An often overlooked way in which SEO success can be dramatically improved takes little, or minimal effort, on behalf of the diligent online marketer.
Since time immemorial, business have relied on their customers spreading the word as to how good they are, and this is something that has not changed with the internet. The only difference now is that it comes through reviews and ratings, as a recent blog on practicalecommerce.com discussed.
Initial work is needed though; ensuring that underlying coding is set up to best exploit all the nice things being said.
If displayed in the right format, on the right pages which are crawlable, customer comments rarely fail. Organically created, often linking to and from other pages, they score highly in the SERPS too.
Reviews about your products and services left on other sites work in the same way too, though checking with quoted queries to see if their pages are indexed may be necessary. If not, contacting the site and asking them to update their pages is easy enough.
Where a comment also has a rating attached can be beneficial too, though not in the truest sense of SEO; they are not factors in search results. However, they can ultimately drive clicks and purchases, so should never be underestimated.
Blogs are a great tool to exploit for SEO of course, and this is certainly the case with customer comments, again with natural examples of keywords and praise.
Customer comments should never be wholly relied upon of course and, any platforms being used will all need to be carefully monitored. Correctly managed though, and there could be a significant positive impact.