Introduction
The website is one of the most marketing & commerce channels for any brand or business as the digital media and online commerce influence is growing rapidly among people.
Billions of users globally are resorting to online mediums for their purchase and leisure activities thus raising the importance of the website as a storefront for any business.
Now website being a crucial storefront, it is essential that you invest properly in search engine optimization and content management to boost your website performance.
Search Engine Optimization For Website
Search engine optimization is when you make efforts and investments on your website and around it i.e. on-site and off-site optimization, to make your website more widely visible, popular, and solving queries of your target audience.
The aim really of search engine optimization is to make your website search-engine friendly so that the search engines can crawl and index your website easily and increase your impressions on the search engine results page (SERP).
Content on the website plays a huge role in the improved & fruitful search engine ranking and impressions. The most popular search engine Google values the website content heavily.
So, it is important to have content that can fulfill the search engine guidelines about content and help you improve your website performance and this is where the role of user-generated content comes into play.
User-Generated content
In the business context, user-generated content is any form of content that has been created and shared by the real customers of a brand based on their real experiences, opinions, ideas, reviews, etc. relating to or about the brand and its products and services.
Enabling customers to easily create and submit UGC requires implementing a dedicated user generated content platforms. An effective ugc platform provides user-friendly content creation and submission tools, moderation features, and rights-approved sharing capabilities.
These elements of user-generated content make it highly valuable and fruitful for any business and using such content on your website can drive huge benefits for your website SEO.
Importance Of UGC In SEO
1.Access To Fresh & Original Content
Content, as we discussed, is one of the most important components on any website and helps in defining its performance in most industries so it is essential to have a hub of fresh and original content.
Now content creation from your brand requires huge efforts and investments from labor, time, and resources and it is a constant process to maintain uniqueness and quality. This hugely impacts the overall growth and returns in investments.
Whereas, user-generated content is available widely on social media and digital platforms so you can curate the best and most relevant content and display it on your website. This creates a stream of fresh and original content for your website.
Search engines like Google value the original and fresh content heavily and it increases the chances of more impressions on the search results as they also want to provide fresh and valuable content to the users.
2. UGC Helps In Building Social Proof
For any online channel of a brand or business, it is essential to have trust and credibility as that is what users initially look for subconsciously. This is as in recent times a lot of concerns over security and distrust have arisen among the users for digital media.
User-generated content is the perfect way to build trust and credibility as the content is shared by users based on their real experiences and reviews so it makes the content highly trustworthy, reliable, and authentic.
These elements help in building social proof for the consumers and the trust will encourage them to engage with the content. The UGC is so trustworthy and valuable that leading global brands immensely uses UGC to search engine queries i.e. UGC is the result to search queries for many leading brands.
The social proof also works well with the enhancement of brand images, authority, transparency, and showcasing the credibility of the brand through positive word of mouth & brand advocacy.
3. Natural Long-Tail Keywords Ranking
Users are the ones who make searches on these search engines based on what they about a product or service or a brand i.e. users rarely make exact keyword search but they search long keywords and phrases.
So these long keywords or phrases that users search for are known as long-tail keywords like Men’s Facewash for dry and sensitive skin instead of Men’s facewash.
So, the users have the habit of using such long interactive language and these users when sharing valuable content about your brand so it will be filled with long-tail keywords that you can target and rank your website on.
And since these keywords are included naturally in the content in an interactive way so that will help in sending positive signals to the search engines about organic content and it not being keyword-stuffed or content created only for ranking.
So, you are using the users’ language to answer the questions & queries of other similar users thereby creating harmony. Also, as you target long-tail keywords in your SEO service, it reduces the competition hugely as rarely brands target these keywords and they focus more on short and seed keywords.
How To Curate UGC For Your SEO
Since we talked about the role of UGC in SEO so now we have a solution to curate UGC for your website. You can use a UGC platform or a User-generated content platform for this purpose.
The UGC platform helps in discovering and curating content from social media and digital platforms into a UGC feed and embed it on your website easily.
The tool helps in making creative customizations, content moderation, real-time automatic updates, UGC rights management, easy integration with different website platforms, responsive design, etc.
Conclusion
User-generated content for SEO is hugely important and these benefits are a validation to this statement and there are many more direct and indirect benefits for your SEO strategy.
You can leverage it to engage users on your website, increase their dwell time, reduce bounce rate, social media optimization, valuable content hub creation, more relevant and fruitful content results, and more.
So, knowing about these benefits and the solution that we have mentioned here, you can empower your SEO tactics and boost your website traffic, performance, and maximize returns on investments.
