Why are consumer sentiments important for your search engine rankings?
Bing has already done it. They use sentiment analysis for featured snippets and obviously how can Google be left behind?
No one likes negativity even if its online. Don’t worry, I’m not here to give you a self-help guide on spreading positivity, but emphasize that in a digitally driven world, the sentiments (positive or negative) of your consumers are extremely important.
Can you imagine that MIT has developed a sentiment algorithm that can analyze sarcasm that is implied when emojis are used. Imagine being able to capture all the reviews about your product or service and being able to know how your consumers feel about what you have to offer.
As per Wikipedia, Opinion mining (sometimes known as sentiment analysis or emotion AI) refers to the use of natural language processing, text analysis, computational linguistics, and biometrics to systematically identify, extract, quantify, and study affective states and subjective information.
Scientists have developed an algorithm that can conduct sentiment analysis, which can determine the sentiments of the content. It contextualizes the content and communication (on emails, blog posts, social media, review websites, customer service portals and online shopping websites) to determine the sentiments around a brand/product/service. It obviously is a humongous task for a person to undertake (analyzing all that content). Thankfully there are tools available that can help you to analyze the user sentiments.
Why are consumer sentiments critical for SEO?
Sentiments are not only important for your marketer but also the search engines. Wondering how sentiments have an impact on SEO? I’ll give you a brief.
SEO backlinks will have a different interpretation
Earlier all kinds of backlinks were deemed good for the website and search engine. The higher your number of backlinks, the better it was for your SEO strategy. Obviously, every mention or reference to your website/ product/ service/ brand might not be positive. Negative reviews have the biggest impact on your brand (and unfortunately people are likely to post more of negative reviews rather than positive). Negative SEO backlinks must not be on your list of SEO efforts. If you’re able to create positive sentiments with the help of your content, keyword strategy, amazing user experience on your website and addressing user needs, you’re already up at the game.
Consumer services will have a role
The foremost priority of brands must be to provide excellent customer service. Sentiment analysis can read through support tickets and transcripts (even private messages shared on social media). In fact, the analysis of this data can be insightful for brands to manage specific customer scenarios and be able to address issues more effectively.
Is sentiment analysis the next big thing?
Google has always wanted to understand content the way humans do it (and what better to do than sentiment analysis). They’d love to give results closest to what the users are searching for. Though there is no immediate need for you to panic of your consumer sentiments, but you do need to ensure that your consumers feel good about what you have to offer. Sentiment analysis will help brands to write more about what their users are interested in. Analyzing the sentiments in product reviews can be specifically useful for SEO purpose. It can improve the quality of meta tags and relevant keywords in product description.
Everything said, emotions can be complicated. They’re not positive or negative always. They can vary in degree or being neutral. Sooner or later, search engines will incorporate algorithms for advanced sentiment analysis.