Top Reasons to Leverage User Generated Content for SEO

What exactly is user generated content? And how can it help you with SEO? These are questions you are naturally asking yourself after reading the title of this article. Don’t worry, this is actually a part of SEO work that you won’t be doing – instead, your satisfied patients will. You seem surprised. So, read on, and find out more about leveraging user generated content for SEO.

What Is User Generated Content?

This type of content is created by the clients of a specific business or brand. When someone attended gym classes and posts a photo with a before and after look, this is user generated content. When someone can stop wearing their back brace because you helped them improve scoliosis and share a photo on the beach, this is also user generated content.

In short, user generated content (UGC) is any text, photo or video that your patients create and share with you. From a review of your practice to a video of them enjoying a run after they got rid of leg pain, all these pieces of content are very valuable for your practice.

Key Benefits of User Generated Content

UGC is essential for any digital marketing campaign at the present. Consumers are no longer 100% confident in marketing materials and ads. However, they will trust another person who recommends products and services they tried.

Just put yourself in a potential patient’s shoes. They have to choose between two chiropractic practices, both in the same area and with similar tariffs. However, one of the practices has the standard presentation texts on its website and social media accounts. Meanwhile, the other includes many testimonials and photos of smiling patients who regained their mobility and managed to get rid of chronic pain.

Which one of the two practices would you choose? We bet it will be the one that shares lots of user generated content.

Reasons to Rely on User Generated Content for SEO

Now let us focus on the main topic of this article: the role of user generated content for SEO. Yes, UGC has a positive impact on your search engine optimization strategy, as well.

Here are just a few examples:

1. You Get Fresh Content with Zero Effort

Whenever you update a website page with a new testimonial, Google perceives it as fresh content added to the page. This means that your page rank will increase. Moreover, Google perceives UGC as reliable and authentic content, adding more trust to the overall content of your web page.

Thus, collecting user generated content for SEO means boosting your page rank without working harder to write articles or film and edit videos.

2. Find More Long Tail and LSI Keywords

When people write captions for a photo or post a review, they use their own words – the same words they use when they search for your chiropractic services. Thus, you can sift through UGC and identify new keywords that you can rank for, especially long tail and LSI keywords.

Moreover, once user generated content is added to your site, Google will index it and start ranking your site for the respective keywords, if they appear with a certain frequency. That’s free page ranking for new keywords just by leveraging user generated content for SEO.

3. UGC Is Ideal for Automatic Optimization

Google relies on product reviews and testimonial to evaluate the reputation and trustworthiness of a website. It does this automatically, by sending spiders to crawl a website and identify user generated content (yes, they can discern between a review and your own description of chiropractic services).

Guess what, websites that continually add reviews appear higher in search engine page results than sites that do not leverage user generated content for SEO.

4. UGC Helps you Optimize Basic SEO Attributes

Keywords, titles, backlinks and internal links represent the backbone of search engine optimization. And customer reviews and testimonials are a match made in heaven for SEO.

First of all, your patients will include links to your site, and this is exactly what Google is looking for in terms of website reputation. Secondly, they will use specific keywords referring to your specialty (chiropractor) and your services. Thus, they will help you improve your SEO strategy.

5. Build a Strong Social Marketing Strategy

SEO and social media go hand in hand. As we explained in a previous article, Google and other search engines index social media content. With lots of user generated content for SEO available from your patients, you can select some items to share directly on your social media pages. This will help other potential patients build trust with your practice and decide to make the first appointment.

When you don’t have the time to manage your SEO strategy, our specialists are ready to help. We know how to collect user generated content and use it in your digital marketing strategy, so contact us!