Reasons to Use Crowd Marketing in your SEO Strategy

In today’s highly competitive online marketing landscape, gaining a competitive advantage can be extremely complex. To appear high in Google’s SERPs and get your business noticed by the right audiences, you need to invest in a solid SEO strategy. By optimizing your website pages, gaining high-quality backlinks, and maximizing your rankings, you will position yourself as an industry leader and build trust with your prospective customers.

That is exactly where crowd marketing can help. This is a popular technique, where businesses use the content created by their customers and relevant industry influencers to gain their audience’s trust and increase transparency. If you are curious to learn what the benefits of crowd marketing for your SEO strategy are, keep reading!

Building Authoritative Backlinks

Backlinks are still one of Google’s most significant ranking factors. According to Backlinko, the total number of linking pages, even if they come from the same domain, can boost your rankings. When ranking your website pages, Google also considers the quality of a linking page, link domain relevancy, backlink diversity, as well as the natural link profile, forum links, and user-generated content links. 

That is where crowd marketing shines. With this tactic, you can gain authoritative links from:

• Relevant forums in your industry
• Industry-specific blogs
• Review sites
• Social networks
• Q&A sites
• Thematic aggregators

The greatest benefit of these platforms lies in their continuous discussions and high traffic. However, you will need to use them strategically to build backlinks. Instead of spamming conversations, you need to focus on whitelabel SEO practices and providing value to your target audiences. Your links should serve as valuable resources online users will love to click on. Above all, you will need to focus on choosing websites and platforms that have already included links and mentions from similar brands in your niche.

Gaining Customers’ Trust and Expanding your Online Community

With the rise of social networks, brands finally have the opportunity to communicate with their customers in a more natural and engaging way. Today’s customers are tech-savvy. They use social networks to voice their satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the products and services they bought and promote brands they like. You should turn their social media activity to your advantage and here is how:

• Leverage user-generated content. Encourage customers to take and post beautiful photos of the products they use. You could even provide incentives, such as free trials, discounts, or massive contests, to encourage them to share UGC.
• Communicating with your target customers. Online customers use social networks to communicate with brands in real-time. By using social media monitoring tools, you will be able to track your brand/product mentions, hashtag uses, and relevant conversations and provide immediate feedback.
• Asking customers to rate and review your brand online. While you will focus more on positive comments, you should never ignore negative ones. Instead, use them to understand your customers’ dissatisfaction, solve their problems, and turn them into brand advocates. Above all, you will gain your target customers’ trust and encourage them to buy from you.
• Building an online community by creating relevant Facebook groups or joining existing ones. The idea is to provide timely and relevant questions to your audience. Above all, you need to focus on delivering value to them.

Increasing Engagement

Engagement is another critical part of your SEO strategy. It includes any action a website visitor takes, as opposed to browsing through your digital channels passively. When observing Google’s algorithm update from March 2019, we can conclude that this search engine now pays close attention to engagement metrics, as they directly illustrate how relevant and quality your site is. In other words, apart from your backlinks and keywords, Google will want to focus more on the signals that tell it whether your website visitors are satisfied or not. 

Therefore, to rank higher, you will need to focus on engaging your customers in multiple ways. Now, there are many types of user engagement, including:

• Social media sharing
• Liking posts on your blog or social networks
• Linking back to your content from their blog
• Using hashtags and creating the abovementioned user-generated content
• Referring traffic and customers to your site
• Writing reviews
• Click-through rates
• Dwell time – how much time a user spends on your website page

Boosting Conversions

Your goal is to turn your website visitors, email newsletter subscribers, and social media followers into conversions. Conversions are one of the most significant metrics to track, since they directly show the effectiveness of your online interactions and SEO efforts. If you generate great website traffic but you don’t convert them into sales, this may mean your website is not relevant, valuable, or quality enough for your target audience. Worse yet, you may be targeting the wrong audiences with your content. 

Crowd marketing can help you boost conversion rates, given that it gains people’s trust and gives you immense online credibility. Backlinks from reputable sites, social media shares, and online customer reviews and referrals will serve as an incredible trust signal and position you as an authoritative online resource.

Maximizing ROI

The good thing is that the mere implementation of crowd marketing is simpler and more affordable, when compared to influencer marketing. Crowd marketing will maximize your ROI, given that it increases website traffic, generates leads, boosts conversions, and impacts your backlink profile. 

However, you should keep in mind that crowd marketing often does not provide direct and easily visible results. It takes several months of continuous work to see its impact on your traffic increase and conversions. Precisely because of that, you will need to measure your crowd marketing campaigns. Here are the metrics you should measure:

• Traffic growth
• The rise in product popularity 
• The growth of conversions
• The quality of backlinks
• Your pages’ position in search results.

Remember that the goal of your crowd marketing strategy is to grow your overall brand image and increase brand awareness.

Conclusions

Crowd marketing can benefit your business on multiple levels. It allows you to increase your brand reputation in the online environment and boost your sales. However, to reap its full potential, you will need to invest both time and effort into strategizing it properly. I hope this article will serve as your solid starting point, giving you actionable tips on what to focus your attention on.

Have you already used crowd marketing in your SEO strategy? How did it benefit your online presence? If you have any additional tips or suggestions, we are listening!