The Role of User Generated Content in SEO: Harnessing the Power of Reviews and Testimonials
In the Web 2.0 era, review sites are very common. It has been found out that users are more likely to purchase a product if they are willing to leave a review about the product. Now a review site may have thousands and thousands of user reviews, and when the user does a search for the specific product, there’s a very high chance that the review site will be on the first page of the search engine. This is an indirect but effective way of off-page SEO because the review site can place a link to the product directly. Now the best scenario is that the review is positive, and it will encourage the user to click on the link, and the review site has given the product a new customer.
Companies always want their site to be spick and span, and user-generated content is out of the company’s control and can have a negative impact on the company. But we will see later in the article that there are ways to overcome this and also encourage user-generated content. As for the relevant incoming links, user-generated content can give very good external links to the site that are deep-linked to specific pages. Such links are very good for SEO, as a website’s deep link ratio is very important.
Importance of User Generated Content in SEO
The increase in the profile of web 2.0 has led to the rise of customer reviews as a selling tool. Reviews have a divisive reputation in marketing, and marketers have been both slow and cautious to embrace them. This is due to the fact that reviews can be a ‘double-edged sword’; they can just as easily promote a product as they can damage its sales and reputation. Despite this, it has not stopped consumers from making reviews on various products all over the internet, and it is a type of UGC that is highly visible in search engines. A survey carried out by comscore and TMP Directional Marketing in 2010 found that 24% of local search engine users and 28% of map users considered customer-generated reviews to be an important tool in their purchase. This is a figure that has likely increased in the past few years. This represents a huge audience of potential consumers who are using search engines to find reviews and is an audience that is more inclined to act with the intent of purchase.
An additional benefit of UGC is often in the optimization of the brand of the product being promoted. As internet users become more and more savvy to the various techniques used in online marketing, there has been a consumer backlash against ‘over professional’ content. Consumers are distrusting content that appears to come directly from the brand itself and are increasingly turning to peer reviews to ascertain whether a product is genuinely worth investing in. UGC can be used to create a perception of honesty and transparency about a product brand. By allowing consumers to discuss a company’s product in an informal environment, it can create the impression of a company that is confident in its own product and has nothing to hide. This can be achieved using anything from a comments section on a company blog to a fully-fledged customer community site.
The most obvious reason why user-generated content is so valuable to SEO is that it provides natural, organic search engine traffic. Every blog post, comment, or product review that a user makes is essentially a web page, and this is indexed by search engines. Assuming that the user has used keywords in the content, it can be found by users searching for those terms and can bring traffic to the site. By having an area of the site where users can contribute, this creates a constantly updating source of content, which search engines love. The sheer volume of content that can be generated can increase the likelihood of the site being found on long-tail searches. Users will often use the same language as they would use when searching, so if the content directly matches the search query, it can be highly visible in search engine results pages (SERPs).
User-generated content (UGC) is a real goldmine when it comes to search engine optimization. An often underutilized resource, UGC can provide many benefits for SEO and sometimes unexpected roles. It can be used in numerous different ways to increase search visibility, and a good understanding of its value can really pay dividends.
Benefits of Reviews and Testimonials in SEO
Product Improvement. Customer feedback helps to build better business. Many of the suggestions made by customers in a review can be implemented to directly improve the product or service. Many people monitoring their reviews have caught undetected bugs and problems on their website by noting a sudden decrease in ratings. This always offers a second chance as most customers are willing to go back and add another review after they see a problem has been resolved. A case can be made that the location of the review has a better chance of catching a user than an offline method such as a survey or suggestion sent by email. This is due to the fact the user is already on the site and the chances of him viewing reviews are higher than clicking an email link.
Increased Unique Content Reviews and testimonials offer a chance to have more eyes on a given product or service page. This occurs when your customer is at your website leaving a review; there is a strong possibility that they will click around and read more about other things that you offer. When using a 3rd party review service, they visit the URL specifically created for collecting reviews. Links are then visited and revisited by search engine spiders each time new reviews are added. This gives the search engines more chances to find your pages and offers a direct link to them. By having a pile of 3rd party reviews for a given product, it’s not uncommon to have several links directly to that page. This is important because it increases the PageRank of that page and causes it to be indexed more frequently.
Strategies for Encouraging User Generated Content
Incentivizing customers to leave reviews can be an effective strategy but has its pros and cons. Obviously a customer will be more likely to leave a review upon receiving an incentive which could be anything from competing in a contest to win a prize, to gaining virtual points that can be traded in for other products. Incentivizing can be cost efficient since it mostly only rewards customers that were already planning on leaving a review. However, the atmosphere of the reviews can change from actual reviews to fake reviews from people just trying to get the incentive. Another downside is the lure of incentives can attract users known as ‘semi professional’ reviewers trying to get as many incentives as they can. Such users might spam reviews and even purposely mislead other customers with good or bad product ratings to try and gain more incentives.
Several strategies can be taken to induce users to leave reviews. One such strategy is creating a review system that is simple to use and effortless. The simpler the review process, the more likely a user is to follow through with it. The easier the process, less intrusive the review system is, the more likely that a customer will leave a review of your product. For example, Amazon’s review system is extremely non-invasive, only requiring a minimum of 1-5 rating for a product and a ‘yes or no’ review being helpful. To leave a full written review, it merely requires an extra click. Compare this to Epinion’s review system, which has both a long and short opinion option, a poll, a product specific rating, then an overall rating, and review guidelines and there is a stark contrast. Users are much more likely to leave a review on Amazon. Any business can benefit from copying some of the features of Amazon’s system. Ease of review creation can be maximized with simple web forms that require very little clicking between pages and components. Often companies will create a review process that is half a page and then require the user to click ‘continue’ to keep a review from being too long. A good way to get sparser reviews would be to make the review form half a page long instead of dividing it and forcing an extra click.
Creating a User-Friendly Review System
A website should have a review system that allows users to leave feedback on products and services. This can be as simple as rating a product from one to five stars or writing a detailed explanation. It is generally accepted that the more complex the review, the more helpful it is. While this is beneficial for the website owner as detailed reviews can be used as product testimonials as well, it can be off-putting for the reviewer. The website owner should be aiming to make the review process as easy and stress-free as possible. A complex review system requiring registration, CAPTCHA input, and a written testimonial longer than 1000 words should be left to the product and service market researchers. For the average customer, a simple star rating system is ideal. This can be easily achieved by installing an open-source plugin on a webstore. In some cases, companies may encounter negative feedback of a product and may be dismayed to find that the review system does not cater for product improvement. This should always be considered when implementing a review system as it can actually add brand loyalty. An example of a rather negative and unhelpful review system is for the MMORPG RuneScape. The website forum allows users to leave feedback on updates to the game. However, due to the lack of a review moderation system and no official response to certain updates, the forum soon became a haven for rage-filled rant threads. This is not the image that should be portrayed by a review system of a product and should the developers wish to improve the game at a later date, it would be fairly off-putting to a potential customer.
Incentivizing Customers to Leave Reviews
Luring existing and potential customers with cash prizes, monthly sweepstakes, and free products has long been tactics employed by numerous companies to jazz up their online UGC. Avraham R. Shen (2011) suggested that to kick-start a UGC campaign, companies could start by offering rewards to employees, friends, or family who can be considered as a pre-testing phase to gauge the effectiveness of the campaign. These techniques are definitely efficient, but they can be costly with no guaranteed return on investment. Conversely, from a cost-benefit standpoint, it is more advantageous to offer incentives directly to the customer. This is also the viewpoint held by Chevalier and Mayzlin (2006) in their study of movie critics on the website Epinions.com. Their study found that the increased rating level of ‘stars’ present on the site had a positive correlation to the number of movie reviews and revenue made by those movies. To increase the quantity of reviews, Epinions.com increased the value of each star, and it indirectly created an incentive for members to leave more reviews. They argued that to compete with the opportunity cost of time spent on reviewing, the value of the incentives must be higher, i.e. better-rated movies should receive higher incentives for better quality reviews. An alternative method to directly increasing the value of individual reviews is to implement loyalty schemes. Deighton, there will be more posts of customer experiences and opinions of those who are more frequently making purchases. This is due to them being more motivated to accumulate points in order to trade for rewards, hence increasing the rate of purchasing frequency. An example of this could be seen from the system used by eBay in its Feedback Forum. eBay offers its customers incentives to leave good feedback on vendors in the form of reputation points and an automated comment from the eBay CEO on well-established Power Sellers. With positive feedback, vendors have an easier time selling products, or perhaps on to a point where they have become loyal customers to eBay, hence creating a cyclical process where more reviews are being left by these transcendent level vendors.
Leveraging Social Media for User Generated Content
Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare all have their own versions of location-based marketing that enable people to “check-in” at physical businesses and provide information for their friends and followers to see. Ranging from discounts to badges and mayorship status, businesses can form campaigns to incentivize UGC in the form of reviews, photos, and status updates based on customer experiences. For instance, a Yelp.com and Foursquare event that took place in Chicago had people split into teams and checking into various places around town, taking pictures and leaving tips for others to see. Their efforts resulted in an increase in UGC for local businesses and a greater awareness of the Yelp and Foursquare brands within the Chicago community.
Qualitatively different from the other strategies, social media is a platform that allows direct and personal interaction between businesses and customers. In the past, companies have struggled with communicating to customers in a way that is not sales-pitchy. Social media is an attractive option because it allows companies to interact with customers and it’s much less invasive than other forms of communication. Additionally, advertising costs can be very low with the potential for high returns. With a carefully planned strategy for engagement, companies can generate loads of UGC and make lasting relationships with customers.
Optimizing User Generated Content for SEO
In order to take full advantage of user-generated content, it is important that reviews and testimonials contain keywords pertinent to the company and the product. Customers often provide opinions using words that are not in the company’s marketing vocabulary, so it is crucial to implement a voice of customer program to uncover the language your customers are using. Once companies have collected a decent list of alternative keywords, they can compare the frequency of these words to those on their keyword glossaries and identify any gaps. This can, in turn, help search marketers to refine their SEM strategy and the on-site search team to improve their results. It is important not to force these keywords into reviews, as it can make content look unnatural. Keywords should be implemented as part of the natural language relating to the product.
Using Relevant Keywords in Reviews and Testimonials
Testimonials should be seen as an endorsement of a product and the user experience and can be created from editing the opinions given in reviews. They are often ignored or left on a separate page to the main content of a website. To really make use of testimonials for gaining traffic and interest in your products, companies can create a specific area or page for testimonials to ensure that it gets indexed and ranked on search engines. This can have a greater impact than typical onsite SEO techniques such as link building or article writing. So long as the testimonials are providing information on a product and not a company’s service, then it is still classed as UGC. A good example of this is the case of KoodibooK, whose private photo book service was underused because consumers were using it as a tool to try creating photo albums of their own. By indexing user testimonials on how it’s a useful tool for creating albums of memories, traffic from new potential consumers increased.
A case study by Greenlight Digital demonstrated the use of reviews and opinions for client Reevoo who were selling a range of TVs. A sample of Reevoo customers who had purchased a TV were surveyed with the question “What’s the single best thing about your new TV?” Responses were logged and turned into long-tail keywords on the Reevoo landing page. For example, “how does the picture on my LCD compare with a plasma TV?” became a keyword that led a user to the TV in question. The page was then indexed and attributed in an SEO campaign to close the conversion path for consumers using search engines. This resulted in a 130% YoY increase in sales of TVs coming from SEO and a 48% increase in traffic to the Reevoo section.
The use of keywords in UGC can be categorized into two areas: reviews should be a focal point for SEO efforts and can be worked upon individually. This is a driving reason for harnessing the power of opinions, as opinions are naturally given in the form of keywords. Allowing consumers to review products means you’ll receive autogenerated feedback which is of high relevance to the consumer and the products they have purchased. Systems like Bazaarvoice, Reevoo, and Power Reviews all specialize in the provision of customer reviews and opinion interaction for online businesses. Opinions can be captured about any product, by any type of consumer which creates a large pool of information that can be accessed by other potential consumers.
Encouraging Natural Language in User Generated Content
Over the years, artificial language translations have improved considerably, but for some languages, quality can remain a problem. From the user’s perspective, you should know that buzzwords can be translated with reasonable success, but detailed product-specific instructions and error messages may not be effectively translated. We have seen situations where website administrators choose to have all site text automatically translated into another language using one of the internet’s free translation tools, and then allocate that translated text to a localized version of the website. This is not a good solution, as it will lead to indexing of the translated text, plus it can often result in the original English language content becoming un-indexed due to cross-translation duplicate content issues. An alternative to direct translation of the user’s content is to provide a language-specific area on the website where users can enter content in their own language. This then creates separate language versions of the UGC without any issues of cross-translation duplicate content. This solution is a compromise because it helps to sidestep duplicate content issues and it will provide language-specific content to the site, but there may be SEO problems in trying to get this UGC content indexed if the site does not already have strong visibility in the target language market.
Structuring User Generated Content for SEO
Another method of directing the language used within a user review is to provide customers with a list of words that are associated with the positive aspects of a product or company. If the customer is provided with a list of possible comments, it’s highly likely that the customer will use some of those provided statements. For example, a digital camera company could provide this list: sleek, compact, durable, affordable, feature-packed, high-quality images, simple to use. Users often struggle when conveying their thoughts into words, so by providing them with examples, you make their task easier and also improve the likelihood of the user-generated content being in line with your objectives.
One efficient method for ensuring that user-generated content contains relevant keywords is to offer users a questionnaire-style form when submitting a review. This will direct the user to mention specific features and benefits in their answers. Using the company’s predefined questions, the user will input valuable text that is focused around key product attributes. This method is not only beneficial for SEO, but it also provides the site visitor with valuable information.
When considering the structure of the text on your site, user reviews and testimonials can play a significant role, as stated by Rob Kerry. It’s important to note that the search engines utilize semantic text matching to connect various search queries with appropriate text on the internet. Essentially, the search engines attempt to understand the meaning of a phrase. Using relevant keywords within user reviews and testimonials will help to associate various search queries with your user-generated content.
Monitoring and Managing User Generated Content
A combination of both paid and free tools will enable website owners to thoroughly monitor all reviews about their company and products. This will also allow them to stay informed about mentions that do not come directly from review submissions on their site, such as blog posts or articles discussing their products.
– Google Alerts: This tool allows users to set up alerts for company/product mentions and have them delivered via email or RSS.
– Twitter Search: This free service can be used to monitor mentions of a company or product on Twitter.
– StepRep: This is a paid service that aggregates and filters reviews into one location and assigns a reputation score based on review sentiment. – Yahoo and MSN feeds: These are other free tools that can be used to set up feeds for company/product mentions on these search engines.
Some popular review monitoring tools include:
By now, it should be clear that website owners have very little control over user-generated content, including reviews and feedback. Therefore, they need to equip themselves with tools to monitor these reviews and their impact on SEO. Review monitoring tools are generally third-party applications or services used to aggregate reviews from major and minor review websites into one location. They are a cost-effective way to stay informed about what customers are saying about a company and its products.
Implementing Review Monitoring Tools
In addition to these tools, there are other specific tools that focus on a particular area of user-generated content. One example is the use of customer surveys to gain specific feedback into a particular product or service posted on a website. This feedback can be very useful and is always relevant when the release of a product is fresh in the minds of consumers, as it can provide immediate and specific information that can be used to augment a product or change a service in a way that better meets the needs of consumers. Usually at this point in time, the product or service in question will be most accessible via the internet and causing this is where the user reviews will come into effect. The feedback from the survey can be compared to the sentiment analysis of reviews made around the same time to help build a clearer picture of what was effective with consumers and where there may be a difference of opinion on what made a good or bad impression. Another example would be the monitoring of user comments on forums and message boards. This information can be vital if there is a specific online community based around a product or brand, to identify the needs, wants, and problems of a specific group of consumers. The data is usually very qualitative, and by identifying with the specific community, it can be interacted on to gain both further feedback and increase brand loyalty with discussion of changes in response to what has been learned.
The proactive monitoring of user reviews and feedback is essential for any business wanting to take full advantage of user-generated content. There are many different types of review monitoring tools available, ranging from simple tracking of reviews and feedback to more in-depth sentiment analysis or data mining tools. These tools can help businesses identify which types of user-generated content are most effective at driving sales and which are having little or negative effect on purchasing decisions. Data mining tools can be used to summarize review information and feedback from around the web to help build a clearer picture compelling businesses in the right direction to their customers, while sentiment analysis tools can pinpoint the location and nature of positive and negative statements within user-generated content. This information can then be used to explore and exploit positive content or rectify negative information in response to feedback from consumers. This proactive approach to dealing with user feedback can help build a clearer and more beneficial perception of a business’s brand so products can be positioned with a consumer in mind.
Handling Negative Reviews and Feedback
There are occasions where, as much as you try, you can’t resolve the issue with a customer. They may continue to be negative in their reviews, degrading your business or its products and services. If they are unreasonable in their reviews, the best course of action may be to ignore them and focus on attracting new positive reviews to bury the negative content. You may have the option to have the reviews removed; however, many review platforms only allow for the review author to delete it.
Responding Publicly to Negative Reviews When responding to negative customer reviews, it is important to be constructive. There is nothing worse than a negative review met by an even more negative response by the business owner. This only serves to damage your business’ reputation further. A constructive and well-thought-out response, acknowledging the customer’s issue, and attempting to resolve it can be invaluable. It shows other potential customers reading the review that you are a company that cares about its customers and their feedback. Always respond to a customer that has left their negative review; they may have more to say, and leaving it unacknowledged could add to their feelings of frustration or disappointment.
Introduction Handling negative customer feedback in the right manner is crucial. It can turn a negative into a positive, but failure to respond (or inappropriate responses) can lead to a disaster. It is important to have a response strategy to deal with negative customer reviews. Always be constructive and try to turnaround a negative into a positive. Most review sites and platforms allow for a business owner to respond to reviews. Always respond to negative reviews that are publicly visible.
Engaging with Customers through User Generated Content
User-generated FAQ and community forums are another wide-reaching method of connecting with the customer. When a customer posts a question on your site, it’s likely that the same question is searched for on Google. If the user finds their answer in a public forum on your site, they are less likely to seek information elsewhere. Onsite UGC has the added benefit of creating long-tail SEO. This content will make your site more visible in search engines and bring in users looking for your solutions. With the added content being focused around customer input, this also adds a personal element to your site. It shows that your company is comprised of real people who have interacted with other customers. In a virtual world, adding humanism can be a great differentiator for your brand.
Engaging customers through reviews, Q&A, and social media builds trust in your brand. A good response, whether positive or negative, shows that your company cares about satisfaction and feedback. Remember to respond to reviews in a timely manner to show customers that their opinions are valued. If you receive a negative review, take this as an opportunity to turn a negative into a positive. Use this as a chance to regain customer satisfaction, show the company’s transparency and resolve the situation. A simple response to a negative review can increase advocacy by up to 16% (Reevoo).
