According to new research, consumers, especially 16- to 34-year-olds, are more likely to turn to sites like Instagram or Facebook — instead of Google or Bing — to search for information about brands and products. And instead of clicking on keyword-rich landing pages, they’re more likely to prefer short-form videos, like those popularized by the social media platform TikTok.

This shift in search preferences is in part generational. Younger people use social media more than previous generations do. Almost 85% of people aged 18 to 29 and 81% of those 30 to 49 are active on at least one social media site — compared to 73% of those 50 to 64 and 45% of those 65 and older.

But the shift toward social search is also powered by technological advancements, including voice search, AI-powered algorithms, and more intuitive video-creating and editing tools, as well as the rise of new social platforms. Since 2020, new sites like Threads and Spotify Live — as well as more niche platforms like Clubhouse, Lemon8, and Polywork — are giving consumers more options when it comes to connecting with friends, family, colleagues, and brands. 

Brands and retailers that want to capitalize on the shift to social media SEO need to embrace these new search engines with a social search strategy that keeps up with consumers’ evolving preferences for discovering new products.

What is social media SEO?

Social media SEO is the art of optimizing your profiles to reach customers who are searching for terms relevant to your products and/or services. In addition to the social media best practices of building relationships and engaging your audience, you also want to share content that addresses the queries your ideal customers ask throughout the buying cycle about products and brands like yours.

Consumers in general are increasingly turning to social for their search inquiries. 83% of shoppers use social at least one of the big eight social platforms for researching products.

But social media SEO is especially important to companies that want to reach tech-savvy younger shoppers who are more likely to turn to social media, rather than Google, to find products. 40% of Gen Zers prefer to conduct research on platforms other than Google and a massive 90% say their purchase decisions are influenced by social media. 

One of the reasons younger consumers prefer social search is because they’re already active on sites like Instagram and TikTok. It’s less hassle for them to simply scroll up to the platform’s search bar than open a new tab. 

Social media platforms are taking notice and keeping users on-site by embracing predictive text and other advancements that improve the search experience.

• 94% of Gen Z use social media in 2022, up from 77% just a few years ago
• The average Gen Zer spends 2 hours and 43 minutes on social media every day

Another lure of social media SEO for younger generations is the visual nature of the search results. When asked why she stopped using Google, Anne-Christine Fignole, 21, told NBC News she prefers to watch, rather than read. 

“It’s one thing to read about … how this product works, but it’s another thing to see it,” said Fignole. This is also because the content found on social is much more authentic and relatable. Shoppers want to see visual user-generated content — real social imagery from fellow shoppers — over branded content because it’s more genuine and easier to see how products look in the real world.

Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram are the top social media platforms used by Gen Z. All favor visual content over paragraphs-long captions.

How social SEO helps your business

With more consumers (especially aforementioned Gen Zers), turning to social media instead of Google to find information, investing in social media SEO can help your brand stay relevant to a new generation of consumers. But that’s not the only way social SEO can help you reach and engage current and new customers. 

1. Boost product discovery. Even if your target market still uses Google for search, chances are they’re also active on social media. In 2022, more than 4.5 billion people used social media worldwide. That number is expected to grow to almost 6 billion in 2027. Having an active social media presence helps ensure you meet your customers on the channels they use every day. 
2. Grow your social audience. The core of social media SEO is creating valuable content that’s directly related to your customers’ needs and goals. The more relevant and helpful content you create, the better your chances of growing and cultivating a highly engaged social media audience. 
3. Boost your site’s SEO. A social media SEO strategy can also help you boost your site’s Google ranking. The social media scheduling platform Hootsuite recently conducted an experiment to determine if social media affects where a site shows up in traditional search engine rankings. The results showed a strong correlation between a brand’s social activity and its rankings.
4. Drive more sales. 63% of shoppers are more likely to buy a product if they can view customer photos and videos. Getting this visual UGC in front of more shoppers will mean an increase in sales for your brand.

How to create a social SEO strategy

A strong social SEO strategy begins with the same solid foundation as a traditional SEO strategy. You need to invest time in keyword research to understand the exact words and phrases consumers are using to discover products like yours. SEO tools like Semrush and Moz Pro can help with this. You can also glean a ton of SEO insights from your user-generated content. 

Like traditional SEO, you also want to embrace tools that help you measure your impact. By tracking comments, likes, and shares, you can find out what content resonates with your ideal customers — and double down on those types of posts. Some of the more popular social media management platforms include Hootsuite, Buffer, Sprout Social, and our own suite of social publishing and insights tools.

Once you have the basics in place, here’ are’s a few tips to help you boost your search ranking on each of the most popular social media platforms. 

Social SEO tips for each major platform

Social media platforms are the new search engines and while there’ll be similar SEO tactics across all of them, there’s a number of nuances specific to each one. These the social SEO tips you’ll need for the top social media platforms.

Instagram

Instagram SEO is its own ball game. Use keywords in your company’s profile name and description. This helps new-to-you users understand who you are and what you do — while increasing your chances of being discovered for relevant queries.

Further boost your social SEO by weaving keywords into your hashtags and video subtitles. Instagram will also let you edit its AI-generated photo alt text to include relevant keywords (while offering a better experience to those with visual impairments!).

Facebook

When you first set up your business page, Facebook assigns a generic URL that typically consists of an unrelated string of numbers and letters. You can optimize your social SEO by creating a vanity URL that includes your company name and ideally a target keyword. 

You can also optimize your Facebook SEO by including keywords in your page’s “about” section, description, headline, and captions, as well as your photos’ alt text. 

TikTok

TikTok’s search bar and trending topics can provide a wealth of SEO inspiration for future posts and content. 

Once you know what your consumers are looking for, create videos that appeal to these searches and make sure the relevant keywords are prominent in your captions, titles, and voiceovers. Having the most important keywords appear in a text layover also helps boost your discoverability. It will also significantly boost your chances of standing out in search by verifying your TikTok account.

YouTube

YouTube isn’t always considered a social media platform but it’s the 2nd biggest search engine in the world, behind Google, so requires a strong SEO strategy. Just like TikTok, the YouTube search bar is a fantastic source of SEO content ideas. Because the recency of videos can play a factor in where they appear in YouTube search rankings, consider targeting keywords that don’t bring up a lot of new results. 

After you create your content, make sure your keywords appear in your video’s file name, title and description, cards and overlays, chapters (aka timestamps), as well as your tags and video script.

You can also create keyword-optimized playlists and embrace YouTube’s organizational tools like hashtags and categories to boost your discoverability.

Unlike Google, you won’t get penalized on YouTube for optimizing multiple videos for the same keyword. So have some fun and experiment to see what works best for your audience. 

Pinterest

Setting your brand up as a verified merchant on Pinterest will boost credibility with consumers while giving you access to analytics that help you create more impactful content. As you learn more about your Pinterest audience’s interests, make sure relevant keywords appear in your bio and display name, as well as the names and descriptions of any boards you create.  

LinkedIn

In addition to optimizing your company page’s headline and about section, LinkedIn lets you customize your company page’s URL (just like Facebook), giving you additional opportunities to rank for relevant search terms.

But don’t stop there. LinkedIn offers so many fields to personalize, from your company’s specialties to its products and services. While most companies are content to just throw up a logo and drop a few sentences in their LinkedIn about section, you can set your brand apart — and boost your social media search rankings — by filling these sections out completely with keyword-rich content. 

Twitter/X

Whether you call it X or Twitter, make sure your bio, alt tags, and hashtags feature the keywords your customers are searching for. To further boost your Twitter SEO, take advantage of Twitter’s default sorting algorithm, which makes it easier for users to find posts and profiles that align with their interests. 

By creating lots of keyword-optimized tweets about topics that are related to your company and relevant to your customers, you show Twitter you’re an informed and authoritative voice on the topics your customers care about. 

Heads up!

When it comes to using keywords, you don’t want to overdo it. Consumers can smell a keyword-stuffed post from a mile away. Instead, use search terms carefully. If it sounds natural when you read it aloud, chances are the post is good to share. 

Also, remember that social media SEO is not a one-way street. Most of the platforms listed above prioritize the content of active profiles that engage with other users and participate in community conversations.

Embracing social search

With more and more consumers, and almost half of Gen Zers, conducting searches on platforms other than Google, brands that want to stay relevant and connected have to embrace social media search. 

The more you know about shoppers’ preferences for finding information, the better positioned you are to meet them where they are — and provide the exact information they need to move forward in the buying cycle. 

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Masterclass: How to improve SEO with reviews and social media

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While content still rules, retailers need a holistic SEO strategy that optimizes mobile and voice search, diversifies marketing channels, and maintains technical excellence.

SEO tips for retail growth

Looking to boost your online presence? Here’s our 10 SEO tips for retail.

1. Do your keyword research
2. Feature content that positively impacts SEO
3. Refresh your existing content
4. Diversify your marketing channels
5. Optimize return on ad spend
6. Be mobile-first
7. Consider voice search
8. Check technical SEO
9. Include structured data
10. Secure your e-commerce site

1. Do your keyword research

Your retail SEO strategy should begin with keyword research. You want to make sure you’re targeting the right words in your on-page content in order to maximize your SEO efforts. But where do you start?

• Understand your audience: Research and identify the keywords and phrases your target audience is likely to use when searching for products similar to yours. And don’t forget to check reviews — they often contain valuable insights into how people talk about your products and can help you better understand your customers’ language
• Focus on long-tail keywords: Long-tail keywords are more specific, typically have less competition, and attract more qualified traffic. For example, a keyword like “dresses” is broad and vague, while the long-tail keyword “women’s maxi dresses for summer” targets a narrow audience with clear intent
• Identify user intent: Evaluate the search queries related to your products and identify the intent behind those searches. Are the terms you’re using informational, navigational, or transactional? Words like ‘buy,’ ‘shop,’ ‘order, and ‘discount’ signal strong transactional intent. Including them in your keyword choices can help you target users actively seeking to make a purchase
• Monitor competitor keywords: Keep an eye on the keywords your competitors are targeting to help you identify gaps or opportunities in your keyword strategy

Remember that effective keyword research is an ongoing process. You need to stay updated on the latest industry trends and adapt your keyword strategy to stay competitive in online retail. 

2. Feature content that positively impacts SEO

Prioritizing quality content attracts traffic to your store and distinguishes your business from competitors. You already know that user-generated content can boost your add-to-cart rate, but it can also improve your E-E-A-T signals.

E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. These four qualities are part of Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines, which real people use to evaluate the quality of search results. To meet these quality standards for SEO, your content must be high-intent, valuable, engaging, and useful to searchers.

While it’s not a direct ranking factor, Google wants to serve its users results with strong E-E-A-T, which is why it must be a key component of your SEO strategy.

So what type of content best contributes to E-E-A-T? User-generated content (UGC). Studies show that UGC can boost organic traffic by 30% — one of the 24 ways UGC can boost SEO.

The most effective types of UGC for SEO include:

• Product reviews. Product reviews are one of the most influential elements of e-commerce sites, with 88% of consumers reading them before making a purchasing decision. Including product reviews on your product detail pages (PDPs) can improve their overall quality, enhance their trustworthiness, and send positive signals to search engines
• Visual content. Visual UGC, like photos and videos, can enhance your site’s trustworthiness by showcasing real people, real experiences, and real satisfaction with your products. It creates a more genuine and reliable connection with shoppers, boosting their confidence in your site and increasing the likelihood of conversion
• Questions and Answers. Q&As contribute to E-E-A-T by providing accurate and valuable information to customers and actively engaging with their inquiries. This showcases your expertise and helps improve your reputation, credibility, and, ultimately, customer trust

3. Refresh your existing content

Search engines prioritize fresh, relevant content. That means older content is likely to drop in rankings and traffic. Make sure to update your existing content on a regular basis! That’s another way UGC can help.

Keeping up with the content demands can be a challenge, but shopper content like photos, videos, reviews, and Q&As ensures you’ll have a steady stream of new content and can provide several SEO benefits, including:

• Improved SERP results: Refreshing content helps search engines discover updates and changes on your product pages, leading to improved Google search engine results page (SERP)rankings
• Keyword optimization: Optimizing keywords in refreshed content increases the likelihood of ranking higher in search results for relevant terms
• Enhanced user experience: Updating content improves the user experience, resulting in longer on-page dwell time, lower bounce rates, and higher conversion rates, which all positively impact search rankings
• Increased relevance: Keeping content relevant and accurate through refreshes helps search engines understand the usefulness of your product pages, increasing their visibility in search results
• Social sharing and backlink opportunities: Refreshed content attracts social sharing and backlink opportunities, signaling to search engines that your content is valuable and deserves higher rankings

Keep in mind refreshing content doesn’t guarantee instant results in search rankings. SEO is a long game with complex factors. But by consistently updating and optimizing your product detail pages (PDPs), you can increase the likelihood of better visibility and improved organic search performance over time.

4. Diversify your marketing channels

Diversifying your marketing channels can have several positive effects on SEO for your retail website. By leveraging social media, email marketing, and working with influencers, you can get more people to visit your e-commerce site and interact with your content, improving your search engine ranking.

Plus, using different methods means you’re not relying on just one way to drive traffic. It can help you stay ahead of algorithm changes and keep a steady flow of visitors and sales.

5. Optimize return on ad spend by lowering advertising cost

SEO and paid ads help your e-commerce site show up in search results without spending as much on ads. As a retailer, you can improve your marketing campaigns and still achieve good results by refining ad targeting and using data analysis to limit spending on ads that don’t work. By balancing SEO and cost-effective advertising, you’ll get more value for your advertising dollars and improve your overall marketing results.

You can improve online visibility and increase revenue by pursuing a holistic search strategy. And by combining SEO and SEM, you can dominate Google’s SERP. One way to do this is by redirecting ad spending from keywords where you already rank well organically. It allows you to maximize your budget and achieve better results.

6. Be mobile-first

As of 2023, 79% of smartphone users have made purchases using their mobile devices. And it’s projected that in 2024, smartphone commerce will account for 44% of all e-commerce sales. 

With this significant shift toward mobile commerce, retailers need to implement a mobile-first approach. A mobile-first approach ensures your site is optimized for mobile screens and provides a seamless user experience, leading to more organic traffic. Factors such as responsive design and intuitive navigation also enhance user satisfaction and decrease bounce rates.

Not to mention, a mobile-friendly website is more likely to attract backlinks and social shares, as shoppers are more inclined to share content they can easily access on their mobile devices.

7. Consider voice search

Voice search is becoming increasingly important for SEO in retail thanks to the rise of voice-activated virtual assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant. Voice search offers convenience and speed, allowing users to perform hands-free searches and get immediate results.

With voice search queries often have a conversational tone and are longer, resembling natural language. Retailers need to optimize their content with long-tail keywords, answering common questions, and providing concise, informal responses.

By embracing voice search, retailers can capture a growing audience and gain a competitive edge in the evolving search landscape.

8. Check technical SEO

As a retailer, here’s five tasks you can undertake to improve your technical SEO and optimize your online presence:

1. Optimize website performance: Improve your site’s speed, responsiveness, and user experience for enhanced performance
2. Resolve technical errors: Identify and fix technical issues such as broken links, duplicate content, and 404 errors for better site functionality
3. Establish logical site architecture: Create a well-organized site structure and implement proper internal linking for improved navigation and crawlability
4. Optimize for website accessibility: Ensure your site is accessible to all users, including those with disabilities, by following accessibility guidelines
5. Streamline indexing: Optimize your site’s crawling and indexing potential by leveraging XML sitemaps and robots.txt directives

9. Include structured data

Structured data is information that’s decipherable by machine learning algorithms. Retailers can leverage it to enhance SEO efforts by providing search engines with clear and structured information about a product’s name, price, availability, ratings, and reviews to search engines.

This enriched data helps search engines understand and categorize products more accurately, improving search results’ visibility and potential inclusion in rich snippets and product carousels.

Structured data can also help you showcase additional information, such as product variations, specifications, and shipping details, enhancing the user experience and increasing click-through rates. By incorporating structured data, you can gain a competitive edge, attract more targeted organic traffic, and drive higher engagement and conversions.

10. Secure your e-commerce site

Last but certainly not least, securing your e-commerce sites is essential. Since search engines prioritize secure sites, implementing SSL encryption and ensuring your site is secure can positively impact your search rankings and conversion rate.

And because customers are more likely to trust and make purchases from a secure site, it also improves the user experience and can increase conversions.

Dominate SEO for your retail website

Mastering SEO is crucial for driving traffic, visibility, and sales in the dynamic digital retail world. By implementing these 10 SEO tips for your retail site, you’ll elevate your online presence and outshine the competition. 

To maximize your online presence as a retailer, consider the following SEO tips:

• Conduct thorough keyword research to target the right audience and diversify your marketing channels for broader reach
• Prioritize quality content that aligns with Google’s E-E-A-T standards and refresh existing content to improve search rankings
• Focus on technical SEO to strengthen your site’s foundation, leverage structured data for enhanced visibility, and secure your e-commerce site for customer trust

With these strategies in place, you can navigate the SEO landscape with confidence and achieve sustainable success in the digital retail realm!

Want to really hone your SEO strategy? Watch our short masterclass below to understand what UGC criteria to include in your SEO audit, how to boost your Instagram SEO rankings, and the factors that affect your retail category search ranking.

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Masterclass: How to improve SEO with reviews and social media

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According to Pew, the ability to ask questions is a key deciding factor for consumers and is second only to price competitiveness. And in a study, the Harvard Business Review found that consumers value easy access to reliable information about products while shopping, with many reporting that FAQs and online question and answer platforms are valuable resources.

The simple truth is that unanswered questions can keep shoppers from buying your products and, even worse, cause potential customers to distrust your brand. If someone came into your physical store and asked you a question, you wouldn’t ignore them. So why ignore them online?

When you think about the impact, that’s 700 fewer calls or emails coming through to our customer service team. It’s time and money saved, so the impact is significant

Kristina Rapljenovic, Website Manager, Nestlé Canada

For good reason, question and answer platforms have become a staple in e-commerce. These tools allow brands and other consumers to directly answer product questions from in-market shoppers. That’s a big benefit to shoppers, but it’s an even bigger benefit for your brand.

Question and answer platform key benefits

Building a question and answer platform into your product pages enables you to have a one-to-one conversation with your shoppers. Whenever you’re able to have a direct channel to your audience, especially when they’re ready to make a purchase, your brand will benefit.

For example, Bazaarvoice customer MeUndies found exactly that when they implemented a question and answer platform on their site.

By answering customer questions on product pages, future shoppers can learn more about products and save themselves the effort of having to contact the team. It also enables the brand to turn a negative experience into a positive one. This has increased conversions and decreased the number of customer service tickets MeUndies employees must respond to.

Here’s the the top reasons to include a question and answer platform on your e-commerce site.

1. Reach shoppers at key decision moments

Let’s start with the biggest benefit of question and answer platforms: When shoppers are asking questions, they’re engaged and already well into the decision stage. In short, they’re ready to buy something and just waiting for validation.

There’s two types of common consumer questions:

• With quantitative questions, shoppers are asking or looking for product-specific questions that center around features. “Does this dress come in black?”, “How many HDMI ports does this TV have?”, “Is this gluten-free?” These questions focus on the hard details of a product or service.

• On the other hand, qualitative questions tend to focus on more subjective product details and personal opinions: “Is this a good blender for green smoothies?”, “What do you think of the picture quality on this TV?” These types of questions see the shopper trying to either validate or discredit their own opinions. In short, they’re looking for a second opinion, preferably from someone who has already experienced the product.

When you can provide answers to these two kinds of questions, it makes for a powerful combination. Facts and figures quickly reduce uncertainty about your product, but decisions tend to be rooted in emotion. Quantitative questions give shoppers facts and figures, while qualitative questions tell a story about the product.

2. Organically build a list of FAQs to increase conversion

One type of question and answer platform is frequently asked questions (FAQs). Aka one of the most tried-and-true methods of improving consumer confidence. The same study as above by Harvard Business Review showed the value of making it easy for consumers to gather, understand, and weigh their options. Brands that did this well were:

• 86% more likely to be purchased by the consumers considering them
• 9% more likely to be repurchased
• 115% more likely to be recommended to others

The easier a brand makes the purchase-decision journey, the better, and an FAQ list can move shoppers quickly towards validation.

But making an FAQ can be tough. You have to do customer research to identify common questions and pain points, and then you have to answer them. And you have to do that across all of your products. This can be a project.

So what if you crowdsourced your FAQs? What if you could identify exactly which questions continue to crop up from interested consumers about your products?

With the right question and answer platform, you can do just that. By giving shoppers a platform to ask their questions, you build yourself a powerful repository of consumer insight into common questions you’re facing in the market. You can answer your potential customer’s questions before they’ve even had to ask it.

3. Build more social proof around your products

Social proof has been one of the buzzier concepts in e-commerce over the past few years and for good reason. It explains a psychological and social phenomenon where people look to their peers to figure out the right thing to do. It’s the “if everyone is doing it, then I should be” feeling.

In the context of commerce, it’s a powerful force. Simply put, people often turn to their peers when making purchasing decisions. That’s why user-generated content (UGC), like ratings and reviews, has proved so successful in e-commerce. At its most basic, it prove that other people are using something.

Question and answer platforms scratch a similar itch. In addition to allowing customers to ask questions and find answers, they also show shoppers that other people are interested in — and own — the product in question. But Q&A goes one step further than ratings, reviews, and other forms of UGC — it allows shoppers to ask why the crowd is moving in a certain direction.

We want to know that other people have shared our experience. More importantly, we want to know that the choice we are making is the choice that other people have made.

Crazy Egg — web analytics tool

Research has shown that the more UGC and social likes, shares, and follows a product or brand has, the more likely it is to command respect. Sometimes all it takes to get a customer to click the buy button is to show them that other people have already hit that same button.

4. Boost SEO with key content to attract more shoppers

When you’re juggling a lot of products — and multiple product pages — it’s likely that you’re missing details somewhere. The more information you provide on product pages, the more customer questions you answer and the better your page performs in search.

Shoppers tend to ask questions when there’s a lack of information, which can help you identify content gaps on your site and then fill them with keyword-rich content.

As an added bonus, allowing customer questions on your site organically boosts your SEO. First, when your product pages are constantly being updated with new questions and answers, your pages have fresh content, which positively impacts your search ranking.

Second, people’s search queries often match the keywords in customer questions, so your pages rank higher and people are driven straight to your products. Let a question and answer platform do the heavy SEO lifting on your product pages for you.

The best question and answer platform on the market

From the original bazaar to the new connected marketplace, shopping has long been a social activity — consumers ask each other questions, talk to store assistants, and examine and compare products. While e-commerce has changed that, the tools that bring those in-store experiences online have helped fill the experiential gap.

Question and answer platforms do just that, offering up answers to shoppers when they’re on the cusp of making a decision, convincing them to make the purchase. And they’re very convincing at it.

For example, the composite organization featured in a recent Total Economic Impact Study of Bazaarvoice, which uses Bazaarvoice’s own question and answer platform, allowing them to answer questions at-scale within minutes, saw conversions increase by 20%, reaching a rate of 5%.

Learn more about Bazaarvoice Questions & Answers here or get in touch directly below to get started.

If you prefer, you can watch our on-demand masterclass on the subject instead.

Chapters:

1. How UGC increases organic traffic
2. Brands and retailers utilizing UGC for SEO
3. Assemble your UGC toolkit
4. Calculate the SEO impact of your UGC

You’ve done everything right. Keyword researched your industry and target audience, optimized your e-commerce site pages, your site is user-friendly, and you’ve earned backlinks. Nice. But, even though you’ve taken these steps to improve your search engine optimization (SEO) performance, your organic traffic is still not where it needs to be.

Enter: user-generated content (UGC). UGC is a lot more than Instagram posts of fab new outfits or hilarious product reviews. While those have excellent social and entertainment value, from a marketing standpoint, UGC also has significant e-commerce benefits. A big one that often flies under the radar is that UGC is powerful fuel for search engines.

Search engines are gateways to purchases. “As shoppers, we often turn to search engines to find the products we’re looking for,” says Brandon Klein, a senior product marketing manager at Bazaarvoice. Social media is a wonderland of product discovery, which is why Instagram SEO is so important. And Google is the place for research, comparison, and consideration. In other words, shoppers are inspired on social and ready to take action on search.

Organic search is the dominant source of global e-commerce traffic. So it’s crucial to make sure your site content is optimized to rank high in search results and is compelling enough to click. And UGC can make your site more appealing to both search engines and human shoppers alike.

1) How UGC increases organic traffic

Since the dawn of the internet, search engines have refined their algorithms to produce the best results for user queries. These search engines use a variety of criteria to determine which website results best match users’ intent. Among the most important factors that provide value are keyword match and quality content.

And the more specific the content on your website is, the more chances you have to match with a search query. We don’t just search for “bluetooth headphones” we search for “best bluetooth headphones for running” or “most comfortable bluetooth headphones for sleeping.”

Klein says, “This long-tail nature of how people use search engines to find the perfect product is a table stakes opportunity for brands and retailers to leverage consumer language to show up in a moment that counts — when shoppers are trying to make a purchase.” So how can brands figure out exactly what consumer language to include on their website? By sourcing it from other consumers via product reviews, Q&As, and social media posts.

Aside from containing long-tail keywords, UGC also improves your SEO in subtler ways. 

Ratings and reviews

According to a survey of 500 brands and retailers, improved SEO is one of the top business benefits of ratings and reviews. That’s why 63% of them rely on ratings and review programs to meet their goals for SEO — among several other targets. It’s simple, brands with a continuous stream of review content will see their product rank higher in search queries. And vendors with more reviews will see their products rank higher on retailer’s websites.

More reviews = higher ranking = increased conversion = boosted sales

Product reviews and star ratings give customers a chance to provide feedback that’s not only helpful to your brand but also highly influential to other shoppers. When customers interact with reviews, the likelihood of a conversion doubles because of their trust in the perceptions and opinions of fellow shoppers.

Reviews provide an effective and consistent influx of fresh content, a major component of Google’s ranking criteria. In addition to the fresh factor, customers are contributing long-tail keywords from their own feedback. These long-tail keywords have a lot of value. When someone else searches for the same terms found in product reviews, the product pages linked with them will appear in search results. The CTR of long-tail keywords is 3-6% higher than broad searches, and they’re also less competitive to rank for than shorter keywords.

Another perk of ratings and reviews is the coveted rich snippet. A review rich snippet displays an average Google seller rating and the number of reviews associated with the corresponding product. It also takes up precious SERP (search engine results page) real estate, making it a focal point for the user.

A large-scale Milestone study of over 4.5 million search queries found that the click-through rate (CTR) of organic search results with rich snippets is 58%, compared to 41% for non-rich results.

As you can see in the example below, this review rich snippet for a Wayfair product category page includes an aggregate of all the star ratings and thumbnail images of the products on that page.

Klein says if the quality of the page merits those clicks from the rich snippet, the payoff will be even greater. “If this initial click-through is supported by other positive site metrics on the web page that the user lands on, like time on site, additional clicks, etc., then Google is inclined to reward that site with a higher ranking as a result of providing consumers with a high quality experience.”

To enable rich snippets for your reviews, add review markup code to the product detail pages (PDPs) where you want to display star ratings in search results. Confirm you’ve done this correctly with Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool. Once you’ve established there are no mistakes in your code, resubmit your XML sitemap in Google Webmaster Tools so that Google indexes your changes as soon as possible.

Questions and answers

Offering a question and answer feature on your e-commerce site invites customers to interact with you, similar to an in-person shopping experience. This is a way for shoppers to submit questions right on the product pages they are looking at. You get an alert whenever there’s a question, and then you can respond directly. The questions and answers serve as records that other shoppers can look at when considering products.

Questions and answers result in a 98% average conversion lift for brands and retailers. And, just like reviews, questions and answers produce keyword-rich content that ranks for matching queries, thus increasing organic traffic.

And the SEO fun doesn’t stop there. Questions and answers create the ultimate resource for FAQ pages. With FAQs, you can compile all the most common and important questions from customers with your brand’s answers and solutions all in one place. Not only is this a handy customer service tool, but it’s also more content for Google to rank in search results.

FAQ rich snippets also happen to have the highest CTR (87%) of any type of search result, according to the Milestone study. This indicates FAQ pages are among the most engaging and helpful to shoppers.

Let’s look at an example from McDonald’s, which has a FAQ page that addresses customer questions while driving organic traffic. The golden arches do more than dominate the fast-food industry; it also knows a thing or two about SEO strategy. The design of McDonald’s FAQ page is clearly laid out and comprehensive, with a large search bar at the top for easy navigation. Their expansive list of customer questions with the company’s corresponding answers is 177 and counting.

Their FAQ page is structured by individual sections for each question so that all the subheadings contain long-tail keywords. So, it’s no wonder that the single FAQ page ranks for 300 keywords, according to ahrefs.com. This is a great example of how you can repurpose customer questions into one main resource that ranks for all the keywords found within them.

Above is some examples of the questions on the FAQ page that match common search queries. This data from ahrefs.com shows the keyword from the FAQ question, the search volume in the U.S. (Volume), and the global search volume (GV).

Visual UGC

Text isn’t the only kind of content you need to optimize to increase organic traffic. Visual content — such as photos and videos of consumers using your products — plays a big role in SEO strategy as well. Google returns images and videos for approximately 25% of search queries.

That’s why it’s important to showcase visual UGC on your PDPs, so you have a variety of rich content for search engines to pull from. Then, once your site visitors are on the page, visual UGC can really work its magic. Shoppers respond to images and videos of other customers using a product. Consumers know that professional photography can be deceptive, but visual UGC shows them how your products look in the real world.

These factors contribute to website visitors spending up to 90% more time on pages with visual UGC galleries. And when users spend more time on pages, it signals high value and quality to Google, thus boosting their SEO ranking.

You can also share the captions from social media photos and videos along with the images. Oftentimes, these captions are fun, playful, honest, and transparent. People love to share their lives — including their purchases — on social media, so it’s great content to share on your e-commerce site. Part of the visual UGC you feature on PDPs can feed in from users’ social media accounts with their permission. The comments on their photos and videos are yet another opportunity to rank for long-tail keywords.

Take this example from Old Navy’s shoppable UGC gallery. Based on the customer’s caption, this photo could possibly appear in search results for terms like “cozy tunic sweatshirt” or “sweatshirt for leggings.”

Repurpose UGC to extend its impact even further

There’s a bonus benefit to implementing these types of UGC for SEO: you can apply their insights and verbiage to further optimize product page messaging.

Reviews, questions and answers, and visual UGC can illuminate key points, qualities, and concerns that you can then use. For example, if multiple shoppers ask if a kitchen appliance is dishwasher safe, that’s a feature to highlight in the product description.

Furthermore, these informal, efficient, and convenient insights are invaluable for improving or even developing products to better meet consumers’ needs. You can use them to highlight features that customers care about and describe particular use cases for products that you wouldn’t have anticipated before gaining that knowledge from UGC.

The toy brand KidKraft put this strategy into action when they discovered different product functions revealed in customer reviews that they hadn’t considered before. Thanks to customer feedback, they refreshed their marketing messaging and developed different versions of products, resulting in greater sales.

Another way to recycle the UGC found throughout your site is to feature particularly positive or helpful pull quotes from reviews on product, category, and home pages. You can do the same thing for relevant questions and answers that warrant space in a higher, more prominent section of your product pages.

2) Brands and retailers unleashing the SEO power of UGC

Even though UGC isn’t often at the top of the list of ways to increase organic traffic, there’s plenty of clever brands and retailers that are hip to its impact.

LeTAO boosts overall SEO performance with customer reviews

The Japanese pastry and bread brand LeTAO focuses on reviews to drive traffic to their e-commerce site. LeTAO built up over 45,000 reviews and used technology to ensure search engines could find and index every single one. This steady stream of fresh content improved their search ranking, and the high volume of reviews earned them significant organic traffic.

After a year of tracking performance, LeTAO determined that their reviews program brought in 27,000 visitors to PDPs optimized with reviews and that most of those shoppers were new users. Visitors to those pages viewed an average of 10.5 pages per session and spent an average of six minutes longer than usual. The conversion rates associated with those organic visits were 5.9% compared to 3.1% from other referral sources.

Oak Furnitureland directs traffic from social and bolsters PDP performance with visual UGC

Social media is an important source of referral traffic, and the channel is literally made for UGC. It’s where people go to leisurely browse brands and products, which inspire them to shop. In fact, almost 80% of people say UGC from social media highly influences their buying decisions.

Furniture retailer Oak Furnitureland recognized the opportunity to create a shopping experience for their social audience and invited their followers to their e-commerce site. Using the Like2buy feature, they enabled shoppable Instagram posts. When users click on posts with featured products, they’re sent to PDPs to learn more and to “add to cart.”

Over the past year, this feature resulted in 11,000 website visits and a 79% click-through rate. Oak Furnitureland keeps the social experience going once visitors land on their product pages with UGC galleries. These galleries display images their customers upload or post on social media with the #OakFurnitureLand hashtag. Galleries increase time on site by 281% for visitors who engage with galleries, and they result in a 248% increase in conversions and an average order increase of 21%.

Since website traffic is a Google ranking factor, extra referral traffic from social media can also help your site rank in search results. Google also takes into account a website’s social signals when ranking content. That means your brand’s social presence and community engagement should be a priority to increase organic traffic.

Makeup.com by L’Oreal expands UGC into blog posts

Makeup.com is an outstanding example of a major beauty brand’s blog. Completely separate from the main L’Oreal brand site, Makeup.com stands on its own as an editorial source for beauty tips, trends, recommendations, and more.

The blog uses UGC as inspiration for article topics and integrates it into the content. For example, the blog used a common beauty question as the focus of their article, “Beauty Q&A: Should I Avoid False Eyelashes If I Wear Contact Lenses?” Makeup.com recruited a board-certified ophthalmologist to lend their expertise in answering the FAQ.

In another post, “The Best Type of Bangs for Your Face Shape,” they sourced UGC from social media to showcase different hairstyles on everyday people instead of using branded photos. Blogs have a significant impact on SEO. Long-form content, like articles, keeps your website content fresh, and when optimized properly, it can rank for target keywords that will drive traffic for relevant topics.

Allswell leverages customer reviews to generate traffic from emails

Like social media, email campaigns produce a substantial amount of referral traffic for e-commerce brands. While email marketing isn’t directly related to SEO, it can support your SEO strategy and influence your site ranking. As Chris Rodgers, CEO and founder of Colorado SEO Pros, told PC Mag, “The big connection between SEO and email is the ability to promote targeted SEO content, improve off-page SEO factors, and drive qualified traffic that leads to better engagement signals for Google and other search engines.”

UGC is an effective and versatile tool for email campaigns. Featuring UGC in emails can be done in a variety of ways to achieve different goals. Allswell, the home bedding and bath brand, appeals to consumers’ trust and reliance on reviews to inspire email clicks leading to product pages.

Another approach is to highlight UGC galleries in emails with hashtags to encourage subscribers to create their own images and videos with your products. UGC can also help to personalize emails with reviews, Q&As, and visual content relevant to your subscribers’ interests and purchase history. Businesses that include UGC in their email campaigns have seen an average increase of 13% for email click-through rates and an average increase of 35% for email conversion rates.

Walmart Canada’s Spark Reviewer

It’s not just brands that can increase organic traffic. Retailers need to think about UGC for SEO too. Vendors who continuously collect fresh review content can have a higher chance of their products being discovered on retailer sites. And the more review content vendors have, the more product-specific keywords retailers have on their website to drive traffic from search. 

No one knows this better than Walmart Canada. For vendors to increase sales on WalmartCanada.ca, products need to show up in a shopper’s search results. So, product pages need to be optimized for SEO. Walmart uses algorithms to rank products based on the number of sales and views, and how pages display the product name, images, features, description, and attributes.

“The products that stand out on our site have strong review volume numbers and high average ratings. Getting more reviews is one way brands can improve where their products show up, giving them more clicks to their products”

Shariq Hasan, Associate Manager, E-commerce Merchandising Operations at Walmart Canada

How does Walmart collect all that great UGC? The retail giant partnered with Bazaarvoice to create the Spark Reviewer sampling program, enabling vendors to exchange product samples for honest reviews on Walmart.com. To date, the program has seen over 380,000 reviews collected, leading to higher product visibility and increased conversion.

Encouraging customer reviews, and other UGC, keeps your product pages fresh with new content. And the retailer websites with regularly updated keyword-rich content rank higher in search. Sounds like a win all round.

3) Assemble your UGC toolkit to increase organic traffic

In order to leverage UGC to improve your e-commerce SEO, you need to have a steady supply. Luckily, there’s many different ways to acquire UGC. One of the most effective is to launch a product sampling campaign. In exchange for free samples, you can ask recipients to leave a review, post visual UGC on their social media accounts that include your brand’s handles and hashtags, or both.

And to take your review volume to the next level, ReviewSource is an always-on content solution that taps into the active Influenster community of over 6.5 million members who contribute reviews for brands. It collects fresh review content for you, while you sit back and reap the rewards. 

You can also use your email campaigns to ask your subscriber list to upload visual UGC to your site or leave a review in exchange for a discount code or another incentive. Alert shoppers on social media and email that you have a question and answer feature if they have any questions about your products or services.

4) Calculate the SEO impact of your UGC

We can sing the praises of using UGC to increase organic traffic all we want. But really, like all marketing strategies, hard numbers do more talking than words. (Somewhat ironically.) That’s why we created a marketing ROI calculator tool, pictured below.

The free tool takes 12 months of benchmarking data to estimate the SEO impact, increased revenue, conversion rate, and in-store sales you can expect. The quantifiable evidence you need to begin your UGC for SEO strategy. Try it here.

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How to improve SEO with reviews and social media

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You can check out the rest of our Long Read content here for more marketing strategies, tips, and insights.

Instagram was one of the top-visited sites worldwide last year. Meaning, it’s a great platform to get your brand noticed. Focusing on Instagram SEO is an excellent way to ensure your content is seen by the masses and stands out among the marketing noise. 

Chapters:

1. What is Instagram SEO?
2. Benefits of Instagram SEO
3. 5 ways to improve your Instagram SEO
4. Letting social publishing tools take the Instagram SEO wheel 

What is Instagram SEO?

Instagram SEO is the process of optimizing your content to rank your profile higher in the Instagram search results. SEO (search engine optimization) is a strategy marketers use to improve site visibility when folks search for your products on search engines, like Google or Bing. Instagram SEO works similarly, just exclusively on this platform. 

So, if you want your content to be front and center, working on an Instagram SEO strategy is likely a profitable endeavor. 

Benefits of Instagram SEO

Brand growth is about getting your products in the hands of many. Instagram SEO is your bridge to helping people find and connect your brand. 70% of shoppers turn to Instagram for product discovery, so the better you stand out in search, the better chance of being discovered. Instagram SEO is essentially like the rainbow that leads to the pot of gold at the end. 

But, some other benefits may not be so obvious when focusing on Instagram SEO: 

• Broadens your reach so audiences near and far can discover your content 
• Connects you with users who are actively looking for your products 
• Allows for brand creativity and doesn’t limit the hashtags or keywords you can use for discovery
• Simplifies your research so you can quickly identify what your competitors are doing in the space and figure out ways to help your brand stand out

5 ways to improve your Instagram SEO

You can use many of the same strategies to improve Instagram SEO that you do to boost SEO on your site. From keywords to hashtags to alt text descriptions, here’s five tips for boosting your visibility on Instagram. 

1. Optimize to get more eyes 

Start by focusing on your Instagram profile (bio). You’ll want to include pertinent keywords and hashtags that help users find you in their search results. 

The foundation of your Instagram SEO is your handle. So, when choosing your handle and name, incorporate words relevant to your brand. If your brand is a household name, you could start there. But, if there is room for adding keywords that will boost your presence on Instagram, add them. 

Your handle and name are like your forest impression to users who aren’t familiar with your brand. So, you want to let users know what you’re able to do right away — don’t leave them guessing. 

For example, if your brand is a beauty line focusing on skincare, try adding the word skincare to your name or handle. Both handles and account names appear when searching for skincare. 

Once you have your bio don’t just leave it sitting idly. You should spend time fine-tuning your bio. Use the space to add relevant secondary keywords you want to rank for. Tell your audience who you are and what your brand is about in a few words.

For example, if your target keyword is “furniture,” your secondary word may be “wood” or “home.” 

Lastly, including your location is essential if it matters to your business. As a Business or Creator account, you can add a location tag. Adding a location tag is another way to increase viability and traffic. If you have several brick-and-mortar locations, location tags can effortlessly help consumers find your brand in the real world. 

2. Select the right keywords 

How do you know what keywords work for your brand? 

Research what users are searching for on Instagram. If you type in a keyword relevant to your brand, several keywords will pop up below. By clicking on one of the keywords results pages, you’ll discover an entire page of pertinent content. Essentially, this page is an Explore page that’s designed around that keyword you selected. You can browse this page to identify top performing keywords.

You should also check out the Tags tab to pinpoint the best performing hashtags related to that specific keyword. 

Use them in your post captions once you have a handful of keywords to put to work. Instagram includes hashtags, relevant keywords, locations, and captions in all search results. Additionally, the Explore page algorithm identifies accounts with related topics and how accounts are relevant to each other. That said, embedding keywords in your post captions can boost visibility, even if you’re smaller brands trying to gain traction. 

Otherwise you can try Bazaarvoice Insights applications, which highlight the keywords your users are writing over and over again for you. Or, perhaps take a look at Google Analytics to identify keywords driving traffic to your site. 

3. Pinpoint hashtags that make a difference 

Like keywords, use relevant hashtags in post captions to boost visibility in search results. Instagram recently offered up some tips and tricks for boosting your Instagram SEO with hashtags. Some tips include:

1. Use hashtags that are relevant to your content 
2. Identify the hashtags your audience follows and use
3. Combine popular and niche hashtags to extend your visibility 
4. Avoid using generic hashtags that already have a high search volume 
5. Stick to to three to five hashtags — using 10 to 20 will not increase your discoverability

Remember, the goal is to focus on your niche and identify what resonates with users. 

To find the right hashtags for your brand, take a look at the hashtags driving traffic to your account on Instagram Insights. Instagram shares the number of impressions from hashtags on any given post. While Instagram does not specify which hashtags got the most traffic, you should be able to weed out the hashtags that are the top performers if you stick to the three to five hashtag rule. 

You can also use the keywords search results strategy with hashtags. Search hashtags you’re considering and identify the activity. 

4. Put alt text to good use 

Alt text is a description of visual content that richly describes it to visually impaired folks. Not only does it help those who are visually impaired enjoy content, but it can also boost your Instagram SEO rankings. 

Since alt text helps Instagram better understand your content, it can identify relevant topics that connect your content with search results. 

If you don’t choose to use alt text to describe your posts, Instagram will do it for you. But unfortunately, the algorithm isn’t as detailed as you’d like. Also, it may incorrectly classify your photo, which is something you definitely don’t want. 

So, before you publish a post, select the “Advance setting” and edit your alt text to reflect your relevant keywords and hashtags. 

5. Keep tabs on your progress 

As with any marketing strategy, you have to throw it against a wall and see what sticks. In other words, tracking your analytics to see what’s working and what’s not will help you polish your Instagram SEO. Try regularly running an Instagram content audit to ensure your efforts are paying off. 

When conducting the audit, ask: 

• Did our changes make a difference in the metrics?
• Did the changes impact discoverability?
• What could we improve to get more visibility?

Comprehensive analytics tools come with business and creator accounts. These tools allow you to measure your metrics and performance from the platform thoroughly. 

Letting social publishing tools take the Instagram SEO wheel 

With social commerce being all the rage, it’s more important than ever to stand out on Instagram. And Instagram SEO is what’s going to get you there. But, don’t take the journey alone. Instead, use the right tools and resources to optimize your Instagram SEO effortlessly. 

Going at it alone takes a lot of trial and error. If you want to take the guesswork out of nailing your Instagram SEO, Bazaarvoice’s Social Media Management tools can do just that. From building the perfect grids and feeds to evaluating the impact of your content, to forecasting the right time to engage the most followers, BV social publishing tools simplify and streamline your Instagram SEO efforts.

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In the beginning, optimizing your retail site for search engine optimization (SEO) involved weaving your target keywords into the titles and body copy of each page. But since Google’s first algorithm update, search engines are getting smarter — and they want retailers to follow suit.

Bazaarvoice works with retailers of all sizes, in all industries. We’ve seen what SEO strategies have worked for our e-commerce clients — and more important, what strategies fell flat.

To help you keep up with Google’s evolving expectations, here’s the top SEO tips for retailers to optimize each product page and category page for maximum SEO success.

Use the right markup

One of the most straightforward ways to increase your search engine ranking is to make it easy for Google to read and understand your site.

Using the correct structured data markup helps search engines understand the content of a product page. It tells the search engine what elements of your site are images versus text and helps the engine clearly identify the average rating and interpret the reviews.

For retailers receiving a lot of syndicated content from brands, the right markup can also make it easier for Google and Bing to see which page elements are reviews, as well as the aggregate rating for each product.

But perhaps most important for your 2022 SEO strategy, embracing structured data markup also helps search engines determine whether your product pages are eligible for rich snippet benefits.

With more and more marketing happening on the search engine results page, optimizing your markup to take advantage of rich snippet opportunities helps you appeal to zero-click searchers as well as users who visit your site.

If you’re not using any structured data markup on your site, you’re missing out on opportunities to considerably increase your organic search results.

Check your markup regularly

Many of the top e-commerce platforms, such as Magento and BigCommerce, include tools that automatically add markup data to your page elements.

Sometimes these tools work perfectly. Sometimes they don’t. And even when things are running smoothly, Google might come along and change its algorithm — making your markup suddenly out of date.

To keep your site current, we recommend running it through Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool on a regular basis. The free tool scans your site and shows you how search engines see each page. It alerts you to potential issues and errors and helps with product page optimization.

Leverage your user-generated content

Search engines love fresh content. That’s been the golden rule of product page optimization since the early days of SEO.

There’s so many ways to give search engines the fresh content they crave. You could host a blog or spend hours each week updating product page descriptions.

As a retailer, you need to leverage your vendors. They have a relationship with consumers that you may or may not have the opportunity to build. The more content they let you use, the better.

No one knows this as well as Walmart Canada. The retail giant partnered with Bazaarvoice to boost retail sales by improving content on product pages.

Getting more reviews is one way brands can improve where their products show up, giving them more clicks to their products

Shariq Hasan, Associate Manager, E-commerce Merchandising Operations at Walmart Canada

It’s in a vendors best interest to get more of their content in front of Walmart Canada shoppers. By increasing UGC on retail product pages, vendors see increased product discoverability, boosted traffic to product pages, and improved visibility in category search. As this UGC is collected, Walmart Canada syndicates it to the retailer’s website. Vendors get more content then more revenue, just as Walmart gets more content and gets more revenue. A win all round.

Understand user intent

Syndicating reviews and other user-generated content provides an additional perk: it gives you insight into the language your target customers use to talk about their problems and how your products solve them.

In many cases, this is the same language potential customers use to search for the products you sell. Having this insight helps you keep up with the latest Google algorithm updates, which favor retailers that build their SEO strategies around user intent.

Rather than stuffing keywords into your product titles, optimize each page around the words and phrases your customers use to talk about your products.

Ultimately, your website’s ability to meet consumer expectations is directly correlated with the revenue you drive from search — paid or organic. By embracing the strategies above and following the best practices that have been in the SEO rulebook since the beginning, you’ll be empowered to boost your retail site’s SEO rankings in 2022 — and beyond. For more SEO tips for retailers, check our new guide below.

How to increase organic traffic: User-generated content for SEO

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To provide the best content to users, search engines like Google are constantly refining their algorithms. These SEO updates are important; they’ve eliminated black hat techniques like keyword stuffing and cloaking. They’ve also rewarded brands that link to reputable sites and provide quality content. 

But let’s be real. These updates can be impossible to keep up with, especially if you have a small team.

While each update brings specific tips for increasing your ranking, many of the changes are based on the best practices that have been in the SEO rulebook since the beginning: Mark up your data, keep your content fresh, and use keywords that match your target customers’ queries.

To help you accomplish these goals in 2022 and beyond, here are the top tips for optimizing your e-commerce brand site and product pages for maximum SEO success.

Check your site’s markup

Since introducing rich snippets in 2009, Google has evolved the way it shows your content in search engine results. 

To decide which elements of your product pages are eligible for rich snippets, Google looks at your site’s markup. This microdata tells the search engine what elements of the page are images versus text and helps the engine understand the difference between a slogan and FAQ content.

Rather than spending hours trying to understand the latest Google update, the easiest way to make sure your site is marked up correctly is to run it through Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool.  

The tool will show you how search engines see your page and empower you to get ahead of potential issues and errors. 

Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool is a free tool that’s extremely valuable. We see clients of all sizes utilizing it.

Keep it fresh with user-generated content

Since the beginning of the internet, search engines like Google have always rewarded websites with regularly updated content. 

There’s so many ways to achieve this: blogging, continually revising product descriptions, adding new images, etc. And while all of these techniques are effective. They also take time.

Fortunately, you have a wealth of assets created by one of your most valuable resources: your customers. 

There are so many ways user-generated content can be leveraged to increase your site’s freshness.

By hosting customer reviews and other keyword rich user-generated content on your site, you’re able to regularly offer visitors (and search engines) new content. Reviews can also affect off-page ranking signals like engagement and reputation and help you understand your customers’ intent, which we’ll talk about in a minute.

Having an active social media presence can also help you achieve your fresh content goals. Take advantage of tools and plugins that allow you to display social media content on your site, including potentially SEO-friendly content like videos and influencer posts.

Improve your brand site’s SEO by focusing on user intent 

In the past, optimizing your site for SEO best practices involved weaving your target keywords into your site’s headlines, titles, and body copy

But recent updates to Google’s algorithm are pressing brands to focus more on user intent. Rather than building content based on a set of keywords, build it around the words and phrases customers are using to talk about your products and the problems they solve. 

You can find this information in a number of ways. There are agencies specializing in intent marketing. You can also offer incentives for participating in customer surveys or focus groups. Your product reviews are another powerful source of information. 

The great thing about reviews is that usually people will review a product using the same language they would to search for it. Brands have discovered new ways to talk about their products that they didn’t know before just by reading user reviews.

Bonus: Build sites for speed

One of the most significant changes to Google’s algorithm — one that goes beyond the SEO basics  — was the Speed Update. When it was introduced in 2018, this new code was designed to filter out slow-loading websites from mobile search results. 

Two years later, improving your page-load speed is still one of the top ways to increase your brand’s rankings in search engine results.

Make sure that all images are compressed appropriately and optimized for quick-loading, she said. It’s also important to check that the third-party plugins you use aren’t bogging down your site with excessive code. 

By keeping your site lean, updated, and optimized for your customers’ needs, you’re better positioned to roll with any search engine algorithms updates that come out in 2022 and the years to come.

Since the rise of digital and omni-channel, brands and retailers have struggled to get a grasp of the evolving CDJ. Technology has dramatically changed the landscape of many industries. The classic example is entertainment. Watching a movie used to mean a trip to the local Blockbuster to pick up a VHS. Then, DVD’s could be delivered without leaving the house. Now, it is pressing a few buttons for a myriad of streaming options. The underlying theme? Convenience.

What’s the best way to get a grasp of the consumer decision journey? The model of awareness, consideration, purchase, and loyalty appears to remain the most common approach. Each of these stages presents unique challenges — here’s how brands and retailers in the Bazaarvoice Network stay competitive and capture the attention of shoppers during the course of the consumer decision journey.

Awareness

Generating awareness of a brand or product is a huge challenge. Simply knowing where to begin can seem daunting. For consumers looking for their next purchase, it is a much easier journey — a whopping 55% go to Amazon and 28% to Google. The remainder go direct to a retailer.

Google aptly references the famous Woody Allen quote, “80% of success is showing up,” in describing the importance of the Zero Moment of Truth. A nice sentiment, but very difficult to achieve when it comes to appearing in the top 5 natural search results, where 76% of clicks happen.

At this early stage of the CDJ, however, it is unlikely a consumer knows exactly what type or brand of product they want. That is, unless you have the marketing budget of Apple or the unique offering of Tesla. Therefore, a shopper’s search is quite generic, like “LED HD TV” or “skinny jeans”. Research actually shows that 78% of consumer Google searches are of this broad nature, and the results direct shoppers to category pages on a brand or retailer’s website.

For many websites though, category pages are often neglected, focusing on what customers do when they’re on the page, rather than addressing how they got there. Some innovative Bazaarvoice clients are proactively trying to change this by elevating consumer-generated content (CGC) from product pages to category pages. With fresh, relevant, and unique content on their category pages, clients’ websites jump up in search rankings.

This strategy has been adopted by the brand ghd in markets outside of the UK, where brand awareness is more of a challenge for them. In Australia, for example, the brand moved from 3rd to 1st place for the generic term “hair straighteners”. Industry research shows this ranking change can lead to an increase in traffic of over 20%.

Consideration

The proliferation of choices available to consumers has made it increasingly difficult for brands to stand out and differentiate. These days, with consumer trust in brand content declining, those companies who spend the most and shout the loudest may not always be heard. Consumers have also never been more empowered to make decisions, accessing information as and when they need it, hence why many companies now have a mobile-first approach.

In marketing, strategies are often categorized as either push or pull; the difference being what triggers a consumer interaction with a brand. They can be pushed content via techniques like display advertising or pull content from sources such as social media.

Most companies benefit from a balanced approach to both strategies, which is why having a curated approach to social media is just as important as an advertising strategy. Social media is particularly important when launching a product line. To launch an exclusive range of products in the UK market, UK retailer Debenhams and US beauty brand Kat Von D supplemented other promotional efforts with a hashtag campaign: #KVDxDebenhams.

By doing so, they have been able to curate and display consumer images of the beauty products online. An inspiration gallery, combined with a link to the product page, shows perusing shoppers how others are using the products and allows them to easily make a purchase of their own. These same consumer images are also displayed on the product pages, further increasing conversion.

This curated and moderated approach to social media helped the brand Kat Von D to raise its profile in a new market, whilst also differentiating itself at the retailer Debenhams in the path to purchase.

Purchase

Trust and personalisation: Two key themes which influence where and when consumers make a purchase.

Joe Gebbier, the CPO of Airbnb, talks about their trust challenge during his TED Talk, “How Airbnb Designs for Trust”. Airbnb’s business model revolves around the ability to give both the homeowner and the guest the confidence to stay in the host’s home.

This led to the company establishing themselves in the role of “mutual friend”. With the aid of their guest and host ratings & reviews system, Airbnb not only creates a sense of familiarity between two people who haven’t met, but also connects those who are best suited to one another. The company now sees that a host with 10 or more reviews is 10x more likely to book their home.

Reviews are now expected by consumers when buying almost any product or service, partially explaining why so many consumers start their shopping online. Now, brands and retailers must accelerate their review programme to differentiate through personalisation, in addition to trust.

A client doing this well is GlamCorner, an online designer dress rental service in Australia. Their challenge is to overcome the doubts associated with fashion and then to deliver a great experience to encourage repeat customers.

Dean Jones, CEO of GlamCorner, claims that “consumer-generated content is the single most important driver of our business growth.” Like Airbnb’s “mutual friend” approach, GlamCorner associates the “sisterly advice” of their reviews with an increase in conversion by 30%. By including detailed personal information alongside each review, their customers can get a genuine answer to the question “will it fit me?”.

Loyalty

So, you’ve made a consumer aware of your brand, entered their shortlist of products to buy, and finally won their purchase. They’ll now be a loyal customer, right? Unfortunately not. According to McKinsey, only 42% of customers remain with the same brand, and, even then, some of those still shopped around to consider other options. How can companies better ensure repeat customers?

Mobile apps are often associated with driving loyalty, but, in reality, half of all apps are uninstalled after a single use. It is only those that really benefit the consumer that can point to real success metrics. In the extremely competitive environment of coffee, Starbucks has managed to create an app which does instill loyalty through convenience. By allowing customers to order and pay for their coffees in advance, Starbucks was able to attribute 11% of its sales to the app in the 4 years following the app launch in 2009.

Another way to enforce loyalty is through post-purchase communication. Argos uses their CGC programme to remain in transactional communication with their customers. For example, when a customer makes a purchase, they are later sent an email asking them to review their purchase. After a customer has written a review, Argos will send another email to notify them when it has been published. These types of post-purchase emails generate 3-4,000 transactions for Argos each week, with each notification email generating £4.36 in sales.

Loyalty is undoubtedly a significant headache for companies, regardless of industry or market. As customer acquisition remains costly, the race is on to win customers earlier and longer through innovative and creative methods. The underlying message is to be where your customers are when they need you.

The traditional consumer decision journey, once so fundamental to marketing and advertising strategy, has gone out the window. The winners in this new, increasingly digital era are the brand and retailers, some mentioned above, who meet shoppers anywhere along their path to purchase. To learn how other brands and retailers capitalize on shoppers in the awareness, consideration, purchase, and loyalty stages, download our latest research on the shopper journey.

As consumers increasingly search online for solutions to their immediate and often local needs, the opportunity for savvy brick-and-mortar businesses has never been greater. Marketers are on to it, though; competition is increasing, and local search engine results pages (SERPs) are becoming more crowded. In fact, brands plan to increase their spend on targeting local audiences by $17.1 billion from 2015 to 2020, while local SMBs will invest an additional $10.6 billion.

Today, your company’s interaction with an in-store consumer begins long before your location is plugged into their GPS app. It’s often a meaningful online connection that brings them in-store. How can you convert your online searchers to in-store shoppers? Start by incorporating these 4 best practices into your local marketing mix to increase your online visibility, engage consumers in the moments that matter, and ultimately drive in-store traffic.

1. Enable authentic consumer-generated content (CGC)

It’s incredibly difficult for a brand to build consumer trust without the backing of other consumers. In recent research, Bazaarvoice found that, on average, online shoppers who interact with review content on product pages show a 58% higher conversion rate, a 62% increase in revenue per visit, and a 3% rise in average order value, compared to visitors who do not interact with reviews. Another study specific to reviews for local businesses found that online reviews impact 67.7% of respondents’ purchasing decisions.

Each month, the Bazaarvoice Network sees 590 million unique shoppers. When those shoppers click through on a search result to visit your website, are you immediately building trust with reviews?

Rio SEO integrates your authentic CGC with your local landing pages by way of ratings and reviews, Q&A, and social content including video and images. Consumers are greeted with highly local and relevant content, setting the stage for a meaningful and engaging brand experience — the kind that converts.

2. Share localized offers

Consumers crave savings. In fact, an Accenture survey conducted just before the 2016 holiday season found that 44% of shoppers say they will rarely or never pay full price for purchases.

Search engines are designed to provide relevant local results. Showcase your local top sellers, offers, unique gifts, and more on location pages. With our Local Pages, you can give local managers the ability to populate their landing page with relevant local content rather than generic, brand-wide offers alone. Your customers will appreciate the personalized touch.

3. Stand out in the SERPs

Of course, you can’t engage if you can’t be found. SEO is a long term proposition, but don’t worry, achieving rapid local rankings results is possible.

We recently studied one national retailer that, thanks to the seasonality of its business, was under pressure to launch and promote 300 stores in an incredibly restrictive timeframe. Within 3 months of choosing their temporary retail locations, each needed accurate, optimized business listings and local landing pages as well as top search engine rankings.

Listings accuracy and completeness are critical, as incorrect business information results in poor user experience and lost sales. Review our case study to better understand how one retailer experienced an increase of more than 1 million new visitors on their location pages within two months of launching.

4. Optimize for mobile

Mobile search and even in-store comparison shopping are the new norm. After searching on Google, 76% of mobile shoppers have changed their mind about which retailer or brand to purchase from. Mobile is their door to the store.

It’s also an opportunity to increase average order value. In fact, while consumers spend twice as much in-store when they receive assistance from a retail sales associate, they spend 2.2 times more when they visit the brand’s website in-store, according to an InMoment study.

Optimizing for mobile, at its very base level, refers to how well your site renders on multiple devices. But you can’t stop there. For location pages to be successful in competitive markets, mobile optimization refers just as much to the mobile user’s experience.

Ensure your local landing pages are mobile optimized and properly marked up with schema to be findable by mobile searchers in their moments of need and optimize your location finder to drive motivated consumers. Then, meet those searchers with all of the relevant, engaging content needed for conversion:

• dynamic headers and footers
• click-to-call
• mobile wallet integration
• rich, Bazaarvoice powered consumer-generated content including product and service spotlights, Q&A, social endorsements, reviews, photos, and videos

As consumers continue to seek out the products and services most in-line with their preferences and within their immediate vicinity, local retailers with a strong online presence, accurate location listings, and engaging localized content are best positioned to succeed. Are you one of them?

Find out how to integrate local search and consumer-generated content into your marketing strategy to drive in-store traffic. To hear more from Bazaarvoice partners, read our other posts in the series. 

What is user intent, and why does it matter?

Google describes consumer use of the internet as a dynamic collection of micro-moments. In general, common types of micro-moments are based around needs and desires like “I want to know,” “I want to go,” “I want to do,” and “I want to buy”.  Beyond these, what does the user expect? Each user’s subconscious expectation in a micro-moment is the basis of user intent. The ability of any brand or retailer to meet those micro-moment expectations is the ultimate goal of the online commerce experience.

What do shoppers expect from Google?

To better understand what shoppers expect, Bazaarvoice assembled a study to determine user intent for the top 10,000 search phrases of the 2016 holiday season. In total, these 10,000 phrases were the queries driving over 1 billion Google searches during this time. For the analysis, the team members of the study to identify their landing page expectation if they had performed a search with each of these 10,000 search phrases. The analysis was split into two distinct questions.

1. Would you expect a homepage if searching with this phrase?

For the initial question, 84% of searches showed that the user did not want to end up on a homepage. Many of us assume that the homepage is the primary entry point into our domains, but that’s not necessarily the case. While homepage experiences are important, we should assume that many users, especially those coming from search, will never see the homepage.

It is also important for brands and retailers to consider features that are commonly located on homepages — seller ratings, trust marks, sales promotions, etc. If users never visit the homepage, they may never be exposed to these messages. It may be time to consider adding these trust and respect-building features to category and detail pages.

2. If not looking for a homepage, would you prefer a list of options or a detail page?

78% of the search queries we studied indicated that users do not know the exact product they are looking for when they conduct a search. These users are looking for a list of options; they seek guidance from Google, the brands and retailers whom they trust, and other consumers who have come before them.

This data suggests that category pages are the lowest-hanging fruit when it comes to retail SEO. The least searched phrases in this list received an estimated 18,000 searches per month, and some phrases exceeded a million. Winning in search for just a couple of these high-value search phrases can be amazingly valuable.

What does this data mean for brands?

In 2017, develop a strategy to boost your list or category pages’ search rankings. A core element of this strategy should be to include fresh content with keywords that your actual consumers are using to describe your products. In addition to content, spend time and attention on internal linking strategies and social campaigns that will result in inbound traffic to your list pages instead of your homepage.

Ultimately, your website’s ability to meet user expectations is directly correlated with the revenue you drive from search – paid or organic. Companies that want to improve their organic search rankings must understand user intent and be able to map it directly to website content. This fundamental strategy will be the difference between those who win with search in 2017 and those who continue to under-deliver on key micro-moments.

Brush up on your SEO techniques and best practices for e-commerce with Academy Sports, ghd, and a group of your industry peers at our Bazaarvoice SEO Certification Workshop in Austin on March 8th — a great way to kick off the Bazaarvoice Summit 2017.