Supercharge Your Site With User Generated Content

If you've been following our blog or dabbled in SEO you should be well aware of how powerful and important creating quality content is. Being an authority on a topic or niche is crucial to improved rankings and growing your organic footprint. However consistently creating quality content can tak e time, effort and money before you can see the rewards of your labour. You may be limited by human or monetary resources while your audience can only enjoy and interact with so much content being pushed on them at any one time.

Pushing out content is also a very one-dimensional relationship unless you allow users to engage with your content in other ways apart from reading, this is where user-generated content comes in. Giving more users the ability to contribute to your site in some way can unlock valuable insight, improve the authoritative qualities of your site and provide scale you would not have reached otherwise. If you're wondering how to collect and solicit users to provide you with this valuable content. Here are 6 ways to gather user-generated content (UCG).

1. Comments

Social media has gone out of their way into making this a popular form of UCG. It is actually the foundation of their superiority to other sites. Providing an outlet for users to provide their feedback, to feel like they're contributing not just to the site but to a community is what makes this such a popular format.

Make sure comments are unique to your site and not pulled in from feeds by 3rd party sites.

2. Testimonials

Testimonials are a great source of content providing positive reinforcement about your brand from customers, celebrities and personalities can help ease cognitive dissonance of prospective clients checking out your site and are on the edge of whether to purchase or not.

3. Polls

Super simple to execute, there are many third party tools to embed this to your site or building your own shouldn't take too much effort, but reap big rewards. Polls can be used to gather quick responses from users who wouldn't normally engage on your site. Extending the reach of your content interaction, improving time on site and interaction on site which are all positive signals to search engines. Polls can also provide great insights for you to use as a base to create more content.

4. Surveys

As with polls, plenty of third party tools are available or build your own. Running regular surveys can bring big rewards. You are able to pull in more honest opinions due to anonymity and get valuable feedback on how people see, use and think of your site. Which you can use to be reactive and make positive changes or even release statistics that could be used for content syndication.

5. Guest Blogging

Leveraging off of bloggers who already have some authority and audience in a niche can help your site attract new users from their audience. It also aids generate a hype for marketing pushes targeting more content writers. While finally helping your site by giving it different styles of writing and different takes and perspectives giving your content a variation in personality and freshness.

6. Forums

Forums are an amazing source of untapped content potential. Allowing users to create topic threads of discussion to contribute to can quickly build up amazingly loyal and insightful contributors. Search behaviour has evolved and complex questions and long tail keywords are growing. For answers to these complex questions and long-tail searching, forums are winning these queries over with relative ease. Sites with forums like Quora and mybroadband have been using this to great effect.

Make sure you enforce strict rules on your forums when ti comes to content creation and that you have moderators in place for anyone who violate these rules like spammers.

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Tags: Content Marketing, SEO