User-Generated Content For Search Engine Optimization (UGC For SEO)

You might know both of these terms separately about what is user-generated content and search engine optimization. But how do these relate to each other, and why do you need UGC for SEO performance increment now? 

Firstly, as we all know, quality content, when combined with a powerful search engine optimization strategy, can augment any website’s performance, rankings, and results immensely. 

Content is an integral part of an SEO strategy that brings returns for a website; thus, it needs to be the best & valuable to the users. It is where user generated content comes into the picture. 

So, let’s get a better understanding of UGC for SEO and its value. 

How UGC Relates To SEO?

How to improve SEO with User Generated Content?

User-generated content or UGC is generally in marketing terms is the content created and shared by the users on digital platforms relating to their ideas, experiences, questions & answers, reviews, opinions, feedback, etc. about a brand or its offerings. 

Now, talking about UGC for SEO, there are billions of search queries conducted every day on the biggest search engine i.e., Google. These all searches are done for a piece of information i.e., content that the user is looking for. 

Now, Google algorithms are constantly evolving for better by providing the most relevant, beneficial, and valuable content in response to these searches. 

Google states that to improve your SEO performance and boost growth, the content that you have on your website should be:

• Useful & Informative for the users
• Valuable than the competitors
• Credible, trustworthy, and authentic
• High-quality rather than just keyword-filled
• And most importantly, it should be engaging, interesting, interactive, and appealing

To augment the value of your content for SEO, you need to integrate these attributes into your website content. Now, the issue is content created by brands is not much trustworthy, engaging, reliable among the users as it is mainly promotional & isn’t consumer-centric. 

Whereas user-generated content is comparatively the most trustworthy, authentic, and engaging form of content among the users. It is as the content is driven by real-life authentic experiences existing customers of a brand giving a realistic value to the content. 

To get into the depths of why UGC is vital for SEO, we have listed some significant benefits below. 

Also Read - User-Generated Video Content Guide

Why User Generated Content Is Important For SEO

1. Fresh & Relevant Content

Fresh, unique, and relevant content is the need of the hour to engage your users, which needs a constant stream of original content. But this continuous content creation is a rigorous task that requires a lot of time and monetary investments. 

Whereas with user-generated content, you can easily curate all the relevant and valuable content around your brand in minutes with minimal investments, and you can even automate this process. 

It will lead to high-quality fresh and authentic content on your website or chosen channel, along with saving your resources for content creations. The users’ content will reflect well with the brand images to make it a consumer-friendly brand for the new visitors. 

Access to constant fresh & relevant content will help the SEO strategists amplify their performances & returns. 

2. Unlocks Possibilities With Long-Tail Keywords 

Firstly, Long-tail keywords are different from usual keywords as these are search phrases that users put into search engines when they are not fully aware of the exact keywords. 

User-generated content is filled with long-tail keywords as users tend to share content in raw and communicative language. It helps you target these keywords and generate traffic from it, and the best part is that the competition is not that high as it is in short keywords. So, it will become easier to target and rank high on these keywords. 

Like you will have a lot of competition on the keyword “Running Shoes,” but you will have a lesser competition on long-tail keyword “Red & White Running Shoes For Men.”

So, you can even target these keywords by filtering UGC for such long-tail relevant keywords and using it on your website to target these and get traffic from it. 

It will help you understand what type of keywords or search queries users make based on which you can create an SEO strategy around these keywords. 

3. Trustworthy & Authentic Content

As we mentioned earlier in the Google guidelines about content to improve its SEO performance, it is important to have content that is trustworthy, reliable, and authentic for the users to get accurate & valuable information. 

User-generated content is the most trustworthy and authentic form of content out there that helps you build social proof for your brand. The fact that 9 out of 10 users trust UGC while making online purchase decisions proves its credibility. 

Also, Over 25% of the search results for globally leading brands are links to user-generated content, and websites that featured UGC gallery saw a 90% increase in average time spent on the website and over 1/5th return visitors. 

Using UGC for SEO like embedding it on your website in the form of reviews, testimonials, UGC gallery, social UGC feeds will help you improve your search engine performance as it will contain positive content about your brand that will help search engine algorithms to identify, evaluate, and reflect it on the SERP leading to boosting your SEO strategy. 

Authentic & trustworthy content will help in building positive word-of-mouth about the brand which will lead to an increase in organic traffic from search engines and other channels.

4. Increase User Engagement & Interaction 

User-generated content helps in boosting user engagement and enables brand-user interaction that can increase the average dwell time, leading to reduced bounce rate & magnification of SEO benefits. 

UGC is highly dynamic, vibrant, and diversified that it can attract and engage users way more as compared to branded content. The higher engagement is triggered among the users due to content relatability and humanized elements. 

Also, when brands interact with users’ content be it on social media or website, users feel rewarded & valued that leads to extended engagement. 

As the website engagement increases, it also positively impacts the average time spent by visitors on the website which also tackles one of the major issues of high bounce rates for websites that dips their ranking in search engines. The dwell time is a key performance indicator for SEO and deriving results from search engine queries. 

5. Augment Social Reach & Sharing

Social media is a crucial element for any SEO strategist as in recent times, social platforms have been the focus for marketers, brands, social managers, etc. due to the traffic, reach, engagement, and conversions possibilities it provides.

Another big benefit of social media is that the content exposure can boost your social proof, which can, in turn, generate quality backlinks from bloggers and journalists who reference your work by linking to it.

User-generated content helps in boosting your search engine optimization strategy by bringing social media into the equation.

Sharing UGC on your social profiles will help you build trust, increase reach through interaction, magnify user engagement, etc. For example, sharing relatable & authentic reviews & visuals on platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, etc. can increase the number of user likes, comments, or shares.

It will lead to expanding brand awareness and bringing in higher traffic than usual. Traffics from social media also sends social signals that boost SEO performance. Moreover, user engagement will help in increasing the brand’s social following and ultimately leading to better results for brand growth.

Also Read - How User-Generated Content Can Light Up Your Website

Best Way To Leverage UGC For SEO

There are many ways to leverage user-generated content for SEO to boost your search engine performance tactics scattered into different forms & possibilities. Still, we have divided UGC for SEO into two aspects for your ease & better results with minimal investments. 

1. User-Generated Content Creation 

For you to leverage user-generated content in your SEO strategy, you must first need to have UGC that is relevant and useful for your brand. So, the initial step is to encourage your users & customers to generate content about your brand. 

You can do so in many ways, some of the best ones are mentioned here:

• Promoting your brand on social media platforms and allowing users to share their thoughts in response
• Run contests, giveaways, challenges, etc. across channels to engage users and get UGC from them through this engagement
• Encourage & enable customers to share their reviews, feedback, and experiences on your website
• Create hashtag campaigns for your brands and ask users to participate in these campaigns
• Interact with users through comments, replies, direct messages, etc. that will make them feel valued that will lead to consistent engagement & UGC. 
• Organize brand-consumer interaction events, annual meetups, gamified real experiences, etc. and ask users to share their experiences with the brand through social media or reviews
• Promote your existing user-generated content to motivate other users to participate

All these strategies will help in generating a massive amount of valuable user-generated content for your brand which also means UGC for SEO. Then you can move onto 2nd step to leverage it in your marketing campaigns to boost SEO performance.

2. User-Generated Content Marketing For SEO

Once you generate this UGC for SEO, the challenge will be that it will be scattered on different digital platforms and in various forms like reviews, images, videos, testimonials, etc. 

To bring it all together, make it meaningful & relatable, and publishing it on different channels requires a UGC tool like Taggbox. But what is that? 

Taggbox is a UGC platform that will help you collect & curate user-generated content using hashtags, keywords, handles, channels, etc. from diverse social media platforms into a single feed.

Further, it helps you display your collected user-generated content on any or all marketing channels like websites, social ads, digital outdoor advertising, emails, etc. 

Not just collection & display, you can even customize your collected user-generated content to make it more attractive, engaging, and search-engine friendly with robust content moderation & customization functionalities. 

You can even get content rights to repurpose users’ content and can enable real-time content updates to keep the content fresh & unique for your users. Besides, it does not even affect your page loading time with its quick responsiveness. 

So, this makes it a perfect solution to leverage user generated content marketing for your SEO strategy with easy setup & hassle-free management.  

Conclusion

User-generated content is known to be highly effective and efficient in increasing your organic traffic, boost organic brand growth & reach, improve search engine ranking with content quality attributes, and increase engagement, and drive conversions for your brand.  

The catch here is to successfully manage and marketize user-generated content so that it has the potential to generate these benefits and expected returns on your investments. 

So, the best way to improve your search engine optimization performance with user-generated content is by using a UGC platform like Taggbox.