The Secrets SEO Can Tell You About Your Customer Experience

Building lasting customer relationships starts with understanding who your customers are and what they are looking for. Discover five secrets that SEO is telling you if you only knew how to listen.

For companies with developed customer experience (CX) capabilities, insights from data are readily available to make critical business decisions.

But what if your company doesn’t have access to a data lake, predictive analytics engine, or team of data scientists? Perhaps you’re considering website updates to enhance your customer’s digital experience or simply want to understand your customers’ needs better.

For real-time insights on what is most important for your customer experience — and what will help you rank well in Google search results — these five SEO secrets will help you deliver a seamless digital CX experience.

Secret One: How to Improve Your UX 

Usability testing, website surveys, and customer support data offer a wealth of information on your site's performance from your customers’ perspective. But one of the easiest and fastest ways to measure user experience is by monitoring your site’s Core Web Vitals.

Launched in May 2020, Core Web Vitals is a significant update to Google’s ranking algorithm. This set of user-centric metrics tests whether or not a website is fast, responsive, and provides a smooth user experience.

In addition to monitoring with Google’s Core Web Vitals Tools, it’s also recommended to collect real-world data from sources such as Real User Monitoring (RUM) software. RUM provides detailed data from a visitor’s browser or mobile app session, including heatmaps, page load times, conversion rates, and much more. With a combination of Core Web Vitals and RUM software, you’ll have a holistic view of your website’s user experience performance.

Secret Two: How Links Drive Access to CX

The world wide web is tied together through links. There are two primary types of links — external and internal. External links connect one website domain to another, and internal links connect one web page to another in the same domain or subdomain. 

How easy it is to find your website by external links and how easy it is to navigate around your site through internal links are both critical components of good user experience and SEO.

We recommend periodically monitoring your website’s external and internal links through Google Search Console. If your brand’s site has a relatively low number of external links from trusted and authoritative sources, a link-building program will make it easier for customers to find your content.

Ensure that your website has both structured and contextual links. If every page on your site is a dead end with no internal hyperlinks or calls to action, invest in an internal linking strategy to improve your customer experience. A well-executed internal linking strategy will help your customers find relevant information about the products and services they are interested in and propel them deeper into the sales funnel.

Secret Three: Why It’s Important To Be Helpful

In addition to the Googlebot that crawls the web through links, Google employs more than 10,000 human search quality raters around the world to review web pages and evaluate them on a range of criteria. 

One of the primary ways raters score web pages is by reviewing if the content is original, helpful, and people-first. To this end, in August 2022, Google launched a helpful content update that spells out the importance of quality content “written by people, for people.”  

Having helpful and quality content is especially important for websites under Google’s “Your Money or Your Life” (YLYM) category. YLYM refers to any site that may affect the visitor’s health, safety, finances, or quality of life. This includes brands in the medical, financial, news, government, and commerce industry.

By presenting content designed to be helpful for your customer, not only will you provide a better customer experience, your efforts will go a long way in helping your page rank higher in search results.

For an in-depth look at ranking page quality, view Google’s Search Quality Evaluator Guide.

Secret Four: Learn To Read Your Customer’s Mind

Does your brand’s website anticipate your target audience’s needs and have quality content ready to help? 

One easy way to learn about your customers’ interests, motivations, and behaviors is to look at what they search for on Google. Go beyond generic, high-volume terms and drill down to specific questions and detailed search queries known as long-tail keywords.

An excellent website for this type of search research is Answer the Public. This resource allows you to look at a wide range of long-tail keywords based on Google’s autocomplete and related search data ranked by the popularity of those searches. 

Long-tail keyword research is an opportunity to get into the minds of your customers. You can discover what questions or concerns they have with your products, what competitors they are comparing your products against, what niches they are most interested in, and what types of content will likely motivate them to engage with your brand.

Secret Five: How to Get Customers Engaged

You’ve published your latest article. It’s expertly written, people-centric, loaded with relevant hyperlinks, and linked to trustworthy external sites. Job well done! Now’s the time to measure, test, optimize, and repeat. 

Pages focusing on customer experience rank better in search because of higher engagement indicators. Time spent on page, lower bounce rates, interactivity, and social sharing all send positive signals to search engines that the site is satisfying user needs. 

Run A/B tests to learn what content elements your audience finds interesting and what parts they skipped over or find difficult to understand. Test content types, calls to action, and design variations looking for opportunities to deliver a more engaging and streamlined customer experience.   

Adding a share-worthy video, infographic, interactive quiz, or podcast to your page may be all it takes to get your website on the first page of Google.

Making routine updates and enhancements to ensure your site’s content is easy to use, relevant, and recommendable is the secret SEO sauce to boosting your search rankings and providing a great experience for your customers.

Take Your CX to the Next Level

We hope you find these five SEO secrets helpful in unlocking your site’s digital CX potential. Once you’ve built a solid foundation and are ready to scale your CX strategy, take a deep dive into leveraging big data with our ebook, Creating a CX Measurement Model.

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