Customer feedback is more than a source of pride and a selling point. It’s a unique source of knowledge about your products and services from a perspective you can’t access otherwise—the perspective of your customers and users.

Analyzing customer feedback can help you double down on your strengths, improve your weaknesses, or work on brand messaging.

In this guide, we’ll cover why customer feedback is important, how to collect it, and how to improve your company based on the findings.

What is customer feedback?

Customer feedback is any information customers provide about the quality of your products, services, customer service, or any other experience they’ve had with your business.

Types of customer feedback

Customer feedback can be private or publicly accessible. 

Publicly accessible feedback can be found on:

• Review the widget on your business website
• Google reviews
• Review platforms relevant to your industry

Reviews like these can be very short and uninformative, with the user only leaving a star rating and a few words. They can also be incredibly detailed, which allows you to gather a lot of data.

Private feedback is the information your customers provide to you through channels like:

• Review pop-ups on the website
• Email surveys
• Private review forms
• Support tickets
• Customer calls
• Client portal mentions

This kind of feedback often focuses on specific touchpoints — a recent purchase or support interaction. Thus, it can offer richer context than public reviews. It’s also not visible to others, which means critical feedback won’t impact your brand reputation directly.

Collecting feedback from customers

You can gather customer feedback passively and actively. Passive customer feedback collection methods include having a profile on a review platform or a form on your website that a user can leave feedback on. 

Active feedback collection means reaching out to your users to request a review. The ways to get customer reviews include setting up an email campaign with a link to your review site profile and a suggestion to leave a review.

Benefits of customer feedback analysis 

Customer feedback gives you real-world insight into what’s working—and what’s not.

• Positive feedback helps you identify your strengths. If customers consistently mention your fast support or easy setup, you know to highlight those in your marketing and double down on them operationally.
• Negative feedback can point to friction points. Responding publicly and constructively (on platforms like Google or G2) shows future customers that you care and are proactive about solving issues.
• Privately shared feedback via email, support tickets, or surveys often flags internal problems before they show up publicly. These insights can guide product fixes, onboarding tweaks, or support improvements.
• From a data standpoint, feedback can help you spot recurring issues, prioritize what to fix based on effort vs. impact, and measure changes using clear KPIs. It becomes a key input for smarter, data-backed decisions.

How to use customer feedback to improve your SEO 

Making improvements in areas that users cover directly in reviews is straightforward. If users suggest ideas on how to improve the product or service, you’ll have to consider whether the ideas are relevant for your business. 

But the general direction that you have to take to improve your business is often right there in the feedback.

Feedback can also reveal gaps or issues your customers don’t mention directly, helping you spot patterns and make broader improvements. Combining insights from customer reviews and SEO is one such option. 

Here are a few suggestions on how to use customer reviews for SEO, and a few customer feedback examples.

1. Find keyword opportunities in customer reviews

Optimizing your website for the right keywords means the right audience will find your website. If you’ve been doing SEO for some time, you have already optimized your site for the most important keywords—those that many people search for and that are most relevant to your business.

However, those are not the only ones you’ll want to optimize your website for. Many keywords that are longer have much less search volume and might be harder to discover. If you narrow these keywords down to niche search terms, they are likely to bring in qualified leads.

Customer feedback is one of many data sources you can use to discover such keywords. For instance, in this review, a customer uses a phrase that can be a niche keyword.

👉🏻Tip: Since those keywords are likely to be featured in detailed reviews, you can’t sort through them manually. But you can build a custom web scraper or upload review texts into an AI engine to look for potential keywords in bulk.

You’ll then have to check the list of potential keywords you’ve found in an SEO tool to confirm they have search volume.

2. Find content ideas

Most people don’t land on your site ready to buy—they’re looking for something useful, like a free template or blog post. That’s why content plays such a big role in building trust and visibility.

Publishing helpful resources can position your business as a go-to source in your niche. But keeping up a strong content calendar takes effort, and that’s where customer feedback can help.

Look for recurring questions, frustrations, or goals mentioned in reviews or support tickets. These give you ready-made ideas for content that speaks directly to real customer needs.

For example, if several users mention that refining their profile setup is confusing, that’s a clear opportunity to write a how-to guide or create a video walkthrough.

If you believe this reflects a common pain point in your customer base, you can develop a guide on this topic.

3. Fix unclear brand messaging

Not all negative reviews stem from an objective problem in the product or service you provide. Some are a result of a misunderstanding, a lack of clear messaging, or a missed opportunity for brand positioning.

When you find instances of users being disappointed due to one of those factors, take it as a signal to rewrite your website copy or supporting materials to eliminate the misunderstanding.

This user says he is receiving a fair service for the money, but still would prefer more flexible pricing options.

This company can incorporate that feedback and improve the copy on the pricing page or landing pages to let leads understand the value of the service.

4. Incorporate reviews in the SERP

93 % of consumers say they read online reviews before making a purchase. A decent number of reviews with high ratings can prompt Google users to click on your website if you display them in your rich snippet section for search results. 

For example, this company uses its TrustPilot review stars to improve CTR in search. 

5. Use customer support feedback to run an SEO audit

Negative customer feedback, especially one you receive constantly, can prompt you to run a more detailed analysis of elements of your business. For instance, if you receive complaints either privately or publicly that your website takes a long time to load, you should run an SEO audit.

Issues like long loading times or visual instability on the page don’t just create a negative experience for the user; they’re detrimental to SEO.

When users start complaining, analyze your site with specialized software like SE Ranking’s SEO audit tool to confirm there’s a problem. You can follow the suggestions given in the audit to fix the website performance issues and improve both SEO and UX.

How to collect customer feedback

The more feedback you gather, the more useful your insights will be. While some customers will leave reviews on their own, it’s worth taking a more proactive approach. Here are a few effective ways to collect feedback across your website and customer touchpoints:

1. Implement live chats and chatbots

Having a live chat button on your website gives users an alternative way to interact with your content. Instead of browsing the site to find what they’re looking for manually, they can direct any questions they have to the customer support representative or a chatbot.

People typically contact you through live chat to complain about something, especially about finding or not finding certain information on your site.

Analyze the most common questions your customer support receives from website visitors, and you’ll find a lot of opportunities to improve your messaging on the website.

2. Install on-site feedback widgets

Most established businesses with online reviews have them on a third-party platform like G2. This might make the feedback harder to collect and examine.

Installing a feedback widget on your website has many benefits:

• You control the feedback collection process and can optimize the widget to receive more reviews.
• It’s easier to analyse proprietary customer feedback data.
• Viewing the review rating on the website and in SERP builds trust with the users.

You’ll typically see a feedback section on e-commerce websites.

Installing a widget like this on a service-based business website is also possible, but you’ll likely have a lot fewer reviews.

3. Add feedback forms and surveys on your website

What any business can do is to introduce a feedback survey form on its website. You can place that form at the bottom of every page, create a separate page, or create a pop-up like this one.

Keep the survey short—if it looks time-consuming, users are more likely to abandon it. These kinds of feedback forms are a good way to gauge the effectiveness of your UX by asking questions about users’ browsing experiences.

Surveys like these can be a source of knowledge about your business that you won’t find elsewhere, so it’s worth investing in them and experimenting to get a high response rate.

4. Conduct regular social listening

Not all feedback shows up in reviews or support tickets. Customers often talk about products on social media, forums, or communities, without tagging the brand directly. These off-platform conversations can offer honest insight into what’s working (and what’s not), even if you’re not invited into the thread.

You can find user feedback in:

• Reddit threads
• Twitter/X conversations
• Instagram stories
• YouTube and TikTok videos
• YouTube and TikTok comment sections

Use social listening software to find mentions of your brand online and analyze what people are saying about it. In many cases, you’ll only find a positive or a negative sentiment expressed about your brand, but sometimes you’ll find valuable information. 

How to implement changes based on customer feedback

Doing a rigorous customer feedback analysis will leave you with a lot of ideas of what could be changed in your business. Not all ideas are worth implementing, though. That’s why you should start with prioritization.

Prioritize feedback by impact

Look at the list of problems customers describe and potential solutions they suggest. Here’s how to organize customer feedback:

• The problem really exists
• You have the resources to solve the problem
• Solving it will result in an impact on your bottom line
• Customer suggestions are relevant to your business

Start with solving the problems that are projected to require minimal investment while providing the most benefits to your business.

Track before-and-after metrics

To make sure the changes create a desirable outcome, select and track a key performance indicator relevant to the change.

For instance, you learn from customer feedback that the pricing structure for your services prevents small businesses from joining. You want to change the pricing to invite those people to join.

In this case, you might track the number of active users and monthly recurring revenue, or MRR increase. Track the metrics before the changes. If, after you’ve introduced and marketed the change, MRR increases faster than before, you’ll know you’ve made the right decision.

Softr: A no-code platform to capture, sort, and share feedback

Running an SEO audit? Trying to identify confusing copy, content gaps, or friction points? A branded, customizable feedback portal that adapts to your team’s workflow can make the process 10 times smoother.

How it works: 

• Customized access with granular permissions: Create user groups and tailor visibility for team members, admins, managers, or customers. Each user has access only to the right information. ‍
• Capture feedback in one place: Instead of losing feedback in emails, Slack threads, or spreadsheets, you can collect it through a centralized form that feeds into a structured database.

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• Filter and categorize easily: Use tags and views to group feedback by topic, urgency, or user type — perfect for identifying patterns or recurring requests.

• Track what’s changing: Create custom statuses or categories to mark what’s in review, prioritized, in progress, or shipped — and use that same system to close the loop with customers or internal stakeholders.

• Works with your data: The template includes a sample database to get started, but you can connect it to any of Softr’s 14+ supported data sources like Airtable, Google Sheets, ClickUp, Notion, monday.com, or HubSpot. Each form submission syncs in real time with your connected data source – any changes in your data source are reflected in your Softr app and vice versa. No manual data copying is required. Or store data natively in Softr Databases without sync delays and API limits.

You can also automate routine tasks using Zapier, Make, or native integrations — like pushing submissions into Slack or syncing feedback with your product management tools.

Want a simpler way to turn feedback into action? Build a central space your whole team can use to log, track, and learn from customer insights—with Softr.

And the best part? You can launch in minutes, without writing a single line of code. 

Try Softr’s free Customer Feedback template today!

Use customer feedback to guide smarter business decisions

Feedback from clients is more than a trust signal to leads. It is a source of unfiltered opinions that people have about your business across multiple areas.

Taking a structured approach towards feedback collection and analysis allows you to discover areas of SEO growth you’ve missed and create a plan to improve your business.

Remember that you have to filter the issues that come up in reviews and focus on the ones that can provide the most benefits for the least amount of effort. Track KPIs before and after implementing the change to confirm it leads to the intended results.