The customer journey has inexorably changed due to search engines and digital marketing.
Customers get in touch with search engines at multiple points on their way down your sales funnel.
This makes SEO vital to form your brand more visible, so you’ll be found where customers are trying to find the products or services you offer.
Unless your SEO strategy integrates with your customer journey strategy, your prospective customers won’t be ready to find you,
but SEO strategies are usually keyword-focused and not focused on the customer. This is often an error.
In this blog post, we glance at how best you’ll integrate the 2 to form both strategies simpler.
What is the Customer Journey?
The customer journey is the sum of experiences prospects undergo as they seek a product or service.
It’s every interaction a prospective customer has together with your brand, no matter whether or not they become a patron or not.
The digital landscape has made the customer journey nonlinear and sophisticated.
It typically has the subsequent steps:
Awareness –> Consideration –> Conversion –> Post-conversion
At the notice stage, you introduce your brand to someone seeking an answer for his or her needs.
Customers then move to consideration or research, where they inspect competitors, read reviews and consult family and friends.
Then comes conversion i.e. the purpose where they trust you adequately to form a sale.
The post-conversion stage depends on your customer service management.
The entire customer journey has multiple points of interaction where you’ll deliver the knowledge prospective customers need.
What’s important is how you exert your influence to push the prospect from one stage to a different one.
Understanding the customer journey can assist you to develop effective marketing campaigns.
Once you know the route your customers take, you’ll understand their motivations, anticipate their needs and help them achieve their goals.
How Does SEO Integrate with Customer Journey Strategy?
Search engines are the primary place your target consumers will go once they have a requirement.
During a survey, 48% of quite 14,000 internet buyers said they begin their purchase journey on search engines.
Search engines help customers find you, but unfortunately, they assist them to find your competitors too.
The one who comes out on top within the search rankings are going to be the one with the higher SEO strategy.
Strong SEO is often your most powerful asset, turning intrigued prospects into paying customers.
The proper strategy is going to be designed while keeping the road the customer takes to push that coveted “buy” button in mind.
Your SEO should assist the prospect as they move down the sales funnel, from the first discovery to post-purchase.
Imagine you’re a business communication systems provider, and your hottest products are VoIP (voice over internet protocol) and a multi-line telephone system for little business.
Your target customers are companies with call centers.
You have to strategically devise your keyword strategy and make backlinks to your content.
With effective SEO in situ, you’ll also target prospects who are further down the marketing funnel.
With the communication systems provider example, you could possibly create videos or infographics
that provide customers with more information about your product and the way it’ll resolve their problems.
you would like to match SEO keywords with customer intent.
Your SEO-driven landing page should have keywords associated with VoIP for call centers.
The content should tell them your business value proposition and the way VoIP might be game-changing for them.
Search engines have gotten smarter and need to answer people’s questions with high-quality content.
Gone are the times of keyword stuffing and backlink strategies.
Search engines are machines to answer questions and they give priority to websites that have relevant results for user queries.
The following points in your customer journey might involve a web search.
There might be more, but these are the foremost common touchpoints:
Let’s discuss intimately how you’ll incorporate SEO into all four stages of the customer journey:
Awareness
At the notice stage, you’re marketing your brand. As a part of your SaaS marketing plan (if we persist with the business communication systems provider example above),
SEO can have an enormous impact on prospective customers.
Prospects may need to hear of you from a lover or social media.
You ought to also attempt to appear within the search results once they Google VoIP or multi-line phone systems.
Repurpose your content as per your keyword research so you show up at the highest of targeted search results.
Get your website optimized for search engines and know what your prospects are checking out through effective keyword (and long-tail keyword) research.
Be according to your SEO efforts to expand and improve search rankings.
Consideration
At this stage, customers are checking out specific ways to repair problems.
Here your FAQs page is a crucial tool. Your content must answer questions your customers may need to create trust.
Along with an FAQs page, you’ll incorporate other persuasive content within the sort of blogs and articles showing how your product is better than competitors.
All this must be a part of your wider SEO strategy.
For an opportunity that’s further down the funnel and comparing your offerings with those of a competitor, use relevant keywords that objectively explain why you’re better.
It’s knowing cash in of the SEO on digital platforms like directories or listing sites.
If your customers leave reviews on Google My Business and Yelp,
these will rank highly in search results and provides prospects the social proof they have to trust you.
Google reviews impact SEO rankings and has a huge effect on converting potential customers.
you’ll push the prospect toward conversion by using videos for testimonials, case studies, and merchandise demos, and also by ensuring your website’s UI and UX help the customer to navigate it.
eCommerce personalization also can assist your SEO strategy, ensuring you deliver a customized experience and have interaction customers by showing content
supported previous actions, browsing behavior, purchase history, and demography.
Conversion
Your prospects have recognized their problem and now they have help fixing it.
They’re on the brink of creating a choice, and you would like to steer them thereto.
At now, you’ve got to catch searches specific to get intent.
for instance, demonstrating your product is deliverable to a particular area or your service is out there during a particular city.
Keyword searches associated with the worth – e.g. “lowest price [insert your product/service]” also are common and will be a part of your content strategy if applicable to your product/service.
Providing the proper content at the right time on your sites can help with educating the customer and have a serious influence on buying decisions.
Make use of videos and infographics to further the customer education process and nurture your results in a purchase.
Post-conversion
Your customer has made a sale, and now you would like to make sure you keep their custom.
Your content must continue offering value and help them get the foremost out of your products and services as they appear for follow-up support.
Existing customers might look for your time and again, so have content for returning customers that’s relevant to the present phase.
SEO can help keep your customers loyal in the future.
You need to request reviews that will loop back and strengthen your SEO during the consideration phase.
These also are important for improvement and customer service.
Always answer reviews, especially negative ones. Testimonials on your social media and review websites are another sort of content that will drive traffic.
How does one Know Your Customer Journey SEO Strategy is working?
SEO is an integral part of any digital marketing strategy, and there are some ways to watch the performance of your SEO experiments.
Mapping the customer journey and developing content and keywords around it’ll bring steady results for your business.
You ought to be monitoring and tracking your performance using the analytical tools provided by search engines.
The customer journey framework plays an enormous role in understanding your target market. Mapping this provides an image of how people are searching at each stage.
This helps you create content that’s targeted to the individual needs of the customer counting on where they’re in their journey.
Such personalized, targeted content can assist you to rank more highly on program results pages.
Conclusion
Your entire team must be focused and committed to making strong SEO throughout the customer journey.
This won’t only help your site to rank better but allow you to craft content that addresses the questions and pain points of your audience at different, meaningful touchpoints throughout your sales funnel.
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Then get in touch!
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