Customer feedback has recognised advantages. First and foremost, it lets you know how your business is doing. It alerts you to any problems and helps you to soothe ruffled feathers. It gives you hints for improvements, and gives you an insight into the customer side of your industry. In many ways, customer feedback is just like a precious canary in the mine of a business site.

The feedback your site gets from its users, both on and off page, can be used for much more than early warning signals. Any interaction with your users will give you more insight into how your users think. Feedback can provide you with new keywords, misspellings, slang and even ideas on places to get links. Finding places off your own pages where your users discuss your site can also provide you with information on where it’s best to focus your off-page search engine optimisation strategies. Best of all, feedback can help you to generate quality, interesting content which will boost your search engine optimisation campaign and draw users in.

Feedback doesn’t have to be for your site to be helpful. Browsing through the feedback on your competitors’ sites and general industry reviews can provide you with valuable information. Often, this information will be of the ‘what not to do’ kind, when your competitors are criticised for their mistakes. Sometimes, it can give you pointers on what works for your target users. It also provides further information on the wording and focus of your users’ thoughts on your products.

As you might guess, user feedback can and should be used to inform your SEO process. The terms and phrases gleaned from your own user comments and those found on the net should be incorporated into your keyword research. A good SEO consultant will be able to perform an analysis of the most common terms, and you can talk to our experts at SEO Consult about this.

The insights you gain from user feedback can also be used to brush up your site’s general content. Feedback will give you an idea of which products or services are popular and which are declining in popularity, giving you hints of what sort of content to concentrate on. The topics within the feedback can be a good source of content ideas. For example, user questions are good prompts for informative articles. Occasionally users will bring up a new development in your industry, which should prompt a researched article in reply. When content is a direct result of a particular user’s comment, it is a good idea to acknowledge that user. This further nurtures your relationship with your users.

Finally, user feedback can provide content on its own. User reviews are a great way to boost your existing content. Opening up a review function opens the way for your users to interact with each other and your business, providing a handy source of fresh content for your site at the same time. The benefits of this often outweigh the time spent on editing comments.

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