Driving organic traffic to your website is half the battle. The other half — and probably the trickier to accomplish — is getting these prospects to stay and become your loyal customers. To leverage customer experience as the ultimate marketing tool, you need to understand why SEO matters not only for ranking high in Google search but also for improving the customer experience you provide.

In essence, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a neat marketing strategy that, if executed correctly, can bring more attention to your site. This is great — the more visitors you get, the higher are the chances of your efforts proving worthwhile.

But what if your site visitors click on your web page and aren’t able to find what they were looking for? Or, worse, find it hard to interact with the site’s interface and bounce off when it’s taking too much time to load?

Here’s where adapting your SEO tactics to the customer you serve can shift the gears. You have to find the sweet spot between tending to Google’s search algorithm and preventing your customers from switching to your competitor because of the less-than-favorable experience they’d gotten from your company.

Read on to find out how you can tweak your SEO strategy to attract more customers starting today.

1) Make sure the content you post is relevant to your audience

Sounds like a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised by how much irrelevant and poor content an a company’s website influences their rankings. Not to mention the potential leads who end up not converting because they didn’t find the information they were looking for in the first place.

To avoid this, make posting relevant content consistently a priority. Figure out what your customers would want to read about and pack as much value in blog posts as possible. Answering their queries in the form of long-form posts and guides that link to other important sources is how you appeal to your prospects and demonstrate your trustworthiness to Google.

2) Establish solid linking authority for searchability purposes

The backbone of great on-page SEO is the abundance of internal links. A well-structured website has plenty of links that refer the user from one page to another so that she doesn’t have to go somewhere else in search of answers. It’s also one of the reason why Google decides to prioritize these pages, along with the fact that they are more likely to get crawled.

A less obvious strategy to keep your churn rate low is to link to internal sources at the bottom of the articles under the premise of ‘you might find this helpful’. Along with external links that open up in a new tab, this is a sure way to keep your customers engaged while also building your authority with reliable backlinks.

3) Follow the simple NAP rule to rank well locally

Including your contact details on all the platforms you’re active on has more benefits than what meets the eye. One of them is acquiring more clients that find your business by searching ‘X near me’ in Google or typing ‘X service in Z city’ in Instagram’s or Facebook’s search bar.

Aside from letting your customers find you organically, featuring your company’s name, address and phone number (NAP) on relevant pages of your website also eliminates the need for them to turn to Google in hopes to find your contact information and come across your competitors.

4) Use Google’s Featured Snippets to your advantage

Speaking about catering to Google’s needs, it’s only right to adopt as many features as it offers to deliver the best customer experience. Featured Snippets is one of those instruments that can easily distinguish you from the crowd without having to try too hard.

Think of it as a short paragraph that pops up at the top of the Google search whenever someone is trying to find the most appropriate answer to their question. With nearly 30% of 1.4 million queries on Google showing Featured Snippets, you might want to do your own research for the most common questions relevant to your business and come up with a way to incorporate them into your website copy.

5) Take it to social media platforms to boost your online presence

Omnichannel communication is taking over and, to stay relevant, you need to jump on this bandwagon. This means not only engaging with your customers on social media but also applying SEO tactics for a better customer experience.

In addition to using hashtags that are suitable for your business (still viewed as the easiest way to gain exposure), you should seriously consider optimizing your Instagram bio and adding appropriate contact details to your Facebook and Twitter profiles. Mention that you also have a website your followers can visit to learn more about the services you provide.

6) Improve the loading speed of your website

There isn’t a single person on Earth who doesn’t find a slowly loading website annoying and your customers aren’t exceptions. It gets worse — as many as 37% of website visitors will bounce off when they notice that it’s taking over 5 seconds to load.

This might not seem like a big deal at first, but the longer your website takes to load, the higher is the likelihood of your leads losing patience and not even giving your company a chance to redeem itself. To not get on anyone’s nerves and rank well on Google, make sure your media files are compressed, your web hosting is of high quality, and your server isn’t burdened with too many plugins.

7) Optimize your website for mobile users

The 6.4 billion smartphone users worldwide are proof that people are spending more time on their mobile phones than ever before. A report from Search Engine Land provides an even deeper insight — 60% of searches come directly from mobile devices. If you aren’t taking this into consideration when optimizing your website, we’ve got bad news for you.

The benefits of a mobile-friendly website include quicker page loading time, minimal scrolling, and fewer flash elements. Combined with the relatively short global attention span customers have these days, it’s only natural for you to adapt to this new reality. Besides, Google takes mobile traffic into account when giving you the rank in Google Search, so consider this SEO tactic to be absolutely essential.

In a nutshell

No matter the industry, there isn’t a shortage of competitors trying to make a name for themselves. And while some appeal with their innovative solutions to the old problems, those that ultimately win are the ones that sell experiences rather than products or services. To accomplish this, they put forward their best digital marketing practices that make it easy for customers to choose them over others.

Learn the rules of the SEO game and you’ll join them sooner than anticipated. When you put customers first, success follows naturally.

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Mikkel Andreassen

Customer Experience Manager at Dixa

Mikkel is passionate about customer experience in every color of the beautiful customer engagement spectrum. He loves building great connections with his customers, which often lead to meaningful friendships that last a lifetime and inspire his work. Driven by the genuine belief that CX is the pivotal force that drives a successful business, he is currently at the helm of Dixa’s customer experience strategy.

 

Social media:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikkel-andreassen-4603b74a/

Twitter handle: @MikkelVes