Owning a website also involves comments management. Comments left by users show their interest for your blog whether they are positive or negative. Responding to comments can be time consuming if they need complex responses or if you have to deal with many of them. But taking the time to treat these comments is worth it. More than just establishing a positive image of your brand – taking into consideration feedbacks – responding to comments can bring you many marketing advantages and can optimize your SEO.
Comments help boost your traffic
Comments are part of content. Assuming you have a good comment management system, you normally won’t have spams. Comments are user generated content filled with long tail keywords. And these keywords can help you rank better as they are often niche keywords and less competitive requests. These long-tail keywords can give a boost to your blog traffic.
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Then when you get the habit to respond to comments, people are waiting to receive an answer. They will come back on your site to read what you have to tell. And if you take the time to give an answer that offers real value it will produce a great return on investment. Indeed, that’s a good way to have more returning visitors and retain them. Moreover, it will develop your brand awareness, credibility and your authority.
Comments improve social shares
Studies have showed that people leaving comments are more likely to share your content on social networks. Encourage your visitors to leave a comment whenever you have the opportunity. The more you will be responding to comments, the more visitors will be likely to post comments and the more they will share on social networks. What is interesting here is that social shares also increase website traffic. More than just search traffic, you will gain in social traffic which can boost your social signal and your rankings.
Comments enrich your internal linking
When you are responding to comments, you can add links to your response. This is a great opportunity to insert links to previous articles you have written. But however, use this technique only if the content is relevant with the comment. This way, you are going to enrich your internal linking and thus your rankings. This is a pretty valuable solution if you want to send people on a specific page like your About page for example.
Comments increase sales
Neil Patel has realised an experience with his blog Quick Sprout. He is selling memberships to his Quick Sprout University. He found out that people who had bought a membership were commenting on the blog. It results that 68% of the members have commented on his blog before their subscriptions. Thus, he shows that there is a link between comments left and purchases. Althought he is not sure of that, he tends to think that it is the responses he left to comments and the free content he publishes that had help increase his sales.
And you, have you found other advantages in responding to comments?