Edited by Chima Mmeje

When researching a product or service, you’ll probably read the reviews before making a decision. Why? It all comes down to motives. Shoppers know brands are motivated by profit. So, they turn to other users for authentic information, inspiration, and feedback based on real experiences. That’s why user-generated content (UGC) is so powerful.

For brands, it can provide different types of onsite content that build trust and community, all while growing traffic and brand awareness. But many marketers, including content marketers and SEOs, view it largely as a social media strategy. By doing so, they’re overlooking a lever they can pull to drive meaningful SEO growth.

In this article, you’ll learn how to launch a UGC strategy for SEO, create an optimized pipeline, and automate it to scale traffic.

All marketing campaigns need to start with the basics: defining who you’re talking to, their needs, and how you can meet them meaningfully. When discussing UGC for SEO, channels like social media, email, and PR still matter.

The first major step is getting a handle on all inbound UGC channels and dialing in the funnels. Whether your mix involves a few key social networks, a particular product category, your brand's blog, or a combination of these channels, zoom out and see how they can work harmoniously to support the bigger picture.

This exercise will enable you to naturally identify and get to know your audience(s). In turn, you can iron out your goals for leveraging UGC and map targeted objectives to each.

Take that killer blog post you recently wrote as an obvious example. Let's say you want to open up the UGC floodgates by encouraging a constructive discussion in the blog comments. Amplifying it on social media can get the ball rolling. Measuring social traffic, organic search traffic, and engagement metrics (such as comments) gives you a sense of how well it’s working — far sooner than you might wait for SEO traffic to appear.

A major pitfall when launching any UGC strategy is failing to anticipate scalability. But scalability is sort of the point. If the UGC results in new, indexable pages, potential SEO issues and opportunities make it even more critical to get it right from the start.

When the influx of user-generated content becomes too heavy a lift for manual curation or light automation, it becomes difficult to find air and fix the problem. The key is defining and implementing the proper set of tech solutions and processes up front to anticipate and enable UGC collection at scale.

When planning for scale, finding the right balance of automation versus manual review is a gray area. Utilizing systems establishes a frictionless flow of content that helps your team determine what's valuable versus low-value and thin (pages without much content or alignment to user needs).

Automation checks the imaginary box next to several elements in the UGC review process, which minimizes the pool of content for manual review:

• User and content usage rights: Serve the proper legal language regarding user rights and permissions and inform users where and how you’ll use their content.

• Inappropriate content: Fully automate and avoid these issues by putting barriers in place for cuss words, defamatory statements, and user-flagged inappropriate content.

• Acceptable content guidelines: Communicate guidelines for permissible content. For example, no AI-generated or duplicate content. Next, automatically filter out the content that doesn’t follow those guidelines.

Many UGC tools come equipped with foundational automation capabilities focused on collecting and filtering content. However, when automating more complex, SEO-focused elements, they might fall short. The automation needed for scalable optimization could require a cross-functional project with the dev or tech team.

There are countless types of UGC on a brand’s site that can influence SEO. Most of it has incredible potential to grow traffic when SEO is a part of the strategy from the get-go. In large part, it comes down to the way optimization and indexation considerations are built in.

Optimization strategy

The optimization side of UGC looks at specific elements that make up a page’s content, like title tags, headings, page copy, images, etc. These elements help Google understand how relevant content is to a user’s search query. But how can we optimize these elements at scale on UGC pages?

One of the best examples comes from Pinterest, whose method for sourcing long-form text to describe images has become a standard on social media platforms.

Pinterest pioneered prompting users to write descriptive text when uploading an image. They created an automated process where millions of images would receive human-written, long-form text that helps users — without putting that burden on their team or settling for subpar accessibility. It’s no wonder other platforms like Instagram followed suit shortly after.

Automate optimizing for impact

Thoughtful prompts, content fields, and requirements encourage users to upload richer, more engaging content AND provide much-needed context. As Pinterest did with descriptive text, you can automate these fields to populate title tags, page headings, and metadata.

The elements above are foundational for any URL, but automation can also improve performance. Hence, combining the powers of automation and structured data is the “secret sauce” that can help turn mountains of UGC into picturesque traffic peaks.

For metadata, collect that unique content and use it to set your fields. Examples for product pages include:

• SEO title: Use the user-sourced item name and potentially pair it with another field that could have search value, such as categorization. (“{Item Title} | {Item Category Name} on {Brand Name}”)

• Meta description: Consider using the submitted description, author, category, or other search-friendly fields to drive your meta description. (Explore {Item Name} from {User Name} on {Brand Name}.)

Reviews are another great example. If your site is already collecting reviews, mapping them to products via structured data allows them to appear in organic search results. In turn, that incentivizes a click to your result on the SERP versus other results.

Here’s an example of a rich organic result from Sephora.

Indexation strategy

Indexation is the less glamorous but all too critical side of user-generated content. While UGC can be a catapult in scaling SEO, it’s a matter of surfacing the user submissions that best support your goals. Some may be spammy, low-quality, or even damaging to your brand.

Quality is the crux of indexation

Additional tech SEO concerns are at play when determining what content Google should crawl and index. One of the most common and detrimental issues is thin content, which dilutes your SEO over time. Exhausting your crawl budget can also become a problem at a certain scale, which happens quickly as UGC gains traction.

To consistently achieve the desired quality level, audit your UGC forms and optimize fields to collect the content you want to index. For example, you can include required fields, ask the right questions, and enforce character-count minimums to ensure users provide adequate information.

It’s a delicate balance to determine requirements to maximize the quality AND rate of user submissions. For example, you don’t want to require many fields that discourage users from submitting. It’s worth considering automatically deindexing content that doesn’t meet your required minimums, as opposed to not allowing users to upload it in the first place.

Build automation into your indexation strategy

Improving the system you use to source content can create a more robust pool of UGC quality. Since low-quality UGC can slip through the cracks, building automation into your indexation strategy is essential.
The meta robots directive is one of the most vital tools at your disposal, which tells Google whether to index a page via an “index” or “noindex” tag. One potential approach to avoid thin content issues is automatically setting the meta robots tag on new UGC pages. You can base this on quality control factors like the number of fields the user filled out, the character count of specific crucial fields, or similar conditions.

Also, consider building a function to manually override the automated classification. This allows human curation to have the final say in one-off instances when it matters — like when a piece of UGC has “thin content” and 50 amazing backlinks pointing at it.

Whether your UGC strategy is focused on product, blog, or community growth, a certain level of promotion hinges on engaging new users and encouraging return users to share their submissions. This component of your UGC strategy is all about making it easy to share published content on social media accounts, blogs/websites, etc.

A simple method is to build CTAs and share buttons into your template for UGC pages — like the "Click to Tweet" boxes here on Moz. Make it seamless for users to share what they've submitted and what’s published about them. Some of their networks could include your new users.

When constructing the overarching ask, keep these considerations in mind:

• Use clear language to define what you’re asking users to share and how they need to do it.

• If needed, clarify why they should do it and how it benefits them.

• Determine the distribution channels, whether social media buttons or snippets of code/content they easily drop onto their blog/website.

• Include sample content so users can see an example for inspiration.

• For UGC campaigns with a contest or giveaway angle, include details like judging criteria, rules, and prize information.

Growing social shares and backlinks to UGC is also crucial to maximizing the SEO outcomes of your campaign.

No matter how you’re using UGC to support your larger marketing strategy, benchmarking and knowing how to measure success are vital. Using UGC to support your SEO is no different. Having a clear picture of your KPIs and how you’ll determine ROI from your UGC strategy is essential.

In addition to conventional UGC metrics like increased engagement and conversion rates, you'll want to factor in SEO-specific metrics based on target content or customer-funnel stage. Ideas here include:

• SEO performance metrics: Rankings, impressions, organic traffic, and backlink growth

• Content engagement metrics: Pages per session, time on site, and content consumption

• Micro conversions: UGC submissions, reactions, and comments

• Macro conversions: Signups, total sales, and average order value (AOV)

• User segment metrics: Returning visitors or rate of returning visitors (RVR)

• Loyalty metrics: Customer engagement score (CES), repurchase ratio, and lifetime value (LTV)

• Advocacy metrics: Net promoter score (NPS), social share count, and earned link count

In addition to measuring and reporting on success, determine how to use this data for continuous improvement. Look for underperforming areas and make calculated adjustments to improve weaknesses or bottlenecks in your strategy.

For example, which types of users are submitting the strongest UGC? How can you target them and incentivize them to create more?

Even if user-generated content is collected and published through a brand's website with SEO as the top priority, it’s a goldmine for distribution-focused channels like social and email. Some ideas for how to repurpose UGC in other channels include:

• Have the social team cherry-pick the best UGC for future social media posts.

• Include UGC, such as customer creations or quotes in emails.

• Test high-quality UGC images against in-house or stock photography to see which resonates most in paid ads and landing pages.

There’s no universal plug-and-play UGC strategy for SEO. It’s up to you to apply best practices correctly while focusing on what’s most authentic to your brand, product, and content.

TikTok video contests might be all the rage, but that doesn’t make them the right (or only!) answer for your site’s UGC sourcing efforts. Stay true to your users to get a UGC that aligns with your audience. Then, make that content work for you by automating the process with quality and scalability in mind. That’s how you build a library that leaves an impression and drives impressions.