in Your Case Studies
Developing a gallery of user-generated content on your site allows you to create a visually engaging testimonial page for your services, products, and brand. This can be the engagement driver of your entire site, encouraging visitors to stay longer. You can also tag these galleries with relevant keywords, add descriptions, and valuable metadata that will further improve your site’s visibility.
On a similar note, user stories and case studies on your site can further improve your brand’s trustworthiness, as these pieces of content provide your potential buyers with real-life service or product applications.
With the right approach, these pages will help you boost visibility in a traditional sense, and from the standpoint of search generative experience as well. Additionally, good stories can encourage sharing, which can generate valuable backlinks.
Rich Snippets and Metadata Optimization
Try and implement your user-generated content to get picked up as rich snippets in the SERPs. These snippets turn standard listings into more engaging insights that showcase extra details, such as video previews, images, user ratings, and reviews.
Let’s say you get a video from one of your users, and you mark the content up with structured data to make it easier for search engines to understand. This will make your pages stand out better in the SERPs.
This approach helps you draw attention and offers a quick review of what users can see on your site. And the best of it all? UGC offers a level of transparency that will potentially help you boost your click-through rates.
Don’t forget that search engines are unable to directly crawl the content within videos. They make sense of it by analyzing the available metadata, such as tags, titles, and descriptions. This allows you to include more diverse keywords, helping you attract the right audience and improving page relevance in the SERPs.
Direct SEO Benefits of UGC
Search engine optimization has become a complex game, making reviews, testimonials, and real customer stories more than just filler. The right narratives engage people and make them stay on your site longer, which is pivotal for SEO success. But how exactly does UGC work in visibility’s favor? Let’s see:
- Increased engagement and dwell time: Both of these are essential metrics search engines use to measure the value of your site. UGC videos and photos encourage users to research more and engage more actively, significantly improving these two metrics.
- Backlinks: Unique videos and photos can increase shares from other platforms and websites. These backlinks then signal to search engines that your content is worth showing to qualified leads.
- Better content relevance and diversity: A variety of authentic content adds more depth and information on specific topics. Additionally, visually-rich UGC such as photos and videos is increasingly important for engagement and thus, SEO.
- Trust and credibility: Authentic photos and videos act as visual proof of user satisfaction and can also help you build topical authority, which is a plus for SEO, as search engines love sites that are credible information sources.
- Natural keyword integration: Videos with user-generated captions, descriptions, and comments can be rich in natural keywords that both customers and search engines can see.
Getting UGC and Implementing it in Your SEO Strategy
One of the biggest challenges in UGC SEO is acquiring content from users that’s valuable. How should you go about that? Here are a few tactics you can use:
- Encourage customers on social media: Create campaigns that motivate your followers to share their experiences with your products. For instance, Tech21 NYC regularly features its users and what they have to say about the brand’s products. Such an approach generates momentum and sparks exciting discussions in the comment section.
- Create dedicated platforms: If applicable, you can create your own forum or website section where users can discuss brand-related topics and share their experiences. Take Lego, for instance. The Lego Ideas community enables users to submit their creations, which can even inspire the brand to create new product lines.
- External forums and communities: You can always search for mentions of your brand on related expert forums or social media communities. For example, here’s this BMW E46 Tuning community on Facebook, which the automaker can use to reference just how much car enthusiasts love one of their best models of wake of the millennium..
Lastly, how do you implement UGC in your SEO strategy? First, make sure that you opt for the help of an agency. SEO experts can help you identify the most traffic-heavy pages of your site where the content can be implemented. Additionally, they can make further adjustments to maximize the engagement and conversion potential of the content.
Using UGC The Right Way
Needless to say, not all pieces of user-generated content are created equally. To make the most out of your strategy, you need to source high-quality content, such as high-definition images and videos, that viewers can make sense of. It’s also crucial to get a steady flow of content contributions so you can continuously update your site.
All in all, UGC SEO may seem like a long stretch and an overly intricate strategy; in reality, it only requires some creativity and a more practical approach to engagement from your brand. And when everything aligns, UGC has a lot more to offer for growing your business than improved search engine visibility.
