Hey there, savvy marketers and business owners! Ready to dive into the world of user-generated content (UGC)? Grab your favorite social media app and get comfortable, because we’re about to explore how you can harness the power of your customers’ creativity to supercharge your marketing efforts. Even if you’re working with an SEO agency, UGC can be a game-changer for your online presence.

Before we jump in, let me share a quick story. Last year, I worked with a small artisanal coffee roastery – let’s call it Bean Dreams. The owner, Sarah, was struggling to create enough content to keep her social media feeds engaging and fresh. She had hired an SEO agency to boost her search rankings, but she needed more than just SEO to truly connect with her audience. Fast forward six months, and with a strategic UGC campaign complementing her SEO efforts, Bean Dreams had increased their social media engagement by 350% and saw a 75% boost in online sales. How’d we do it? Well, that’s exactly what we’re going to explore today.

Understanding User-Generated Content: What Is It and Why Does It Matter?

First things first, let’s break down what user-generated content actually is. In simple terms, UGC is any form of content – be it images, videos, text, or audio – created by consumers rather than brands. This could be anything from a customer’s Instagram post featuring your product to a review on your website.

Why does UGC matter? Here are a few compelling reasons:

1. Authenticity: UGC is perceived as more authentic than brand-created content.
2. Trust Building: Potential customers trust peer recommendations more than traditional advertising.
3. Cost-Effective: UGC can significantly reduce your content creation costs.
4. Engagement: UGC campaigns often lead to higher engagement rates.
5. SEO Benefits: Fresh, unique content can boost your search engine rankings.

For Bean Dreams, we found that customers loved sharing photos of their morning coffee rituals featuring the brand’s beans. This became the cornerstone of our UGC strategy.

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The approach that needs to be taken to SEO by businesses that operate on in multiple sites and locations is somewhat different to that for single-site businesses.

The basic principles are basically the same but given that you would want each individual site to rank highly for searches related to that location, there are some local SEO techniques you can implement to help with that cause.

These tactics come under the heading of ‘Multiple Location SEO’ and this can apply in a number of scenarios such as the three below.

1) Your business has more than one physical location/store/site and you wish to optimise for each of them.

2) Your business is online, rather than a brick and mortar business, and you wish to target multiple locations.

3) You operate a franchise business and wish to do SEO for individual franchisees in different towns and cities.

Multiple location SEO can be implemented when there are just two locations, two hundred locations, or two thousand locations that you wish to optimise for. One of the keys to this is to make sure that the search engines and especially Google have accurate and up to date information relating to each location.

In effect, you are creating multiple businesses that you are trying to rank, all under the umbrella of your main website so that they can benefit from the authority that it may have, but at the same time, rank for local searches when they occur on Google and the other search engines.

Here are just four relatively simple SEO techniques and tactics that you can implement if you have multiple locations, and whilst they are not especially difficult, their cumulative effect is powerful enough to help you rank not just one website page, but several of them.

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Ever since the internet became a medium by which businesses could sell their products and services, marketing has split into two distinct camps.

In one we have the traditional types of marketing that are consumed offline such as newspaper ads and billboards. The other is digital marketing which takes place online and includes SEO and Pay Per Click advertising.

It may seem that, given they are so distinct from each other, traditional marketing methods would be of no help or benefit to an online marketing campaign, and vice versa, but that is not the case. In fact, there are several ways that traditional marketing can augment digital marketing, so let’s examine how and why.

Benefits of Traditional Marketing

It Has Tried and Tested Methods: Even though the likes of TV advertisements might seem modern, they have actually been around for over 60 years. Newspaper and billboard ads for decades longer. And they all still work extremely well.

They Are The Most Effective In Certain Business Categories: Not every product or service lends itself to online marketing or there are those where traditional methods of marketing work often equally well as digital marketing.

Examples include law firms and car maintenance where local TV, radio, and newspaper advertising still bring them lots of new customers, and often more than their online marketing does.

They Are More Trusted: Given the countless stories you hear about online fraud and data theft, it is little wonder that many people are wary of online advertising. While it could also be said that you shouldn’t believe everything you read in the press, newspaper, TV, and radio adverts are often seen as more trustworthy.

It Is Regarded As Face To Face: Traditional marketing is regarded by anyone who consumes the adverts as taking them closer to the business which is advertising. That might be due to mediums such as leaflets or brochures where they have something physical in their hand as opposed to seeing an online ad, where you can click away instantly.

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The rise in popularity of video websites like YouTube, Metacafe, and Vimeo has meant the importance of video content to improve a website’s SEO, has been increasing rapidly. The fact that Google owns YouTube plays a large role in that, as do the ability for mobile devices to capture high-quality video images and the desire of those online to watch videos of all types.

It needs pointing out that whilst making videos and posting them on your website and other sites can help your SEO efforts, there are also additional steps you can take to maximise their impact. Some relate to the creation of the video and its content, whilst others involve how it is posted, which includes SEO elements on the page. We’ll start with those factors which can be undertaken as part of the video content creation:

Video Length – Long videos can be extremely informative, but the concern with longer videos is being able to keep the viewer’s attention. If someone lands on the page and then quickly moves on as they don’t have the time to watch it, then this can damage rather than help with SEO.

Transcripts – There are several benefits that can be derived from providing a transcript to your videos, apart from the customer-friendly aspect of making them accessible for those who have hearing difficulties. Transcripts allow for keywords to be used throughout if they are used in a natural way and give additional search terms by which the video may found on search engines.

Closed Captions – Many people watch videos in situations where it is not possible nor appropriate for them to do so with the audio turned on. Adding closed captions will allow them to follow the video without sound, and in Google’s view, this adds to the user’s experience.

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There are many business owners, including those who own a family lawyers business,  who are under the false impression that all online marketing is way more complicated an activity than they would ever be happy getting involved with.  The fact is that whilst there are certainly some online marketing channels that might fit that description, not all online marketing does.

There are a number of online marketing channels and activities that are extremely simple but nonetheless highly effective. One of these is having high-quality content on your website, and the primary way that can be facilitated is to create a blog. A blog is the usual name for what was once called a ‘Web Log’ , and it is simply a series of pages and posts on your website where you publish content.

That content is often a blog post which is simply an article, although there are many other types of content you can publish on your blog. You can use graphics such as photos and infographics, embed videos, or simply post a link to a video, and as for the text posts you write, that can be a multitude of different items.

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