The Future of SEO is User-Generated Content
And you need to get started.. NOW.
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One channel is universally present in every company’s growth strategy: SEO. It’s organic, it’s powerful, and it’s… changing. If you’re seeing your SEO dip by 10% or more right now, you’re not alone. You can thank AI for that.
First, there are AI snippets in google, which have taken up 50% of the above-the-fold space, pushing your organic results into the oblivion of the below-the-fold.
But then there's ChatGPT — the first technological development that took away marketing advertising space. Think about it — Google, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok — all added to the advertising real estate. Yet ChatGPT uses SEO content without generally providing credit to the sources. And on the rare occasions it does, only *one* source is linked (and let’s face it, your chance of being THE one linked are slim).
But don’t believe clickbait headlines that SEO is dead. It’s not dying—it’s continuing to change. But it is true that the rise of AI is accelerating that change.
AI is great at providing the most common answers, which is why a lot of general SEO content—often based on widely-known knowledge—is getting cannibalized. Companies have been creating content aimed at capturing common keywords, but AI is summarizing that content in much more effective way without giving any credit. To compound the issue, many SEO are starting to use AI to write content, but that just further proves that there’s no differentiation.
How do you stand out? The answer: by providing something AI can’t—real, user-driven, authentic content - and that’s where you should be focusing your SEO strategy on right now.
Why Authenticity is the Key to Breaking Through
The future of SEO will revolve around authenticity—and its not going to come from you, your content team, or a bunch of freelance copywriters. It’s going to need to come from your users.
User Generated Content (or UGC) will be the backbone of future content strategies. It’s authentic, it’s unique, and most importantly: it’s defensible.
No competitor can replicate the content your users create on your platform.
Examples of Company-Distributed UGC in Action
This isn’t just an idea I’ve had. Look at what top companies are doing and you’ll see it everywhere:
Miro’s Miroverse
Users create whiteboards, which Miro scrubs for proprietary information and then publishes as templates in its Miroverse. Each template is tied to a landing page. Plus, by offering real-world use cases—like "Here’s how Atlassian runs its meetings"—you get instant social proof and validation.
Notion also excels at this.
While they provide their own templates, they’ve enabled users to create over 20,000 user-generated templates, filling their template gallery with far more content than their own team could develop. It sits nicely on their marketing site, capturing that long tail of them keywords.
Amplitude recently launched its own UGC gallery.
Amplitude allows users to share the charts they create. It’s an inspiring way to show how others are using the platform while providing value to new and existing users.
Figma takes this to another level
Figma does user generated templates, libraries, plugins… the list goes on. Plugins are particularly impressive - it’s actual, user-generated plugins that people develop on top of the platform, and then the company offers through a marketplace. Figma is essentially having their users develop product for them!
And then… look at Canva.
Canva pioneered the impact user generated template gallery can have by building an SEO powerhouse around these assets. Each template has its own landing page, optimized for the search engines. Search for pretty much any design-related template idea you have and there’s a good chance a Canva page is sitting there at the #1 spot. This creates a massive, sustainable growth engine. Users create the designs, Canva distributes them.
Pretty cool, right?
UGC challenges—and how to overcome them
1. Not every product naturally lends itself to User Generated Content. Okta, for example, is a single sign-on (SSO) platform—it’s hard to imagine user-generated content emerging from a product like that. But for most SaaS products, there’s potential to turn what customers create into valuable, reusable content.
The key is to ensure that creating this content doesn’t add friction to the user experience. You want to amplify what users are already doing, not ask them to go out of their way to generate templates or examples. Ideally, it should be part of their "Aha!" moment. For example, when someone completes a design on Canva, they should be able to publish it as a template with the click of a button.
2. By investing in UGC, you’re creating a content marketplace—where supply is your user-generated content, and you need to find demand for it in the market. As with any marketplace, demand rules the game (supply will follow if the demand is there), so focus on testing the type of content that will meet strong demand.
3. Users need the right level of incentives to provide their content—whether they’re financial, intrinsic, or extrinsic. Getting these incentives right will make or break your program.
4. UGC is a long game. It takes time—1 to 2 years and thousands of user generated content pieces to see meaningful acquisition traffic and results. You can’t publish 10 user templates and expect hockey-stick growth. This is a slow-bake process: which is part of what makes it so competitively *defensible* and your *earned* channel. No one else will be able to create this kind of content. But you have to lay the groundwork to build out this loop to make it a core part of your product’s growth strategy.
So what, Just wait??
Nope. There’s a proven playbook for making UGC work for SEO, and it starts with using user generated content to activate your existing customers. If your current users don’t find UGC content valuable, your prospects certainly won’t either. By embedding newly created content into activation and re-engagement product journeys, you can validate the quality of the content and start generating initial traffic to those pages from your own user base—signaling to Google that it should pay attention and rank the page higher.
Want to know how exactly to build out your UGC program? Check out the next post. which includes:
Metrics to track
How to source your first 10 user generated content pieces
Where and how to publish
How to drive engagement with the content
When to transition to acquisition goals
Embrace the Future
In the future, SEO and content strategy will be anchored on UGC, not company-generated content. AI will continue to excel at generating the "mean" or the most common answers. But authentic, niche, user-driven content will break through that noise.
And let’s not forget the extra love you’ll get from your users. When you feature someone’s template or content, they’ll likely share it with their network, further amplifying your brand. It creates a social loop, deepens user loyalty, and strengthens retention.
Edited with the help of Jonathan Yagel, Assistant to the Regional Memeger.
Another banger!
This is awesome. I think UGC is honestly the future for most marketing moving forward. It’s the fastest transfer of trust, and is the best at integrating into buyer priorities, not interrupting them.