BazaarblogIdeas to Help Customers Build Your Business

At our webinar Thursday, we had a great discussion about the business and technical aspects of optimizing user-generated content (UGC) for search engine optimization. Herndon Hasty from Range Online Media and Scott Koester from Bazaarvoice talked about driving significant natural search results at every phase of a consumer’s decision-making process.

At its core, UGC boosts natural search results by creating a constant flow of fresh content. Optimizing it further increases the impact of UGC, by enabling more searchers to find trusted, relevant input from consumers like them. There are several ways to optimize this content for search, and Range and Bazaarvoice focus on indexing content throughout the purchase funnel, targeting researchers and buyers at all phases, what we call cross-funnel indexing.

Cross-funnel indexing involves indexing on UGC-optimized category pages, UGC-optimized product pages, and inline on product pages – letting this fresh content attract all types of online shoppers. Here’s an outline of the benefits:

Herndon covered the nuts and bolts of this type of indexing, including concerns about duplicate content, keyword density benefits, and the impact of user-generated photos and videos on search.

Scott showed the clear monetary value of search traffic driven by UGC, based on average cost-per-click statistics, and he shared some upcoming technological plans from Bazaarvoice that will enhance search even more.

If you missed this webinar, request it here. You can read more about our holistic view of search in our related blog post, and for more about cross-funnel indexing, download Range’s white paper on this topic.