Sentiment or sentiment analysis is the interpretation and classification of emotions (positive, negative and neutral) within text data. Sentiment analysis allows businesses to identify customer sentiment toward products, brands or services in online conversations and feedback as well as in the text on the website. It involves using text analysis techniques like Natural Learning Processing (NLP) and algorithms to mine large data sets analyzing volumes of text or voice data for strings of words that signify if the text is stating a positive, negative or neutral sentiment. By isolating these emotion-based opinions, you can quickly gain an understanding of your audience’s or customers’ overall attitudes and feelings, as well as the tone of your website.

Sentiment can be data mined from your content, but also from reviews, comments and social media mentions. Depending on the size of your business, and the depth and engagement of your web content, you may have a lot of data to work with, or a little. The more engagement you have, the more meaningful sentiment will be to your business.

This is why asking for customer feedback is always an important strategy. It provides you with the actionable insights into what’s working and what needs to be improved, but it also grows your customer experience. Many individuals want a platform to share their feedback, whether through a questionnaire, review site or comment section. You should always make it easy for feedback to be given and make an effort to encourage its creation. You can incentivise the completion of a survey or simply end a blog or social media post with a question or thought to get the conversation in the comments started.

Website traffic, lead generation, and customer acquisition are all supported by strong SEO, especially with more and more people using search to research and discover new products and businesses. Sentiment analysis can help you find more relevant topics that resonate with what people are interested in learning about and discussing. This also yields promising insight into the keywords that may be beginning to trend, giving you an early chance to optimize for them ahead of your competition. Studying sentiments in product reviews can vastly improve the SEO of your product descriptions and meta tags. Here, it’s less about the positive-neutral-negative spectrum and more a focus on the number of sentiments regarding a single feature or quality. Once you know what sentiments people are expressing or searching for you can build them into your content and improve your SEO.

Keeping customers engaged, interested and happy is one of the great challenges for businesses. Sentiment analysis creates an easy path towards measuring these emotions and identifying individuals that are dissatisfied and the reasons why this may have happened. In turn, this allows a company to adjust its strategies to ensure a happier and longer lasting relationship with customers.