User-generated content is one of the most important things today. Not a lot of people trust your brand if there are no people backing up your products and services. You need your own loyal user base that can tell people how awesome your company is and why people should consider you over your competitors.

Furthermore, content creation is a time-consuming process. To attract traffic from the internet, you must consistently submit content and develop backlinks. If you are including SEO in your digital marketing strategy, you must know what a great challenge it is. Luckily, user-generated content helps you. It can engage your audience and keep your site updated at all times.

But how do you get people to speak about you and get benefitted from the content that they generate for your brand? And even if they do, how do you use that content in your WordPress website?

To help you in the course, here is everything you need to understand about WordPress user-generated content.

User-Generated Content: Definition

The type of content on the site is created by the users rather than the company. This type of content includes reviews, comments, posts in forums, social media campaigns, and also blog posts.

User-generated content allows end-customers/ consumers to create content. This helps a company to drive more traffic to their site and increase their retention rate by offering genuine content based on the experience of other consumers.

Also, user-generated content is an easy way to create content for your brand. It is cost-effective where people add images, posts, and other materials to your site. This also helps the first-time visitors to see genuine people talking about your brand rather than people promoting their own products.

Furthermore, search engine crawlers can see that you are active on the site, and people are interested in your site and increase more organic reach to your business.

Source: Key Insights from Top Marketers (tintup.com)

Adding User-Generated Content to Your WordPress Site

User-generated content is beneficial for your website. As it helps you drive brand loyalty and allows you to connect on a personal level with your consumers, it has to be done right.

Here is how you can channelize organic traffic using WordPress user-generated content.

1. Accept post submissions form users

Accepting post submissions from the users can work amazing for your website. It is a very easy process and there are many plug-and-play tools available on the market.

The plugins come with a CAPTCHA code and help prevent spamming. You can also set the posts to automatically go live on your site or save them in the backend and then approve or disapprove the drafts.

Here is a tool that we highly recommend for User Submitted Posts. It is quick and easy to plugin and allows you to enable guest posting. The pro version is packed with some exciting features such as unlimited custom fields.

2. Include a forum

Forums are widely popular amongst people. A lot of people look up to forums for useful discussions that can resolve their issues or gain more insights on products and services. It is a great opportunity for you to connect with the users on the next level and including a forum on your site is a good place to start using user-generated content.

It would allow users to ask you and other people to support them with the products and services.

WP Foro is a tool that would make it easier for you to add a forum to your site. The dedicated documentation page would help you customize the forum with all the needed features and as per your specifications. You can add the forum to any page/post on the site using a shortcode.

3. Manage your user roles

WordPress is one of the most dynamic platforms to build websites with a variety of features. Like this one here, WordPress has built-in functionality that enables user-generated content through user roles.

You can work it out in the setting to allow users to register themselves as contributors and they can start creating content, edit their posts and submit it to you for approval and publishing. This gives you major control over the website and its overall content that comes from people outside the organization.

To make this feature more useful and gain more control over the content that regularly is submitted to you, check out this tool here: User Role Editor.

4. Enable Comments

Comment and review sections are the first things that are explored by the new customers. It gives a legitimate impression to your audience and helps them make a buy decision. Enabling comments on the blog post would drive more interactions and promote discussions amongst users about your products, services, interest areas, etc.

If you are allowing your users to add their own blogs to your site, then you cannot miss out on this amazing feature. To add this feature to your site, use the tool wpDiscuz, it is an advanced tool that helps you manage the comments on the site. It gives you major control over the comment system and would enable you to disable or hire any single post or certain type of post.

5. Embedded Social Hashtag

Social media is where people talk about your brand, discuss your products and also share or advocate your brand. If you want to show the engagement and all the love you have received on social media to your site, embedded social hashtag it is.

Regularly run a social media campaign and get frequent boosts of engagement. The embedded social hashtag system would automatically pull the recent social media posts with specific tags to your site and people visiting the site would be able to see them.

Here is a tool that we highly recommend for you: WPSocialStreamDesigner.

It is a free tool that pulls content from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and Pinterest. With two beautiful templates and drag and drop grid card builder, and 40+ layout customization settings, this tool is the best one you have got in the market.

6. Testimonials

Testimonials not only help you create user-generated content but work as social proof for your site visitors. The testimonial section is of great importance on your site and you cannot believe to say a site is complete without it. Small businesses with low brand recognition are highly benefited by this.

Try out these Easy Testimonials to add testimonials to your site. This would help you collect user testimonials through a simple form and display them in a sidebar, slider, or testimonial page.

How to avoid any mistakes in User Generated Content?

WordPress is one of the best platforms to develop websites, as it provides you added benefits in SEO. However, one mistake and you can see your traffic crashing, leads to not converting and a reduction in ROI. Here is how you can do everything right while using WordPress user-generated content.

1. Negative Content Assessments

Now if you are providing an opportunity to the users to assess your products/services and talk about their experience publicly, you cannot avoid some negative backfire.

Not much you can do to hold it but, these comments and reviews become your insight into the market that allows you to manage your products and services and optimize the experience throughout the website. In addition, don’t avoid negative backfires, communicate with these users and resolve their issues.

2. Identify your requirement well

When you are planning on UGC, make sure you have a clear idea about how you want to use them. Generating content and not utilizing it is just a waste of effort. Properly plan beforehand.

Also, you have to inspire people to generate content. This is also going to require some planning. You should have a concise plan on the requirements and discover the likes and dislikes of your customers.

For example, shopping sites are majorly benefited by social media posts, but technology products with forums and reviews. So, depending on the services, type of audience, make sure you use the right channel.

3. Understanding User Persona

Understanding your audience is the key to success. Understand what your customers want in the lieu of content that they are generating. Offer them existing rewards or lure them to advocate your brand regularly for constant content generation.

4. Spam Filter

There are various ways you can avoid spamming. Not always you would get content that helps you in the promotion of the brand. Monitor the content. Also, practices such as Captcha verification, preventing email harvest, keeping private domain, using honeypot, blocking bad countries are some recommended practices.

5. Typos and SEO Optimization

People sharing the content are not professional content creators, therefore there’s a good chance there will be mistakes and it won’t be strategically aligned. But that is the attraction of user-generated content: it is unfiltered, which makes it more authentic to the audience.

In addition, you can use various approaches to using the raw format and rectify the content beforehand for SEO rankings.

Also read: WordPress User Roles And Permissions (Track User Activity On Site)

Wrapping Up

Including user-generated content improves the website’s engagement, trustworthiness, and SEO ranking. In addition, You can pique the interest of your new audience by offering them a user experience that is shared by a number of other people.

Adding UGC is risky too as there has to be proper planning and understanding of your users. Use the marketing and strategic approaches mentioned in the blog and tell us how user-generated content has been able to help you surge your SEO rankings.