Reviews & UGC SEO — Kevin Indig // G2

Quotes

• “I still try to be a bit more in the weeds here and there but 90% of the time, I am much more coordinating and strategizing. The market is also interesting, its very, very competitive. We are trying to disrupt a very big incumbent which is Gartner, and they have several domains. On top of that, theres also the SAP, Oracle, and the publishers like the PC Mag and Business Insidersof the world.” -Kevin

• “It reminds me back when I was in Daily Motion. It was a purely user-generated content (UGC) platform. It was very interesting because we have different types of sites. We have a UGC site which is our marketplace and we also have a pure editorial site that lives on learn.g2.com. Thats where we have a big staff of content marketers.” -Kevin

• “That creates a couple of use cases. For example, Google tries to show a mix of review marketplace, review sites, publishers, and maybe brands. So by having that editorial sites we can send two contenders into the craze instead of just one.” -Kevin

• “G2 kickstarted the whole process with a lot of incentives. We are a well-funded startup and we spent a lot of money on giving people coupons or gift cards, offline and online to write reviews and some of those can be purchase by the company themselves.” -Kevin

• “Now we started towards a more organic model. We dont pay customers to review software that theyuse, but instead, leverage more the companies themselves. One part of leverage is the NPS score. Once you reached critical mass with a platform like that., people come to you automatically.” -Kevin

• “We are still being thrown into one bucket with other review sites almost all the time. The criticism that most people have, and rightfully so, is that most review sites are pay-to-play game.” -Kevin

• “At G2, we dont make money from placements. We are not a pay-to-play platform. Each and every one of our reviews has gone through a manual vetting process. You cannot just publish and see your review online. Instead, we have a team of research analysts and other teams who go through the reviews, validate that you actually used the software. We do want to be the objective marketplace of reviews.” -Kevin

• “The problem with the middle ground is a very interesting one. Usually, the initial touchpoint with ourplatform is they have a really good or really bad experience with a product. Theres an initial trigger and theres a follow up where people leave a much more average review.” -Kevin

• “As an SEO, there are many things that you want to think about when it comes to UGC. Theres obviously the quality of the reviews themselves, so we have a minimum number of words that we require. Thats the first touchpoint, making sure that it is a high-quality review.” -Kevin

• “The idea of the review for us is not to bea walled garden or to be the only place where you find those reviews. The idea for us is to be the source of those reviews, so we syndicate quite a lot. You can as a subscriber and customer show those reviews on your site.” -Kevin

• “There is a little trick here where, if you use a rating schema in combination with our reviews on your letting page, there is a very, very high likelihood that you will get a rating snippet in the search results. The fine thing about that is, they are the only result in the search results that get that snippet because their product is on our platform, those are real reviews so theres no reason for Google to say its a fake review.” -Kevin

• “At a certain scale, we are an open platform and we want our content to be visible and out there. So, to a degree, its fine.” -Kevin