How To Improve SEO With Customer Reviews
Your consumers can be the best salespeople. According to studies, 84% of online shoppers trust the opinions of other customers as much as they trust personal recommendations in their environment, and more than half visit a website after reading a positive review.
Why does marketing that leverages user-generated content work? Why do consumers take advice from other customers into account? This content triggers a psychological response called social proof, which makes people assume that the actions of others reflect correct behaviour for a given situation.
In our everyday lives, we are influenced by the advice of others. If a friend warns us that a specific path is slippery, we are likely to believe and accept their advice. This behaviour is even more pronounced if we have no knowledge about a particular subject, so we are more open to accepting the opinions of others.
A brand may say its products are great, but the sentiment will be much more credible coming from someone outside the organization, so social proof helps increase conversion rates by building trust. This is therefore an opportunity both to increase traffic and to increase sales.
Precisely at the SEO level, the opinions generated by users can be a great tool to take into account. Google also seems to favour these reviews; it has commented on the usefulness of user-generated content as a way to create more context and content for websites.
Why does this type of content benefit SEO?
1. Provides new and relevant content
If you take into account the importance of content marketing in recent times, you can see several advantages, as devising and creating new and specific content for SEO is resource intensive and may not generate the expected results, plus it needs to be 100% authentic and targeted to both users and search engines alike. Remember, content needs to be natural!
This type of content is a very useful way to address this need with unique and authentic content and because it is generated by customers, brands do not have to use a lot of their own resources to develop it.
2. SEO attributes in a natural way
When writing reviews, customers do all the SEO work by adding links and the right keywords, thus indirectly helping to strengthen SEO.
3. Reviews contribute to long-tail keyword rankings
Your customers, when publishing a review, give all kinds of details, what they like the most, the weak points, how they found it, what it’s good for and what it’s not good for, etc. — in this way they are generating content that includes long tail keywords.
4. Reviews increase social optimization and engagement
User reviews contribute to the optimization of social networks by generating content that brands often do not produce and sometimes generate greater engagement. This therefore increases traffic to your site.
It is well known that links from social networks do not affect link building, but you do know that an increase in traffic and an improvement in the quality of the visit can positively influence the improvement of position in the SERPS.
