3 Ways To Get The Most Out Of User-Generated Content with Chris Burres and Matthew Bertram #432

Hi, and welcome to the SEO Podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Chris Burrus, owner of eWebResults, and right next to me is Mr. Aaron ... Oh, wait, it's Matt. Matt's back. He's back from the baby. So actually, a funny story about that. On the way to the hospital, you know, that's crazy. Did you run any red lights? I didn't run any red lights. I literally, when I was on the way, my wife's water broke, and I was like, can I run the red light, please? It was like midnight. Like, please? I mean, I have a reason. I have a legitimate reason. She didn't let me. Oh, really? Yeah. Well, you know, I blasted Eye of the Tiger. We're going to make it happen this time. Eye of the Tiger. Welcome back to another fun-filled edition of our podcast, both to you, the audience, and you, Matt, right next to me. As you know, we are broadcast live in Houston, and Matt and I, we are your Results Rebels. As always, we do have a tip from our previous podcast, and that tip is ... It was talking about the sales process, and you talked about the customer ascension model. Have a stair-step sales process to significantly increase the value of your internet marketing. All right. We talked last time, hey, you've already got the conversions. They're walked in the door. What do you do with them? How do you get them up the stair-step, ascension stair-step, so that they actually become a customer? That can significantly improve the impact of your internet marketing. Make sure that you subscribe, follow, boom. All right. We already covered the part that we usually cover, but we have a review that we've got to read. This is from Autumn Schultz, so punch in the face to you, Autumn Schultz. It says, a fun podcast with great insights. It is, of course, five stars. It says, I absolutely love listening to this podcast, as it's the perfect combination of fun and seriousness. The 30 minutes of each

episode is more than enough time to get some really in-depth insights into the top SEO tactics and methods for internet marketing success. Ten out of ten. Would recommend. Punch in the face to you, Autumn. We really appreciate it. We do it for you. That's why we do it. We heard that this podcast is an advanced podcast, and now we're just dropping bombs. Dropping advanced SEO bombs all over the place. All right. If you're back, you're probably interested in tips, and we've got five online marketing mistakes that can take your business and how to avoid them. No, we don't. That's not up on the new website. It's not working yet. It will work soon. We have a mini-guide section, a resource section on our new website, where we have multiple things that you can get to. The different services we use, 101 tips for internet marketing. We also have my book on there. The book. Build Your Brand Mania. We will have that one up soon, or we should. I think now I understand the timing of your book, right? Book launch and then have baby. I was trying to get that done right before. I feel like if you have a baby, book gets put on hold. I think that's kind of the thing that happens. All right. We're covering a great article today. That article is by a Mr. Manish. I'm not going to pronounce his. We're going to call him Manish. His Twitter handle is Manish Analyst, and it's three ways to maximize the SEO impact of your user-generated content. If you're in a position right now, we'd love you to tweet, hashtag SEO podcast. This is podcast number 432. Tag us in it, at bestseopodcast, at ewebresults, at Matt Bertram Live, at Chris Burris eWeb, and also- That's user-generated content right there. Right there. Yeah. Yeah. We're trying it, and that's what this article's about. Also, tag Manish in it. It's at Manish, and that's M-A-N-I-S-H underscore analyst, so at Manish underscore analyst. Tag him in it. Say you're listening to us

talk about that article. That would be user-generated content, and we would be very appreciative. We believe that the gods would smile favorably upon you if you do that, whichever gods work for you. That's fine. Hey, we run a contest each and every week, and the way that contest works is if we get 10 Shikos- A share, a like, and a follow. If we get 10 Shikos, by the way, when you give us a Shiko, a share, a like, or a follow, you should hear in your head, there's a sound that goes with it, and it's Shikow! So, give us a Shiko, and if we get a review, then we skip the part where we tell you how to leave us a review to the end of the podcast. That is getting bumped to the end of the podcast. Don't worry about it. We're not going to do it right now. What we are going to do is say, if you're interested in a free website analysis, you can get one from our website, ewebresults.com. It is a new website. Relatively new. Yes, it is. Very good. Getting lots of really good feedback on it. We're going to start running some other contests to give away some t-shirts, give away some books. You are always giving away stuff. Did this go through the accounting department? Have you gotten approval for this yet? You notice he's not answering the question. That's hilarious. Maybe we should go visit the accounting department together, and we'll convince them. All right, so t-shirts. Keep an eye out for it. Yes, as far as the profit plan. We're going to start giving swag bags as far as the profit plan. If you listened to the last podcast, you're aware of where the profit plan fits in our kind of stair step ascension sales process. Cool, so then now not only do they get in the stair step, they get the value from the profit plan. They're going to get swag stuff? Yes. Oh, yes. We're coming up with some different things. We

have a few t-shirts that we voted on that we really like. We can throw the book in there, that sort of thing. We'll run some contests as well so you can win some of that stuff to create more user generated content. User generated. That's what this podcast is about. That's kind of crazy how that works. All right, so I don't have any news for today, so we're just going to jump right into this podcast. It's my birthday. It's also his birthday. That's the news. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday, Matthew Bertram. Happy birthday to you. Okay, thank you. And many more. I like that. Actually, we need to get everybody in the room and sing that at some point later today, assuming you have time. All right, so we are going to cover this article, Three Ways to Maximize the SEO Impact of User Generated Content, again by Maneesh, Maneesh the analyst we'll go with. This first sentence, the kind of opening paragraph, I thought was like, we need to read it. It was engaging. It was like, SEO and user generated content have a complicated relationship. On the one hand, user generated content can give search engines more information to work with, improve your rankings for long tail search phrases, traffic, and encourage community activity that generates links and other positive offsite signals. True. On the other hand, user generated content can be low quality, redundant, spammy. It can dilute authority, and sometimes it can even earn you a manual action from Google. Well, you know, that sounds like the pharma commercial saying. Yeah, exactly. You should really do user generated content. Beware, it may cause absolute loss of positioning in Google. Not responsible for said loss. All right, so there's three of these. Let's jump right into it. First, consolidate your user generated content, right? And so this one presupposes that you have enough user generated content and there's a lot of value. Actually, it's interesting. The stats that Maneesh put together for this were really relevant to a

lot of other aspects of SEO, right? Yeah. I mean, this is a big SEO thing, a chart that I've seen a lot of. He says, the correlation is quite clear. In fact, back Linko, they did an average word count Google for the first page, right? And the average word count for those web pages that were on the first page of Google, and actually I think in the first position, was 1890 words, right? So even with blogs, we've seen the real increase, right? So a 400 word blog, 500 word blog, 650, 1,000, 1,500, and really, you know, really you want skyscraper content, you know, reference Brian over there, and really 2,000 words is what you want to shoot for if you can. It depends on the competitiveness too, right? So if you're a plumber out there and you're in a non-competitive niche, still 250 keywords is probably fine, right? Well, you can get thin content depending on how much stuff you're doing off page and whatnot. You really want to have, I think, around 1,000 words. I think that that's like a safe number, especially if you're going to be competitive and aggressive with your SEO. Yep. And it does depend on market. Yes. All right. And the last word goes there. So if you're competitive, like this is, because let's face it, like back Linko, they're not going out there and searching like really long tail phrases to put together this report. That's true. They're hitting the most competitive. And let's also face it, we've got websites that we've done a long time ago where we haven't kind of incorporated this new larger word count, and they're doing really well. Otherwise, we would have already visited it. And so there are definitely corollaries. That is true. There's a tri-correlation together. Yes. Yes. That felt a little petty. I apologize. So there's actually another study by age reps, and they say the average number of keywords for top 20 ranked pages, right? So they did the survey a little bit different. But again, their number was

about 1,300, apparently less competitive. Their number was about 1,300. So absolutely. So in the context of all this user generated content, you can think, maybe it's a review. Maybe you have them submit stories about your product, like whatever you're doing. If it ends up being less than say 250, there's that opportunity to push these all together into one page, right? And he'll actually talk about that. Repurposing blogs. Great way to do it. Yep. Yep. One potential issue with user generated content is that it's comprehensiveness can be hit or miss, right? Some users write 10,000. I was just saying that. The good solution is to pool these all together. Actually, Patrick Curtis of the Wall Street Oasis, he said that you can achieve a 32... They achieved a 32% boost in search traffic, right? When they did a merge and purge on their content. So this was really interesting. When we were looking at this article, Wall Street Oasis, my old roommate introduced me to it. Oh, wow. He's an investment banker. Right. And what this is, is really like a forum plus, right? Right. Because I was like, 97% or whatever, 99% user generated content. It's like a forum that's really, really managed well. Okay. Yeah. And so questions are moved around. It's kind of like Quora for investment bankers. So apparently, maybe at some point, they weren't doing as much kind of coordinating of the content. And when they did, they got a 32% boost in their search traffic. Yeah. All right. So statistical analysis says that using statistical analysis, they found, and this is actually the Patrick Curtis with Wall Street Oasis, that consolidating pages resulted in an average boost of 14% while updating a title and H1 tags only boosted them 9%. Do both of them. Do both. Yeah. Okay. So that puts you in the 20, 23 range. It actually got them out of what they call the five-year plateau of pain, right? So their traffic had plateaued for a period of time, which apparently you can call a plateau of

pain. So here's some recommendations. Identify URLs that are ranking for related queries, right? Okay. So two URLs, similar query, and try and merge those together. Migrate all of the related user content onto a consolidation page. And in this case, he kind of goes into some details about what you should do with those extra pages. I kind of recommend you go find his article, Three Ways to Maximize the SEO Impact of Your User-Generated Content, and kind of dig into those. So my one kind of input on this is really, a lot of times when you're ranking, you have like two pages that are competing for a spot, right? So like on the second page, like I've had on first page and on second page, a lot of times on second page, once you really get on the map with Google and it's indexing, you have two pages that are competing, right? And so you've got to really look at your link structure, your on-page link structure. We talked about siloing before. You want to do that to make sure that one person gets all the attention, and you want to have maybe some smaller pages linking up. And so it makes a lot of sense if you organize it where Google understands it, then Google's going to take care of it, because engineers wrote it. Google will look favorably upon you. Moderate user discussions, and remove content that doesn't meet community standards, and keep your quality score high. Yep. Very good. Number two, enable user reviews. We could not encourage user reviews more. It's a conversation we probably have in every one of our 15-minute calls. In fact, you could probably save three minutes if you got onto the call with us, which is a good thing for your business. And you said, you don't have to talk about reviews, I'm already working on it. Then that could save, I don't know, three minutes of the call, and we could apply that towards something else. Because it really is so valuable, it needs to be mentioned

in almost every discussion that we're having. And it's valuable, I mean, you kind of taught me a little bit about how valuable it is, not just on the SEO side of things, but on conversion. So you get involved on the actual how do you convert somebody in a sale, do you want to talk about that a little bit? Well, everybody's looking for shortcuts because everybody's busy, especially even on Amazon, right? For e-commerce, what do you go to first? You look for, okay, a bunch of stars, and then you look at what it's about, right? So we're always looking for shortcuts, and reviews are a shortcut, and people will give credit to, and I think there's some statistics in here we can go through that are, you know, we're seeing it every day. And I think the biggest thing about reviews is it's not just getting a bunch of them, but it's the velocity of them and how often you get them. So you've got to build it into your process, and then they'll build slowly over time, and it becomes kind of rote in your process. Yeah, so that's a really important point, because if you go in and say for a month or two, you incentivize your staff or whatever in order to get them to drive reviews, and you get this pop, you're like, hey, they're getting a review a day for two months, and then boom, back to zero, that's going to look very unnatural to Google, and so you want to make sure that you're avoiding that, make sure it's part of your process. Here's what he has to say, if you're running a marketplace or selling products, and even if you're running, if you're selling a service, really anything, you should strongly consider incorporating user reviews into your product pages, or otherwise on your site. We actually recommend user reviews on every page, right? It's part of the credibility process for generating leads, and then those leads become customers. So yeah, from a conversion process, starting to put the reviews,

a lot of people put them at the bottom. Right. Read all this stuff, and then the reviews? Yeah, no, no, no. I would say, put the reviews at the top, right, or we've done on a lot of the websites that we've been building, intermingling them. Absolutely. Let's see, on-page user reviews, as long as they aren't suspect, so this is on your own site, help users evaluate the quality of a product or your service in a trustworthy fashion. In fact, 84% of users trust online reviews as much as they trust their friends, and in some cases, even more. New friends, yeah. If you're concerned that anything less than perfect, a perfect five-star rating is going to hurt your sales, that is unfounded, right? So don't be driven like, I know some people are going to give me a, I don't know, say a 4.2 or a 4.5, and I'm concerned that's going to drive people away from my business. This actually says, surprisingly, product purchases are most positively influenced by reviews, with an average star rating between 4.2 and 4.5, presumably because of excessively high ratings are seen as suspicious. It just reminds me of my other business. I probably need to go out and get some bad reviews, because they're just, we're knocking it out of the park, and all the reviews are really good for it. Well, it gives a more well-rounded kind of like, what's really going on, because people want to read the five stars, and the one. And the one stars, right? They want to know the extremes. You know, I used to think that I was, I'm the only one who goes to the one star, and then now everybody I talk to is like, no, everyone goes to the one stars. And it's so disappointing how many of the one stars have nothing to do with the product. The box was broken by UPS when it showed up, why are you writing this bad review here? UPS has a website, go write a bad review on UPS. I've seen

it mostly with doctors. Doctor reviews, like, oh, they didn't answer the phone, I had to wait so long. Those are the lot of reviews I see on medical practices. Yeah, yeah. All right, and then next he says, reviews on average boost sales by 18%. I'm just going to ask a real simple question, who wouldn't want a boost of sales of 18%? What kind of value, like how expensive, quote unquote expensive, is it to get your team to start driving reviews, and then therefore turn it into 18% increase in sales? Yeah, I think that's something you should start today. It's Friday, so Monday. Ask for the reviews when they're the happiest. And then here's a graph, this is by Yotepo, and they have a service that's really review, kind of manages reviews for you. And they said, how reviews boost SEO, and it's just a massive, massive curve that goes up. Do you remember, so the last thing, do you remember the name of that company at that conference we went to that did the video reviews? I do not remember. Because when you do reviews, don't just have the words or it just looks like a quote, actually have a picture of the person if you can. Yes, more credibility. You know, a video is absolutely better. And there was a service out there beyond Trustpilot that would send an email, and then their phone would pop up, and you could give a review. Some of these things we might be testing out, and we'll do like a product review for you. I know those have been pretty popular. But we're looking at that, but we've really built it into our process. And that's one of the big things from a sales standpoint. When we're talking to clients, what we're asking them to do is build it into your process and it becomes part of it, they build. And it works really well. All right. So use a platform like Trustpilot. So this is one of the examples. Ewebresults.com. That's trust. Oh, yeah. Ewebresults.com slash

trust if you wanted to trust us some. And some trust us. And then whatever platform you use, just make sure it's easy to show it on your website. Think about this. When you're putting reviews on your website, don't just put the review, right? Put a link to where they, and a symbol. So if it's a review on your Google My Business page, put like the five stars, the five golden stars or 4.5 golden stars, and then Google and put a link to it, right? Because that gives credibility, like offsite credibility to the review that's sitting on your site. I like that. All right. Very good. Next is content curation. So we were talking about that. What do we do here? Are we curing content? Right now. That is basically what we are doing. Because we went through a whole bunch of content that we felt wasn't worthy of our audience, and now we're showing you the content. Punch in the face. What? No. This is totally worthy. No, no. We went through a whole bunch of content, and we arrived at this content, which is actually worthy for our audience. Punch in the face to you, Manish, for making this great content. Yes. We curate content and give you the best every week. Again, we're covering three ways to maximize the SEO impact of user-generated content. Number three is content curation. So curation. So curated content is content that you create by collecting, organizing, reworking, and republishing content created by others. Yeah, that is what we're doing right here. Creative SEO is an organization. They mention National Geographic's Your Shot as an example of actually generating content. They ask their audience to send them photographs as part of a contest, and then publish the best photos to their Your Shot subdomain. Strategies like these require an audience, but not necessarily one as large as National Geographic's. For example, the University of Missouri Alumni Association was able to achieve a 15% lift in site traffic by leveraging image galleries. So image galleries is a good thing

to content. You want links from images too, not just text. But yeah, look at that, 649 referring domains and 190 backlinks, 90,000 backlinks. So that's for that National Geographic campaign. That's a great case study. So go out and run these kinds of contests where they generate content. We're going to have this t-shirt, and we're going to want you to take pictures with it and send it to us. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right. The goal is to make... Remember, if you're going to put these kinds of contests together, the goal is to make the user the star. So your brand needs to be in it, but not front and center. Yeah. Right? All right. Absolutely. And then, really, in conclusion, properly, did you have anything else to add on that last section? No, but I really liked how you said, in conclusion. In conclusion, because we've got things to go. I didn't want to... I was like, that is going in the right direction. Time is of the essence today. I have a baby I've got to get back to. Properly deployed, user-generated content can make massive benefits for your website. Punch in the face to you, Manish. Just really, really good stuff. And thank you. Yeah. Thank you. We appreciate it. All right. I'm going to pull this up. We're going to talk about... Oh, that's true. I wonder what we're going to talk about. All right. So if you like this podcast, we will ask you to tell three people. Right? Yeah. You can do that now while you're listening and you've got some other device, or you can do that some other time. Text people while you're at the gym. Please do that. Not in the car. Not in the car. Do not text while you're in the car. If you're looking to grow your business with the largest, simplest marketing tool on the planet... The internet. ...call EOR Results for increased revenue in your business. Our phone number is 713-592-6724. If you have a referral, and we're getting more and more

referrals, so you guys are out there listening to us now, give us a referral. When they pay us, we pay you. And we have a client referral on the page. It's on the little extra... I don't know what it's called. It's like the... The hamburger menu? Yeah, the hamburger menu. There we go. That's the technical name. But on there, there's client review. We pay 5% ongoing. So if you're a web designer out there, and you want to have someone to send your SEO to, or your PPC, or your social media, or ongoing content and blogs and that sort of thing, send to us. We'll pay you 5% ongoing, and you can just put in your information. You can put the leads in there. We track everything. It's something to check out. All right. And then it is now officially time for us to share with you how to connect with us. So I think it's Pinterest.com slash... EOR Results. I think. I know. For YouTube, it's actually... It's growing. Pinterest is growing. I know that. Yeah. It's doing really well. YouTube. YouTube. Yes. Will get us there. Yeah. Facebook.com slash eWebResults. Okay. eWebResults.tumblr.com is our Tumblr page. Okay. Imgur. Imgur. Imgur. I don't know. eWebResults.imgur. I'm sure there's a way to pronounce that. .com. We'll get you there. And then finally, our Flickr page. Flickr.com slash photos slash... Yeah. eWebResults. Yeah. So just type in eWebResults. And the platform. And a platform. And then you can find it. And we're trying to build domain authority on all these other kind of platforms. So if there's one that you use that is not mainstream like Facebook and Google. Let us know. Yeah. You leave us a review there. We would love it. We'll get it set up. We're building some syndication out to those platforms. So if there's communities we should be on or not, please let us know. Excellent. We were filmed live here at 5999 West 34th Street, Suite 106, Houston, Texas, 77092. She likes the radio. 77092. If you would like audio, video,

or a transcript of this podcast, you can find it on our website, eWebResults.com. We are the most popular internet marketing podcast on iTunes. In fact, The Hoth just came out and mentioned us. We're actually listed first under the advanced SEO podcast category. A punch in the face to all of you guys for being listeners, for sending in questions, for connecting with us on our social media platforms, those we really like, and for submitting reviews. We just really appreciate it. Until the next podcast, my name is Chris Burrus. My name is Bob Brooks. Bye-bye for now.