How Enhanced Customer Experience Can Boost SEO?
The scope of SEO has changed with the evolution of organic online marketing ecosystem. Social media, content marketing, and SEO are working in sync in increasing the web traffic and acquiring customers. The article enumerates how positive customer experience coupled with positive customer reviews and views can boost SEO and search engine ranking.
SEO or Search Engine Optimization belongs to the broader spectrum of Digital Marketing. When it comes to marketing in a two-way communication channel, reputation and customer experience obviously is of primary importance. There is an oft-quoted adage in marketing literature that cost of acquisition of new customers far outweighs the cost of retaining old customers.
On the internet, the dissatisfied customers can jeopardize the ranking of a website and affect the reputation of a firm. This can prove to be even more costly. No doubt, it also affects the search engine ranking as well. Simultaneously, this is also true with the passage of time social media has emerged to be more of a customer experience channel than a marketing platform. Social networks can work wonders in case there is a reputation and goodwill of a product or service but it can lead to undesirable results if something goes wrong.
The connected customer
Marketers are trying to reach to the customers with the help of all the possible channels. Most of the customers are always online and brands are taking major steps to provide them an enhanced experience. Even the customers share their opinion with others when become a part of this system. All the comments, reviews, and recounts of experiences of the customers matter to a great extend in SEO. The simple reason is the online ecosystem is growing and gradually content marketing, SEO and social media are working in sync to increase the web traffic and acquire customers. In tandem, the Google algorithm is keep updating, in which the social signals are also a factor for search rankings. Thus, in this constantly evolving complex organic online marketing ecosystem, the comments and reviews of customers, does matter.
This, of course, has a direct relationship with customer experience. Thus in simple terms, positive customer experience boosts the SEO efforts and vice versa. It is needless to mention that negative customer experience results in negative comments and bad press while positive customer experience helps in growth and expansion of business. This is very true in the online marketing ecosystem. Below are outlined the effects of positive and negative customer experience and correspondingly positive and negative customer reviews and comments.
Effects of unpleasant customer experience
It takes a great amount of efforts to build a brand. Companies are using technology like never before to make the customers happy and trying to earn their loyalty. In this effort not every attempt goes successful and a bad customer experience might go negative for the brand. Unpleasant customer experience results in complaints and bad press. This adversely affects the SEO efforts and the rankings in the search engines. Most companies employ a reactive approach to bad press with online reputation management (ORM) as a redressal strategy.
They normally start ORM when negative comments start to appear towards the top of Google’s organic listing. This reactive approach does not seem to work in many cases. The reason is the bad press or negative comments are often on the high ranking pages or complaint sites. This creates inbound links which further strengthens the position of the page in the search engine. This makes these pages and comments even more difficult to suppress and the obvious result is ill reputation which costs the business a lot.
Results of positive customer experience
Needless to say, positive customer experience has immense benefits when it comes to SEO, page ranking, and conversion rates. Better customer experience results in referrals and it becomes a powerful instrument when a trustworthy person recommends your product or service. A business establishment with higher levels of customer experience can easily harness this powerful tool of referrals. Referring networks is another way of referring customers to you through business partners. Undoubtedly, today’s customers are more aware and educated and positive customer experience and reviews enable more referrals and eventual conversions. It is, of course, a fact that existing customers can be the best ambassadors of your business.
Positive reviews and recounts of highly satisfied customers create user-generated contents that are fresh. Not only are these influential for attracting new customers but they attract long-tail keyword traffic as well. Thus a consistent flow of the positive reviews, remarks, and comments help to attract even more traffic through the use of right targeted keywords used by the customers. In social media as well, a series of impressive and positive reviews not only increases the social reach but boosts sales as well. Search engines like Google also favor the sites with higher ratings. For the purpose of determining star ratings, Google relies on third party review websites. You should be having at least more than 30 unique reviews during the preceding year with an average rating of 3.5 or more. Star ratings can boost conversion rates to 17%, which of course is a point to consider. Thus enhanced customer experience helps a lot in the web ecosphere and has a direct relationship with SEO efforts of a firm.
A highly satisfied customer not only spreads the news by word of mouth but recounts of such positive customer experience works in a similar way in the web ecosphere. This would essentially enable more visits of new customers to your website and help in generating higher conversion rates. It has been often proved to be a great idea to have a reward system in place to thank customers for their favor. Nonetheless, whatever strategy you apply, customer experience remains the single most important parameter for any business and so it is for SEO as well.