Most of traffic to e-commerce sites comes from search engines like Google. So the SEO is becoming very important for the e-commerce site.
Most of the big website do an amazing job, but there is one thing that a lot of them are totally forgetting – and its the user-generated content.
Why you have to take User-Generated Content (UGC) seriously
- Your customers will leave you additionally information about your product. Maybe you have forgotten to say that your product weights 20 kg.
- You will get some extra valuable keywords. Your customers will maybe say “cheap black car” a word phrase you are not using in your text, but now your page will be found. (Remember to say thx to the customer)
- The customers will give you a higher keyword density for the keywords you already have. Maybe you are driving your traffic to your site using the word phrase “cheap cars”. And if all your UGC are talking about “cheap cars” it will help your ranking.
- With the Google Panda and other updates from Google, it’s now more and more important to have fresh, relevant and always new content. With the UGC you will get this.
- It’s not only product reviews. Remember the social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedln, YouTube, Questions and Answers, discussion forums and much more..
You can use the UGC on a lot of your pages, but the most valuable inputs are the ones that are shown on your product page where people can actually buy your product. If the UCG leads the customers to another page first (like your Facebook page) you will loose a lot of people for every click they have to do.
So put your product reviews on your product page! Don’t say you are going to do this later.. DO IT NOW.
How to let your customers work for you
Here is how it’s going to be done. Take a look at Amazon.com.
But there are also a lot of top e-commerce site that doesn’t use the UGC on their sites. A big site like Dell..
Even Best Buy is not having their product reviews indexed directly on the product page from Google.
Do your own SEO Self-test
Okay the key to all this is that you need your UGC on your product page AND you will have to know if Google is indexing it. And as you could see Best Buy did have customer reviews on their page. But the point is that it’s not indexed – and then its no good.
So this is what you are going to do
- Find a page on your website that has customer reviews on it
- Search for the product in Google
- Find the product link on google. It should look like this
- Click on the cache version
I can’t find the cache version of Google Chrome or Explorer. But you can find it on Firefox. If your Firefox doesn’t show the cache version. Do this:
Here is the Firefox fix:
1. Go up to the Tools drop-down menu
2. Select Add-ons
3. Search for “greasemonkey”
4. Click Install next to the greasemonkey add-on
5. After installing and restarting Firefox to complete the installation, the ‘greasespot’ home page will come up (if it doesn’t, go to this URL: http://www.greasespot.net/)
6. Click on the link “Find Scripts”
7. Look for “Google Cleanup Script” – it should be about the fourth one down on the list.
8. The current version, 1.7f, includes the restoration of the Cache. Just click on the green “Install” button in the upper right hand corner.
9. Once installed, just go to google and search for something – CACHE is back!
10. The annoying preview pane is still available which takes up a third of the page, but there are ways to disable this.
(yes I know a lot of trouble to get the cache back – but its worth it)
Now do your SEO for your UGC
1 Do you have UGC on your site
2 If yes.. Check if the UGC is indexed in Google
3 If not… Do the technical thing you have to do. You will have to make it work
4 If you don’t have any UGC on your site get it. Use at least one like product reviews or Q&A
5 Get ready to get much higher in search
6 Send me a comment and say thx to me. LOL
Okay that’s enough for today.. Time for coffee and football
Free for you
Free SeoCustomer Guide 2011 – just go and grab it …
All the best to you guys
Henrik