How to Use Customer Support to Supercharge Your SEO
Did you ever have the feeling that your customer support efforts are sometimes too much trouble? I’m sure you did, and I’m here to not only highlight the importance of top-notch client support, but to also let you in on a few cool techniques to make more of what you’re currently doing!
Top-notch client support is an exceptionally good calling card and it’s something that you must put at the core of your marketing agenda. I know it may be news for you, but it can also have great applicability when it comes to SEO. Here are few cool actionable tips to supercharge your SEO efforts using your current customer support platform with little to no additional work.
User Reviews
57% of poor ratings come due to bad employee behaviour or negative customer support experiences which affect your SEO. On the other hand, great customer reviews can massively improve your SEO. MOZ explains this in great detail, but the principle behind this is that Google now automatically makes the (correct) assumption that it can trust your business if the majority of your clients trust it and rate it highly. This method is known to be particularly effective when it comes to local search rankings.
For example, if you’re trying to improve your overall rankings for the keyword ‘best burgers in Croatia’, getting your business location added in Google and asking your clients for some top-notch reviews might be an excellent place to start.
This will have a double impact since it will not only help you rank for the broad keyword we’re already targeting, but it will also help Google understand that your clients identify your business with other keywords, and start ranking your site for those too.
Let’s say that a client would use the title ‘Best veggie burger in Dubrovnik’ to rate your business. This would immediately do a couple of things. For starters, it would confirm the fact that your location is correct, and it would also immediately associate your business with that long tail keyword that you would probably be able to rank for with little effort.
Another way how positive reviews can help your SEO efforts is by driving more traffic to your website. Research shows that 88% of dedicated customers look for reviews before making a purchase, and 70% develop their trust in a brand if they read good reviews online.
Website Traffic
Traffic builds traffic! The more traffic you get, better the engagement with your website and better you’ll rank on Google. This is probably something you’ve heard before, but what does it really mean? Google monitors some key performance indicators of how your site visitors interact with it and changes your rankings based on the type of content you provide.
For instance, website page load time is a fairly important metric that’s pretty much universal to all sites. Metrics like time on site, bounce rate or the average number of page visits can be very important as well. But it really depends on how effectively your website addresses questions/issues in terms of customer support.
For example, if a user visits your knowledge base for an issue and exits the site after a minute of reading, Google will love this. But if multiple users repeatedly search for the keyword you’re trying to rank for, check out your page and exit immediately, this will tell Google that you’re not really offering the sort of content your visitors are looking for thereby affecting your website traffic and SEO.
Keyword Insights
Many a time, brands tend to design their website content without really knowing their customer expectations. This is where your customer support can work wonders. Support requests give powerful insights on what your customers think about your business and how they search for it online. Analyzing your support tickets gives you enough information on what words/ keywords your customers use to describe your product.
This can be done either by surveying your clients or by asking them how they got to know about your business. If most of their questions are focussed around the same few features, it lets you know where your product needs improvement. These serve as valuable data for keywords and supercharge your customer acquisition efforts. Look at the titles and analyze what your customers think about your strengths and weaknesses. By improving them, use your current clients to approach new ones.
High Quality Content
Building your website with high quality content is a vital part of any SEO strategy. Though there are quite a few different methods, a thorough knowledge base can be a valuable asset if used accordingly. While many articles tell you to non-index your knowledge base articles, it can only have a bad influence on your SEO.
Make sure to build as many knowledge base articles as possible and try to cover all the vital aspects of your product. The content of these articles should be highly resourceful and address your visitor’s problems. Also, you can get the help of support requests whose insights can be turned into informative blog posts. They help build trust among new clients who are still not sure about your product and boost your website traffic.
Backlink Generation
When you create highly resourceful knowledge base articles, they might prove useful for others who offer complementary products. In fact, if your resource is good enough for them, you will earn backlinks to your website.
On the other hand, customer support helps establish a great relationship with your clients. This, in turn, bags some more mentions/backlinks from those who own blogs. When they speak about their great interaction with your business, your SEO grows to a great extent.
Brand Awareness
Happy customers go above and beyond to spread the word about your business if they feel appreciated. This absolutely applies to your site content which will get more shares or mentions if it’s qualitative enough. Try turning successful support stories into well-built articles and promote them across your marketing channels.
Another sure-fire way of creating brand awareness is by building a relevant email list and sending out regular emails. If you’re looking for an easy way to build out an awesome email template, you can try the drag & drop email builder of BigBangThemes.
Conclusion
SEO is a great way to build your brand’s reputation while providing stellar customer support. If you are unable to set up weekly or monthly appointments with your support team, try stressing the importance of figuring out a way to get information from them to the marketing team. You just might find some really great stuff which can kick off your SEO strategy.
Get started by exploring customer queries both pre-purchase as well as post-purchase. The more relevant and well organized your website is, the better your customers’ chances are of finding your brand on Google and engaging with it.
