What Is User Generated Content and Can It Rank Well?

The concept of user generated content is not new. Far from it, in fact. The concept of “word of mouth marketing” was pioneered in the 1970s. But to be honest, the fact that people trust recommendations from friends instead of salesmen goes back centuries if not millennia. As long as humans have had language and commerce, we have instinctively distrusted marketers, and for good reason. After all, they have something to sell us.

Of course, we don’t care about the 4-star reviews left on the walls of the pyramids or engraved in stone tablets unearthed in Pompeii. We’re concerned with the content users leave on your storefront, submit to you via email, or deliver to you on social media.

User generated content is helpful because it comes back to something called social proof. I don’t mean social proof in the “this post has 10,000 Facebook likes, it must be popular” way. I mean social proof in a more mechanical, survival instinct sense.

If you see someone trip and fall, or slip on some ice, or be stung by a swarm of bees, you instinctively know to stay away from that area, because of what happened to the other person. That’s social proof that something bad lurks in that area. And maybe they tripped on their own shoelaces, or there was barely any ice, or they brought their own bees for some reason; it’s not going to be the norm, it’s an exception, and you’re better off disregarding rare exceptions.

You trust the experiences of this other person, even if you’ve never met them. With poor consequences, you stay away from the situation. With positive results, like finding a delicious fruit hidden just out of sight, you want to get in on that. Modern social proof works the same way, inspiring our base instincts to trust each other, even if we intellectually know we maybe shouldn’t.

In commerce, social proof helps us make decisions about products where we don’t have personal experience. When that social proof comes from someone we know, it’s very powerful. When it comes from someone we don’t know, it’s less so. But still helpful. When it comes directly from a brand, we distrust it. We all worry about the snake that’s offering us that tasty fruit. Right?

What Is and Isn’t User Generated Content?

In modern marketing, we consider user generated content to encompass many types of content. What kinds of content? You’d probably recognize it if you saw it.

The broad definition of user-generated content is “any content generated by a user outside of the organization.” It’s basically free publicity. We only count positive user generated content in the definition. Negative content, like bad reviews, isn’t helpful so we don’t usually consider it part of marketing.

Basic examples of user generated content include things like selfies while wearing a branded hoodie, photos of a product, or product reviews left on a site like Amazon. One of the most classic UGC campaigns in recent memory was Coke’s cans with names on them. People around the world shared photos of themselves with “their” can, giving the brand widespread product visibility and a wave of memes ranging from a Coke nativity scene to jokes about people with uncommon names.

Anything that users change or create can be considered user generated content. Voting brackets, interactive polls, and community-driven tournaments are all examples of UGC in action, where the outcome and direction of the content is shaped largely by user participation.

Content that your marketing team produces isn’t user generated content, even if you make it look like it. Reviews you leave for your own products, testimonials from your own employees, and so on just don’t work. Why? When users identify these as marketing content, they’ll inherently distrust it.

Why You Should Use UGC

It’s no secret that user generated content can be a giant benefit to your marketing. The data supports this more strongly than ever. A 2026 Semrush analysis of 500 top consumer businesses found that UGC now accounts for 31% of all first-page search results, up from 25% the prior year. Even more striking, UGC collectively outranks official brand pages in 44% of product-related keyword searches. Reviews are a massive part of e-commerce, and the data shows they’re only becoming more influential over time.

Beyond search rankings, 79% of consumers say UGC influences their purchasing decisions, and 82% say they’re more likely to buy from businesses that use UGC in their marketing. UGC also results in 29% higher conversion rates compared to campaigns without it. ComScore found that customer engagement is 28% higher when UGC is used versus professionally created content. And maybe most tellingly, UGC is 8.7x more effective than influencer content, meaning the organic, unsponsored voices of your customers carry far more weight than paid partnerships.

User generated content also has a significant impact on SEO, and in several ways.

User generated content creates more on-page content for search engines to pick up. This is a big one, and it applies equally to blogs and to e-commerce storefronts. Amazon has reviews for their products, and while they aren’t necessarily easy to index, you can bet they’re great for convincing others to buy a product.

For blogs, where SEO matters more than testimonials, user generated content takes the form of comments. There’s a furious argument in the marketing world over whether or not you should keep comments enabled on your blog. The strong case for keeping them is that comments are a bit of extra content on your site. And some comments suck, and some of them are spam, so you have to monitor and moderate them. But the benefits can be great. UGC can increase a blog’s organic traffic by as much as 45% and makes articles 2.5x more shareable. If you’re weighing your options, it’s worth considering whether the default WordPress comment system is best for SEO.

User generated content can reach long-tail keywords you wouldn’t otherwise reach. From a purely SEO perspective, user generated content is still content on your page. Unless you’re using a commenting system that doesn’t allow indexation of the content, the content in the comments is picked up by Google; it’s why people leave spam comments. Right? If Google couldn’t see the comments, the spam links wouldn’t matter.

Google picks up your comments and the keywords left there, intentionally or otherwise through conversation, and that’s majorly helpful.

User generated content can keep older pages alive with fresh information. Keeping an older page fresh isn’t always at the top of our priorities as marketers. We usually find it easier to cover new content and expand our blogs than to update older content. The more time you spend on older content, the less time you’re spending on new content. New content usually has better benefits for the time invested.

The benefit of comments, then, is that users are updating your old posts for you while you’re working on new content, and it doesn’t take nearly as much time to engage with a few comments as it does to come up with ways to update and expand old posts. You get the best of both worlds, without having to invest the time or money.

User generated content helps other users connect with and promote your brand. As others connect with your brand, they become brand ambassadors. These engaged users have an affinity for your brand and are willing to promote you to their friends and family when the opportunity comes up. They have more trust within those circles than your usual set of marketers, so you see higher conversion rates amongst that group.

The more user generated content you have in your orbit, the easier it is to draw others into that orbit. Everyone likes to know they have a group of people sharing their interests, whether it’s sports fans or regulars who frequent the same restaurant.

User generated content has a snowball effect over time. Just like other forms of white-hat SEO, just like running a blog, just like building a social media platform, user generated content snowballs. You might get a blog that gets 0-5 comments on posts on average. But those tend to stick around. You draw in more people, and they find value in interacting in the comments, and it all continues to build.

User generated content shows that you care about your customers. Nothing is worse than an inattentive brand. By engaging with and promoting user generated content, users feel that you’re paying attention to them. When the user generated content is generally helpful and positive, it tells other users that you must have a good product; if not, why would people be engaging with you in a positive way?

User generated content is basically free. You have to put in the time to moderate away bad comments, and you have to take action to solicit positive reviews, and you have to come up with campaigns to make use of user generated content. But that’s minimal compared to so many other marketing campaigns.

User generated content can open up new doors. The people who are engaging with your brand aren’t necessarily just basic customers. Many of them may have blogs or businesses of their own, and some of them can be great opportunities for partnership, funding, networking, connections, or other benefits. You never know who might invite you to guest post, give you an enterprise-level contract for your services, or promote you on their site.

User generated content gives you helpful feedback. You can learn what the average skill level of your users is, and whether you should be increasing or decreasing your baseline estimate of their knowledge, customizing future content to that perspective. You can learn to see where their pain points are and what makes them happy or excited. You can discover new questions that you can answer in future blog posts. Users can back up your opinions with their own experiences or case studies, or they can refute you with their own evidence.

How to Use User Generated Content

A lot of user generated content circulates on social media, on platforms like TikTok and Instagram, which have become legitimate search engines in their own right. Google’s own research has said that roughly 40% of young people now try TikTok or Instagram instead of Google Search or Maps when looking for recommendations. That means your UGC strategy can’t be limited to your blog or your Amazon reviews, and it needs to show up wherever your audience is searching.

Blog comments remain a helpful channel as well. If you want to rank well, then you’ll have to take advantage of as many avenues as possible. You don’t want to be limited to just one channel; you want to give your audience as many ways to engage as possible.

Some ideas might include:

• Hashtag campaigns that allow users to submit their own photos or videos, which you can feature both on social media and in a “best of” blog post.
• User-driven voting tournaments or polls, which can help narrow down the target interests of your users while creating a fun and interactive way to engage with them.
• A Q&A session. Post on social media and on your blog to solicit questions for a week or so, and then compile a video, blog post, or livestream where you go through them and answer them. Make sure to credit the people who originally asked the questions.
• Short-form video campaigns on TikTok or Instagram Reels, where users share their experience with your product or service using a branded hashtag. Given how these platforms now function as search engines, this type of UGC can drive discovery in ways traditional blog content simply can’t.

What you can’t do is basically throw up an “Instagram post of the week” blog post with a couple of embedded posts and call it a day. But SEO doesn’t go out the window just because you have users posting their content now and then. You need to take steps to make sure your content meets a minimum baseline, and use the user generated content as icing on the cake. Consider all the places you can share your content to maximize the reach of your UGC efforts.