User-generated content: an underrated SEO lever

Writing blog posts takes time. Your customers, on the other hand, write for free, every day, and often better targeted than you: they use the exact words typed by people who do not know your brand yet.

What Google is looking for

Google favors content that answers a real question, written by someone with first-hand experience of the topic. A customer explaining how she matched two products, or why she chose one model over another, ticks every box.

The conditions for it to work

A forum only helps your rankings if Google can read it. Three things to check:

1. Discussions must be public. A category restricted to logged-in members is not indexed. Keep private what must stay private, and leave the rest open.
2. Each discussion has its own URL and a descriptive title. “Question” is not a title; “Which model for sensitive skin” is.
3. The forum lives on your domain, not on a vendor’s subdomain. Your site is the one that must collect the authority.

The classic mistakes

• Letting spam through. A few shady links are enough to devalue the whole forum. Automatic moderation is not optional.
• Creating thirty empty categories. Three living categories are better.
• Never answering. A community where the brand is absent dies within weeks.

Measuring

In Google Search Console, filter URLs containing your forum’s path. After a few weeks you will see queries appear that you would never have targeted on purpose. That is where the value hides.

Further reading: Why add a forum to your Shopify store, The 5 types of content that keep an e-commerce community alive and all the forum features.