By Nicola Riordan
Product reviews are key for improving conversion, but what about the impact of reviews and social commerce on SEO?
One of the welcome, and often overlooked, benefits of implementing social commerce is that all of this user generated content provides lots of SEO goodness.
In a world where every product page is almost identical in the Search Engine’s eyes, reviews provide a stream of constantly refreshed content that is unique to your site differentiating your website and helping you to stand out. Plus reviews are written by actual customers in natural language, providing you with lots of keyword rich content which can’t hurt your search rankings either.
And the benefits needn’t be restricted to your most popular products. With Reevoo’s unrivalled review coverage across your product range, the SEO benefits scale across your longer tail products.
But that’s just the beginning.
Social Commerce is all about getting your customers talking about and engaging with your products. Easy, right? Well unfortunately, it’s not as easy as it sounds. We’ve seen many brands jumping head long into projects designed to boost word of mouth, drive engagement and improve search engine optimisation. We’ve seen the same brands, months later, wondering what went wrong as they stare at a barren wilderness with no content, no engagement, no impact on search and - more worryingly - the potential to cause great damage to their brands. To avoid their mistakes and see what we've learnt about doing social commerce right first time download our free Social Commerce ebook.
Last year we decided to tackle this very issue and develop an easy-to-implement way to leverage the community built up around particular products. Working with Sony in the UK we created Ask an Owner, to put potential purchasers in touch with existing product owners to answer questions about the product and help them to make the right purchasing decision. This moves social commerce from a broadcast medium to an interactive and real conversation.
In just a few months we’ve seen a phenomenal response from customers with 73% of questions answered in under 24 hours, 18% in under an hour and a speedy 12 minutes from question to answer for our fastest ever turnaround.
But what does this mean for SEO? The addition of social commerce through product reviews and Ask an Owner allows potential purchasers and existing customers to contribute their questions, answers, reviews and other content to the brand’s website. The more user generated content on your product page the better optimised it is for search and the long tail of search queries. And thanks to our network effect (that’s aggregated and syndicated reviews to you and I) product pages that could become stale can be constantly refreshed with social content from across the network, keeping them fresh for search engines and interesting for the customer.
All of these features combine to make Reevoo’s social commerce products the gold standard of search-engine optimised content, ripe for regular crawling by Google and other search engines and sure to boost your website’s ranking in search results.
Our very own Kyle McGinn is speaking on this very issue today at SES in London alongside some of the greatest minds in SEO worldwide, including Lee Odden, Will Critchlow and many others. If you couldn't make it, take a look at the slides from his presentation.