In this case study, we will explain and show how the content created by users was useful for a company that does not conduct business activities and works in the direction of healthcare network in terms of minimizing the time spent searching for unique duplicates. In parallel, these guys attracted new users to their project and increased the level of organic traffic by more than 200%.
Even the authors of the guide for assessing the quality of content working under the auspices of Google agree that unique high-quality content should be accurate, original, fully disclose the topic and be the mouthpiece of expert opinion.
However, not all companies can boast a carload of free time, a lot of money, and the presence of a strategic content plan to fill the site with useful information, at least in the foreseeable future. At the very least, their employees have bad thoughts.
However, through the use of UGC, we were able to help our wards who are not engaged in business fill their blog with more than two dozen informational materials. As a result, this increased the volume of traffic attracted to their blog by more than two hundred percent. And this is only for a year!
Read this article to the end and you will learn how we went step by step to this result, as well as get acquainted with a number of ideas for applying UGC in the field of SEO for your Internet resources.
What we had to deal with: lack of strategy and resources
While working on this project, we faced two problems in the direction of content marketing:
the complete lack of SEO promotion tactics;
minimum resources to help generate content.
As a result, our clients ' blog was almost not represented in organic search.
This company, which operates in the healthcare niche, mostly created blog content from motivational narratives. They were great material for social media users. But for the search, it was almost zero option. Their blog pages did not carry useful information for live users who were harmed by medical experiments.
And since our clients ' company did not conduct commercial activities, we needed to carefully select the resources we used to generate new materials for filling the blog, while not particularly loading the team of full-time content managers.
At the same time, we have adopted the following content strategy: let the same people create content for people.
We gave up the fight for the first places in the top search results for keywords in General medical niches with such projects as, for example, Mayo Clinic and threw all our efforts to attract family, spiritual and emotional publications related to medical events to the blog's readers. CaringBridge in this regard can be regarded as a “journey of health.”
And in order to find sources of inspiration for content generation, we sat down to analyze our direct competitors, and began to think together with content managers, and then determine priority keywords based on volume and relevance.
Finally, after the block of our new topics appeared, we started searching for experts and sources of generating ideas. Now it is clear that people who have real-life experience in these industries know these topics best. It turned out that the lion's share of clients of the organization whose blog we were currently engaged in felt the impact of health problems on their own skin. Who but these people know what to do if not health fails.
Therefore, we decided to communicate with our client's Facebook page subscribers (which is 311 thousand users!) with a request to suggest thematic ideas for blog posts on each of the topics. As a result, 28 publications of the information plan were written and supplemented, with an eye to the comments of live users of the community on Facebook.
At the same time, we used, for example, these invitations and excerpts from relevant publications:
In addition, it was decided to abandon publications with CTA, in the name of commenting on more ideas. And it worked. Immediately, more than one hundred comments were received through posts. But it is comments that, if they are allowed by the moderator and further indexed by search engines, increase the level of relevance of content from blog pages, making it better. And the fresh thoughts of commenters refresh the content itself. After all, this is what all the band members work for.
Progress
This activity quickly attracted the interest of users. That's why we had to do very little, and as a result, get interesting and useful materials.
UGC allowed us to get unique and relevant content that quickly became popular, and brought the blog pages to the top of search results for a number of target keywords.
As a result, according to the results of last year, we managed to bring an almost unknown blog to the top of search results for a number of keywords, making it the most progressive section of the resource.
It showed an increase in the number of organic user traffic by as much as 228% Y/Y.
At the same time, the volume of created sites increased by 79% in annual volumes. And the volume of traffic attracted from Facebook increased by 304% Y/Y. And traffic from email showed an increase of 76% Y/Y.
But this statistic will definitely not include hundreds of rave reviews from our group members about our new publications.
"A very necessary list, I am delighted with the quotes. You have a great website!"
"Thanks to these ideas, I will help my little sister. And since we live a long distance away, the idea of a shell for a gift will be interesting."
"Wow, these feelings are almost like those who are struggling with lymphomas. It is extremely important to listen to the patient. But these are life bases that Can heal anyone!"
we include UGC with additional methods
Facebook comments aren't the only source of user-generated content. There are still a lot of ideas for getting UGC:
Of the reviews. Criticizing they are great to increase the level of sales and can bring relevant content to the site. If you are worried about this, Google's advice will remind the owners of web resources that a couple of bad reviews will not harm the site. "One contact can't significantly ruin the overall situation."But you also need to deal with spam, as well as with bad reviews, filtering them if possible.
With comments. As the main content of the page. If the comments are of good quality, their value can be extremely high. But if they are bad, they will drop the page down the search results. Check the quality of moderation of your comments and their indexing.
Embed tweets: ask your Twitter followers to retweet your keywords. Their retweets can then be used to generate content creation ideas and add tweets to your blog posts. This will unify the content and attract readers.
Note: there are reasonable concerns about UGC due to spam or non-thematic content. Therefore, read these strategies created by Google to bring your content in line with the requirements for authenticity, relevance and thematic content.
And if you have no place to model your UGC - this is not a cause for concern. Content can be loaded manually. And our example is a good proof of that. After all, this process will be completely controlled by you, as well as the content itself.
Finally, get your users to ask for your approval to post their comments on your site. In this matter, transparency is your everything.
Last chord
Study your users to see if they can generate thematic ideas. Ask your subscribers by email or via social networks what they are interested in reading about. Create a list of frequently asked questions from your customer reference groups and for your products. Explore the content of your blog's comments in search of interesting questions and General topics. Then you can explore keywords to understand how users search for these topics.
And to feel the effect of UGC, you don't need to gather an army of users. Many of our tactics also work with small projects. Don't be afraid to experiment in searches that provide a high degree of engagement and give a good result. If you work together with your readers correctly, pleasant results will not be long in coming.
Related: demonstrate your personal tactics. Enter the search query Land Awards >>
The opinions expressed in this publication are solely the opinion of the author and do not apply to the search engine. The composition of the author's team can be found here.