Search engine optimization is a huge component in brand visibility, performance and sales in the online world. Without search engines, a huge portion of organic traffic is suddenly inaccessible to brands that thrive on a combination of organic and paid engagement. As such, finding ways to maximize SEO potential is essential. Customer and visitor engagement is also crucial to overall brand loyalty and success, which makes the combination of these two elements very powerful. Today, we’ll discuss how you can convert various forms of customer reviews into powerful SEO potential.

Reviews Boost Keyword Exposure

Your brand or business targets several different keywords in search. While there may be plenty of variations that you are using to compete with other brands, a large content portfolio ensures that all of your bases are covered. The great thing about relevant user reviews being allowed on your website is that they do some of this work for you. Whether positive or negative, user reviews will often contain many of the same keywords and phrases in them as custom-tailored content. The act of allowing users to leave reviews will ensure that you’re pinging search engines with more organic instances of your targeted keywords than you are currently, and that is always a good thing.

Reviews Provide Content

As we alluded to above, user reviews are in many respects a different type of content. While you may be working hard to generate new blog posts, custom product pages and a variety of other important content-related elements, your users’ comments can be leveraged into powerful content of its own in the form of reviews. Whether you choose to use standalone review pages or embedded review plug-in options is up to you, but make sure that in any and all cases, users can write to their heart’s content about your products, services or brands. The longer the review, the more content benefit it produces.

Reviews Can Boost Local SEO

In the right context, reviews can help brands that are focusing on local SEO as well. You can ask users to be sure to mention their location in the review as one way to help “geocode” the content and make it more potent in terms of local SEO. Additionally, this aspect of SEO benefit can also be achieved via users leaving reviews on other sites – most of which also ask for location information and record it in the review. Reviews can be a great source of organic SEO benefit when they’re pinging search engines consistently, but whether you decide to use them on your own website or elsewhere, they can also provide local SEO benefit as well.

Reviews are sometimes viewed with scepticism by many brands. Because they can be a double-edged sword, some have opted not to include them on their websites. Despite this, allowing reviews on your website can be a great way to boost local SEO, generate new forms of organic content and even rank better for select keywords. What experiences have you had with user reviews? Tell us!