First and foremost, you ought to be encouraging user reviews across Google, social media, and your website. They can be one of the best sources for long-tail keywords and because the reviews are user generated, there is very little work that you have to do on your end. Take your customer reviews from product pages and move the very best reviews to their own page to highlight and give these reviews even more importance in the eyes of users and search engines.
Customer Reviews and SEO
Make your star ratings visible and include structured markup with your reviews to make it easy for search engines to also read and assess your reviews. User reviews account for around 9.8% of a site’s ranking according to one estimate.
With certain customers and brands, you can even reach out to reviewers – especially users that left negative reviews – and engage with them both on and off the site. Don’t be afraid of feedback! There are plenty of cases where a company engaged with a customer on social media and that interaction was shared far and wide across the internet netting that company thousands of backlinks.
One of my favorite ways to leverage customer reviews for SEO is to comb through the reviews in order to find out what specific language customers are using to talk about products. Maybe what is on a site is industry specific and customers use laymen’s terms; chances are good that by optimizing a site and pages for those laymen’s terms will have a huge, positive impact.
Customer Reviews and Paid Advertising
You’ve just leveraged your customer’s reviews for their SEO quality, but you can take all of that effort one simple step further and start using reviewer’s keywords and copy in your advertising copy!
Did a customer call you the best at something? Use that in your ad copy! Did a customer say that they trust your product with their life? Ad Copy! Did a customer use a term for you product that you had not thought of before? Paid keyword!
The other hugely important part about using customer reviews for paid advertising is the amount of information you can glean about your audience. When people leave a review they include a host of information about:
- The product
- How they were using the product
- Who was using the product
- Lots and lots of additional information you might not even think about or additional uses for your product that you had maybe not considered
People will also leave information about their age, sex, location, and other demographics that cna help you more effectively market to your audience or even better define or redefine your audience.
While this isn’t necessarily a customer review, combing through LinkedIn content, especially a user’s profile, or several users with the same or similar job titles is a highly suggested way to find keywords and copy that you can then use to target those individuals in your paid campaigns.