Google itself has confirmed the rumors: You can use the voice of your customers to boost your own SEO!
Would you like to improve your SEO without much effort? It's definitely possible, and here's how.
In this article, you will learn:
- what important information Google has confirmed
- how to improve your SEO using customers
- how to do it for free without much effort
Before continuing, I would like to remind you that we have prepared a white paper for you in which we give you tips on how to use keywords to improve the SEO and SEA of your website. The download is free !
How can content boost SEO?
Content is very important for SEO. The more content you have on your website (domain), the more information Google has about your website.
It works like this:
Google is basically a robot that scans your website and tries to predict what it is about. Then, determine the position of your website based on the keywords used so that users can find it.
The most important job for Google is to satisfy users. Therefore, to rank as high as possible, your content has to be related to the keyword/search term that users enter into Google.
If your website doesn't seem to meet users' intentions, you simply lose rankings for those search terms.
However, if you optimize your website (especially your content) for SEO, you can gain a lot of traffic from Google organically.
And of course, organic traffic is free!
In summary:
When you have a lot of content, Google sees what your page is about and knows how valuable and relevant it is to show it to its users.
Does user-generated content work for SEO too?
That you need a lot of content, you already know. Obviously, producing all that content takes time. Wouldn't it be great if someone created it for you? What about your users or customers? They sure can!
However, the question until now was whether or not it counted in terms of SEO. The truth is that many experts have been speculating about it for a long time, but due to Google's secrecy with the ranking algorithms, this has never been confirmed. Until now:
John Mueller, Senior Trends Analyst for Webmasters at Google, shared in his YouTube video series, Ask Google Webmaster , the following important information:
In general, Google doesn't differentiate between content written by you and content written by your users. If you publish it on your site, we will see it as content that you want published. And we will use it for classification.
In summary:
User generated content works for SEO too.
However, it can be good or bad. What I want to say is:
If you have a lot of user-generated content, you need to make sure it meets your standards, so it doesn't hurt your SEO.
Here you can see the whole answer:
Make sure user-generated content is right for you
There are different types of user-generated content:
- Customer reviews (both short and long)
- Photos and videos (of satisfied customers using the product or just the products)
- Comments, questions and testimonials
- Creative content made for the competition
And these are just examples. Start by thinking about what kind of user-generated content you could use on your website. And then: make a marketing strategy for it.
If the content is of high quality, your reward will be a higher ranking in Google. And you know what this means for you: more free traffic .
There's plenty of work to do
But first you have to take care of these two things:
- Moderate user-generated content
- Make sure it doesn't slow down your website
Mueller himself recommends moderating user-generated content:
An easy way to do this is to block those pages from being indexed in the standard way and allow them to be indexed when you're happy with the quality.
You could block them, for example, with a meta robots tag without an index, which you remove once you're satisfied. Only you can decide when you are happy with the content.
Some sites collect information about how satisfied other users are with the content, which can be very useful.
Also make sure that the pages of your website that are full of user-generated content work just like the rest of the website.
In other words, they have to run fast, as speed is now a ranking factor as well.
The last thing you need to make sure of is that users don't use your website for their own SEO purposes.
They can just create any content, just to be able to put some links to their websites. In this way, they will be stealing your SEO power from your website.
And if their websites (the ones they link to) are of low quality, it can also affect your rankings.
What Mueller recommends in this case is to use the rel= "ugc" attribute:
Finally, one thing to keep in mind with user-generated content is that, by default, you probably won't be able to vouch for the links that have been added.
To do this, there is a way to tell us (Google), through the rel="ugc" attribute, that these links are user-generated content.
Finally, one thing to keep in mind with user-generated content is that, by default, you probably won't be able to vouch for links that have been added.
To do this, there is a way to tell us (Google), through the rel="ugc" attribute, that these links are user-generated content.
One last thing:
If you use user-generated content, such as product reviews, in your online store, don't forget to optimize your product pages.
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