The Hidden Ways Wikipedia Influences Your Customers

When prospective customers search Google for information on a specific brand, it’s overwhelmingly likely that they will come across the company's Wikipedia article.

Wikipedia ranks consistently as a top-five website in monthly page views, with tens of millions of visits each month. When conducting a Google search, there’s a 99% chance that a Wikipedia link will be on the first page, with those links often ranking in the top three of results.

With Wikipedia appearing so prominently in Google search results, brands have a clear incentive to harness that reach by optimizing their profile there. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, though, not a promotional website, and editors maintain strict guidelines as to what kind of content can stay on the site.

Let’s look into the secret ways Wikipedia influences customer behavior, and what you can do about it.

Wikipedia’s Impact on Customer Experience

Whether you like it or not, if your company has a Wikipedia article, it is a popular (and ostensibly impartial) source of information for customers, investors, and journalists. With its prominent ranking in Google searches, Wikipedia is one of the most visible parts of a company's digital presence, and yet, few companies are spending time and energy monitoring their own page on the site.

With Wikipedia articles on brands often ranking in the top three organic links on Google, it’s likely the company's Wikipedia article gets the customer's attention before the company’s website even does. 

With that in mind, it becomes clear why it’s so important for companies to want to make sure the correct information is displayed in their article, and for those who don’t have one to want and to try to acquire one.

What You Can Do To Monitor Your Company’s Wikipedia

Wikipedia articles are constantly changing, making it imperative for you to monitor the alterations and see what’s been updated.

Rather than reading the whole page regularly, you can quickly see recent changes in the page's edit history. You can do this by going to the View History link on the top right of any Wikipedia article. From there, you’ll be taken to an archive, where every single change for the page is recorded along with what was changed and who made the change.