We have already covered how user feedback can help improve ROI of a SEO campaign. If you haven’t already read that post, I would recommend that you read it now (read the post here – Using User Feedback To Improve SEO ROI). The idea promoted by the post was to collect as much feedback from your visitors as possible. The post also emphasized to provide a fair opportunity for your website visitors to send you a feedback at any stage of their visit. This feedback was then to be used for improving visitors’ usage experience on your website and facilitate easy conversion. The collected feedback is employed as a tool to understand the usability issues of the website and provide better customer experience.
The collected feedback can also be used for improving the website’s credibility and SEO by using the feedback as user-generated content. This post shall talk about how to use customer feedback as user-generated content on your website and how this can help a website’s SEO.
What Is User-Generated Content?
User-generated content, as the name suggests, is the content that has been generated by website users, not by the webmaster. The user-generated content can be either in the form of comments or reviews.
Screenshot Of Product Review – Overstock.com
Some of the most popular websites like Amazon.com, Overstock.com, etc. use their customer feedback as user-generated content.
E-commerce website owners can effectively use their customer feedback for generating unique and original content for their webpages. Websites that have catalog-based product listings can also allow their users to comment on the products’ page and this comment can then be used as page content.
Advantages Of Using Customer Feedback As User-Generated Content
Customer feedback, on any webpage, adds a sense of trust. People are more likely to buy from a website which showcases product reviews (from their customers) and customer feedback than from a webpage that lists just product description and has one of those nasty ‘buy ‘buttons. Besides adding trust value to a website, customer feedback can also provide the following advantages –
Fresh & Unique Content For Free
One of the crucial aspects of SEO is adding fresh and unique content on a regular basis. The E-Commerce and catalog based websites have a unique problems in this area. The same product listed on their website is being sold by tens or hundreds of other websites. The product specification is the same on all the websites and so it means that tens or hundreds of webpages have essentiality the same content. Do you see a problem now? Yes, they all are having duplicate content. The only way out of it is to add sufficient relevant content that is unique. Publishing customer feedback and reviews seems like the best solution. Every customer feedback is unique in its own right. An active and engaging audience can generate a lot of relevant and unique content for free.
Improved Keyword Relevancy
The customer reviews are targeted to a product or a listing. In the process, the customer creates references to the product. The references are obviously natural and (unknowingly) semantically crafted. This uniqueness of content and use of semantic phrases in the review improves the content of the page and provides better rankings.
Improved Chances For Long-Tail Keyword Rankings
More than often, the phrases used by customers while reviewing a product is similar to conversational search terms most people use while searching for the product. This provides an unmatched opportunity to rank for various conversational and long-tail search phrases.
Customer Feedback Improves Conversion
The single most important goal of any campaign is to increase ROI and improve the conversion ratio. Publishing customer reviews can play a very vital role in the process and can significantly improve the number of conversions. Reevoo.com (a company that analyzed over 2.5 million customer reviews) established that the more the customer review, the more is the conversion ratio. Examine the graph below –
The following is evident from the graph above –
- The conversion ratio increases with increasing customer reviews.
- Increasing customer reviews from 0 to 10 can improve the conversion ratio by 1%.
- There is no much improvement in conversion ratio when a webpage improves a number of customer reviews from 10-30 (the growth is just about 0.3%). It is pretty much the same conversion ratio when you have 20 or 30 reviews.
- When the number of customer review increases beyond 30; the conversion ratio improves consistently.