SEO has more tactics available than you—or anyone else—have time to implement. Yet, the more you add to the mix of things you can do, the stronger your SEO and the more traffic and sales you’ll pull in.

Do you know about “UGC?” This means “user-generated content” and refers to several different content types.

Since users generate this content, however, it naturally receives heightened levels of trust from online searchers (provided they know it wasn’t sponsored in some way). More trust means more clicks, which leads to more loyal customers.

Here are some different types of UGC and how to score them:

1. Quick Win: Rich Snippets

You’ve undoubtedly spotted these star ratings amongst search results before:

They make your search listings evident and easy to click on—in this case, with respect to Amazon- but you can also employ the same strategy for your own e-commerce site (through a relatively simple process).

It’s possible to increase your clickthrough rate by 20-30%, which is quite a big deal. However, the amount your sales will increase ultimately depends on the quality of the sales page users click through to.

2. Total Reviews Featured on Your Website Increase SEO, Too!

Rich snippets target a specific page and increase its ranking, CTR (Click Through Rate), and sales. However, the total number of reviews you pull across all products and services on your site also improves your ranking.

For example, check out this chart from the Search Engine Journal—reflecting the number of additional organic visits created on 30,000 business websites following the addition of reviews.

As you can see, it takes a good nine months to achieve the full effect; but every little bit counts.

You might ask yourself: Why does Google even care about these reviews so much?

In short, they aim to give the market what it wants. Since consumers trust reviews from other consumers, Google gives these a boost in search rankings accordingly.

3. Testimonials

Some businesses use separate testimonial pages for their website. Others embed testimonials on various pages where customers are likely to stop and decide.

The latter is likely more effective. However, in either case, testimonials often use essential keywords that Google indexes regarding your website.

Moreover, testimonials act as highly effective “social proof.” In other words, your website visitors read these and place a lot of trust in them when making a purchase decision.

Let your customers write testimonials (you can provide them with questions to guide their responses). In doing so, they’re more likely to use essential keywords and add credibility to the process—compared to professionally written ones.

Wrapping Up

While there are so many ways user-generated content comes into play with SEO (primarily through social media), these are just a few examples of packing an SEO ranking power punch.

Red Coyote Services has content writers and SEO specialists to assist you if you need them. Contact us for a discussion.