Driving SEO revenue from user generated content

It’s great to come across a slide-share on the valuable topic of generating SEO revenue from your user generated content, as that’s certainly a topic I worked on at Shopping.com post-Google Panda to try and raise our ranking. What has used to be called social media optimization (SMO) has now migrated to the more specific term ‘social SEO’ in an era when reviews and guides are increasingly core to e-commerce success, and when getting full SEO value from them post-Panda can make a measurable dollar difference.

A top 40 comparison HD TV product guide enabled for SEO purposes on Shopping.com UK

There my approach was to research four or five keywords, based on a combination of share of voice (SOV) and keyword competition, using Google Adwords tool as the now defunct Google Wonder Wheel tool. I then employed Gemma and Tim at The Copywriting People to write guide text for a trial 40 comparison product guides using those chosen keywords, taking the choice of products from our most popular products for the month of May. What I have heard since then (thanks to this webinar with the founder of Trackur, from Hubspot: 23:00 mins) as a tactic to improve backlinks from top blogs is to use a social tracking tool based on keywords you are focusing on, and spotting when top bloggers are writing on a relevant subject. Then reaching out to them to see if they’d review your product, or leave a comment on that blog piece with a link back to your content without making the content too ‘spammy’. You can try this out with Alterian’s free SM2 tool for example.

To measure the effect I recorded the ranking of the products on Shopping.com UK and DealTime UK at the outset. Then with the aim of returning 6 weeks later to record the results.

For comparison check out the slideshare in question below from PowerReviews, which details how to self-assess your own ugc value for SEO – based on the estimate that 60% of US e-commerce sites which carry reviews don’t get full SEO value from them.

It may also worth checking out the Smart SEO tool launch by Bazaarvoice earlier this year. Clearly there’s a real demand for such a product/service in the marketplace, the trick as always is to match a method which fits your budget and delivers to your ‘social commerce‘ objectives.

11 thoughts on “Driving SEO revenue from user generated content

  1. Pingback: My CV in full | @stuartgh

  2. Hey There Stuart Hall,

    In addition to your post I was wondering, I recently wrote an article called ‘SEO what it is? How can help build traffic? Powerful SEO strategies to run organic traffic to your site’.

    Getting the most out of the free, organic, search results should be the
    goal of any online company owner. The traffic is free and extremely targeted.
    Finding and implementing the best SEO strategies will depend mostly
    on your existing knowledge and your budget.

    If you don’t know much about SEO or you don’t have the time or
    inclination to learn, you can hire a business to do the work for you.
    There are a lot of companies that specialize in this and multifarious of them
    are quite reasonable in their pricing structure.

    If you can’t afford to hire a firm at this stage in the game, don’t
    worry, with a little knowledge and a few simple tweaks you can without trouble
    promotion from some basic SEO and at least get your foot in the door.

    Once you are making additional resources online you can invest in the
    knowledge, or hire someone, to take your SEO efforts to the next level.

    For now, you can start here:

    1. It all starts with your keyword list. Choosing the right keywords for
    your onsite SEO has to be the first step, everything revolves around
    these keywords.

    Make sure that you choose words, or phrases, that get at least one
    thousand searches a month and less than 20,000 competitors. They
    must also be closely targeted and highly relevant to the content of your
    website.

    Search engines will either reward or penalize you on the relevance of
    your keywords, you don’t want to be penalized.

    Once you’ve got your keywords focus on placing them in your meta
    tags, your headers and footers to start. This will grab the attention of the
    search engine spiders and they will flow your site to the top of the
    rankings if they think it is highly relevant.

    2. You can use a similar method to pilot traffic to your site by
    writing and submitting quality, keyword focused articles. Now, this is the
    point when a lot of people make a mistake; they don’t write a quality
    informative article, instead they try to product as multifarious keywords as
    possible into it until is virtually all gibberish.

    You won’t be rewarded for that, the search engines are too smart. Write
    your article around a keyword, but don’t write for the search engines,
    write for people.

    If you supply your readers with genuinely handy information, and
    optimize it with keywords, your article can get a top rating in the search
    engines and subsequently direct a lot of traffic to your site.

    You can read the rest of this article at
    http://extraincome.renatas-network.com/index.php/2011/11/18/
    or
    Easiest way to start build your business online now!

    Kind Regards,
    Renata
    Keep up the good work!

  3. Pingback: Applying lean start-up principles and practice to building corporate communities | @stuartgh

  4. Hi there, just turned into aware of your blog thru Google, and found that it’s really informative. I’m gonna watch out for brussels. I will appreciate if you happen to proceed this in future. Numerous other folks will probably be benefited from your writing. Cheers!

  5. Pingback: How your community can help SEO (and vice versa) | @stuartgh (#thinslicing)

  6. Pingback: All Things of World

  7. Pingback: Online Marketplace

  8. Pingback: Live Streaming Κάλυψη Συνεδρείων

  9. Pingback: Why growth hacking is harder than it looks | @stuartgh #thinslicing #MacGuffin

  10. Pingback: Why growthhacking is really about tactics and strategy | @stuartgh #startup #growthhacking

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.