When it comes to SEO, you want to get every advantage you can. Most SEO successes comes not from big things but from an avalanche of small things that all work together to get the results you want.
Content can be a huge advantage, but, again, content isn’t a one-time thing, it’s a process. And a very time consuming one at that.
One of the areas where content becomes a problem is when optimizing ecommerce product category pages. Sure, we can write blog posts all day long, but product and category pages are about the products themselves. Creating content for all those pages can be cumbersome and take up more time than you have in a year.
But who said you had to do all the work yourself? Enter: User Generated Content (UGC). This is content created for you by your customer and site visitors.
Six Types of UGC for Your Ecommerce Website
- Reviews: Allow shoppers to write their own reviews of your products/services.
- Ratings: Similar to reviews, you can also have shoppers rate the products.
- Questions: Some shoppers might have questions that they need to have answered before they’ll be willing to buy the product. Giving them a space to ask those questions not only increases the likelihood you’ll get that sale, it also will likely help others with the same questions.
- Stories: Let visitors post their own experiences with your product or service. This is less of a review than it is a way to highlight creative ways your products were used and what solutions they solved for others.
- Pictures: Along with stories, you can let your visitors post pictures that illustrate your products in use.
- Videos: If you allow videos, some users will use this for any and all of the above. They can post a video review, tell their stories, and show the product in action. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video has got to be worth so much more!
What’s the benefit of UGC? The biggest is you get content that you don’t have to spend time producing. But it’s not just content but actually beneficial content. This content will probably do a better job of selling your products than anything you could do yourself. In fact, according to OfferPop, UGC gives websites a 29% boost in conversions.
Your customers are your best salespeople. They just need a platform to do the job!