How User Generated Content Helps SEO - Engaging Your Visitors

Google and other search engines index your comments; that's one way they help with search engine optimization. But if you want to engage your visitors, you need to do more than just write engaging posts. You need to actually ask them for their opinions. You'll be surprised by how much feedback you'll get.

Enge offers the example of using a poll, as NFL.com does. “A poll is not going to give you reams of text on your page, but reams of text is not the goal here – added value is. Relevant polls do a great job at increasing user engagement with your site,” he explains. You can even write a post about your poll results, thus generating more interest, and hopefully more engagement.

You might also consider installing a comment rating system. Let's go back to the Amazon example for a moment. It presented me with two reviews; both were the “most helpful” for their type. How did Amazon know which ones to show me? Well, whenever a customer writes a review for a product, he or she awards the product anywhere from one to five stars (five stars being the best rating). That tells Amazon what the customer thought of the product. Readers of reviews can also rate the review, again from one to five stars (five stars being the most helpful). I'm not a programmer, but even I can see in principle how one might go about writing a program to use this data to present customers with the most useful reviews.

You can even engage your customers at your brick-and-mortar location, if you have one. Enge suggests that you ask customers to fill out a short survey, and offer a small discount to those who do. You can publish the data from your survey on your website, turning it into a thought-provoking post – or even, with the right survey, using it to guide the content you write about, and the kinds of questions you ask your visitors. Enge recommends that you “Design your survey to collect data that is relevant to visitors to your website.”

If you've established a strong presence on social media, you have another audience you can leverage for user-generated content. With a good-sized audience, you can run polls and get a decent response. Or ask your social media audience for their best tips on how to use your product or service. You'll get some great data that you can use on your website in a variety of ways.

But always, remember that this is about engagement. You're trying to engage your audience, not stick up lots of text. That means you need to put yourself in the shoes of your customer, find out what kind of information they'd deem useful, and then get it. “The hardest task is to come up with ideas that fit your audience on your site,” Enge notes. So what should you do if you're stuck? Believe it or not, you can always ask your audience what they'd like to see. That should get you off to a good start.