How Customer Journey Impacts SEO?

SEO might be a familiar term to the readers by now as it is overused in the present digital marketing scenario.

But customer journey is a concept which was less popular then and is gaining attention now.

Speaking about the customer journey, we can explain it as the touchpoints the customers have with our company. 

It is not the same as the sales funnel but can be considered as a linear process.

In this blog, you will understand what the customer journey and SEO is and how well they complement each other. 

Customer Journey

Customer journey is the customer’s interaction with the company at every possible stage which eventually leads to a favourable purchase decision. 

The interaction points can be considered as products, internet or advertisements for easy understanding and these interactions are multichannel.

The first step to be found by these potential customers at their interaction points is to be present in all the possible channels they might search to satisfy their needs.

Image Credits: Brightvessel

Commencing from the customers’ first interaction, i.e., awareness about the brand, the customer journey extends up to delivering the service or product and later being a loyal customer of the brand. 

An effective customer journey has three main factors: 

1. Great content
2. Perfect marketing tools
3. Well-planned management process

The customer, when interacting with your company, will come in contact with all kinds of content through different interaction points.

So the quality of content the company deploys at each interaction point is of massive importance. 

Quality content ensures effective customer interactions in the customer journey.

Consistency throughout the customer journey is necessary for effective conversion, and the marketing department has a considerable role here.

The marketing personnel should choose the right marketing tools to keep the interaction with the customers at every point positive and active.

Also, remember that the two-way flow of information is necessary for the customer and the company to upgrade their interactive experience.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO or search engine optimization helps increase the quantity and quality of the traffic coming to your website through organic methods.

There are many behind the screen works to be done to increase the traffic, and they can be both onsite as well as offsite. 

Image credits: Moz

These are some of the factors which affect the website ranking when Google crawlers do their job.

By working on different ranking factors, your website can get more potential visitors which will, in turn, boost the ROI.

SEO experts work hard to keep up with the algorithm changes that Google comes up with now and then, which will directly affect the SEO strategies they follow.

Now that a basic understanding of both customer journey and SEO is being made let’s see how the customer journey impacts SEO or the role of SEO in the customer journey.

SEO Analytics That Improve Customer Journey

SEO professionals must be aware of the strategies to be executed if they want to improve the customer journey experience. The smoother the customer journey, the better for your business. Taking care of individual microelements will enhance your Google search results. 

To achieve the same, one should need SEO resources. We will discuss some of them below: 

 

• Intent-Based Keyword Research Data

 

Identifying the user intent is very much crucial for displaying information which the users are interested in. There are various ways to grasp user behaviour while searching for a particular product or service. It could be achieved through developing your machine learning program or via the existing SEO platforms. The keyword tracking tool is the best example of this. It helps us to categorize the keyword according to the search volume.

 

• Click-Through Rate (CTR)

 

Click-Through Rate or CTR is the ratio of users of a page click on a particular item to the total number of visitors on the page.

Click-Through Rate is not a factor that determines your search engine results. Actually, it’s a topic that is debatable, according to various SEO experts. But still, CTR provides some better SEO results. The best thing one can do to improve your CTR is by enhancing your metadata in the pages.

 

• User-Centric Performance Metrics

 

The loading speed of your website is one major factor that enhances the customer’s experience. Google PageSpeed Insights tool is perfect for analyzing the things that affect your website loading speed. Making use of such various user-centric performance metrics helps to improve the customer journey as a whole.

 

• Audience Data and Segmentation

 

Interpreting the customer’s data and categorizing them into different sections is another feature that you should consider to improve the customer journey. Google Analytics helps you in achieving the same. It allows you to accumulate data based on Affinity Categories, In-market Segments, Cohorts, Gender, Age, Geolocation, New vs. Returning Users, and more.

Impact of Customer Journey on SEO

You might still be thinking about what the customer journey has to do with SEO.

Well, the thing is, if you have a well-defined customer journey of your prospect customer, optimizing your website and ranking it to reach them will be made easier.

Customer experience is what pushes them forward in their buyers’ journey.

Knowing the interaction points of the customers with your brand helps to put out the right content when your customer needs to see them.

Mapping the customer journey will thus assist in carrying out the SEO more effectively.

Creating a customer-centric approach and walking in your customers’ shoes are two of the things which you will be getting out of mapping your customers’ journey.

Identifying your customers’ pain points and putting your products on their way to solve those problems will be the right marketing and the insights of where to place your ads comes from carefully analyzing the customer journey.

Let’s get into business now.

Identifying the keywords which the potential customers use to search for your product categories is what the basic SEO does. 

Now when the customer journey we developed is overlaid on the SEO strategy, let’s see what changes.

SEO oriented marketing turns out to be mechanical and result-oriented while the integrated approach where the customer journey is considered turns out to be an empathetic model.

The pain points you’ve identified and the customer objectives you’ve listed becomes a bit more personalized for the predefined user personas, which in turn is your real-life customers. 

At each stage of your customer’s journey, present your products or services with the right content, i.e., give your customer what he or she wants to hear.

Value addition is something everyone looks for, and this is how exactly you can portray your product in the market.

Offer a long term solution rather than short term yet costly solutions. 

If you think the existing content is not doing its job, rewrite it. 

Whatever you do, make sure that you have great content at every point of interaction with your customer in the customer journey.

Post-sales experience is also vital to keep your customer loyal.

Loyal customers are advocates of your brands than anybody else.

Now that you understand the wonders SEO and customer journey can together pull out, it’s time to create your strategy.

Do it now, and you’ll never have to regret it in the future.