A Marketer’s Take: The Relationship Between CX and SEO
Over the last few years, the term “customer experience” has become an ubiquitous term in the digital marketing world. The term has a broad umbrella, and it’s been dissected ad nauseum through:
Blog posts that have been written in detail
Various guides that explain the whys, whats, and hows
Webinars that have been presented on the topic
Podcasts that have analyzed its true meaning
And so on
Now, brace yourselves, because I’m going to do my own dissection of the term. However, I want to look at how marketers and stewards of particular brands build and provide those experiences to website visitors.
In my opinion, the strategies and tactics that are all the rage regarding customer experiences (CX) are, in actuality, straightforward SEO best practices. What do I mean? Let me explain.
Customer experiences build brand identities
A customer experience, or CX, is the holistic perception of one’s involvement with a particular brand. The on-site experience plays a huge part in establishing that brand perception.
Ease of use and fast quality service are two descriptions that we all expect from any company that we choose to give our business. We want straightforward and easy to understand answers to make our decision making processes as comfortable as we can.
An easy to navigate website plays a critical role in establishing those perceived feelings. A study from Clutch shows that 94% of consumers say easy navigation on a website is the most important component of an online brand. People don’t want to spend inordinate amounts of time on sites trying to find straightforward answers to their questions. When they hit a webpage, they want to get their answer and then move on.
That’s the key to providing a quality on-site CX. Be upfront, and give people what they need so they can proceed to their next course of action. In fact, the same study from Clutch says that 50% of people will permanently leave a website if the on-site content is irrelevant or unhelpful.
On-site SEO tactics increase site authority
Here’s where CX best practices overlap with on-site SEO. The key to a quality CX is to provide valuable and relevant information so that people can do one of two things:
Decide that your site has value to offer, justifying a deeper relationship with your brand
Recognize that you do not have the answers so they can move onto someone that does
Now, to help ensure that option #1 is selected by the majority of your site visitors, on-site SEO tactics are designed to guide more people towards that course of action.
Create a link building strategy in parallel to the customer journey
A common SEO best practice is link building. Many marketers assume that link building only means building external links from third-party sources. The fact is that interlinking between your core web pages, including products, services, testimonials, and even supporting content help improve the customer experience.
When you initially build a website, you envision the journey that you want consumers to follow while engaging with your brand. As your site expands with more content and more products/services introduced by your company, the on-site experience balloons with all those new offerings. It can be confusing to the user to have so many pages available, but it actually presents a great link building opportunity.
Build internal links that guide people deeper into your site
There’s a great guide on “How to use internal links to boost SEO and the user experience” where they describe the true value of an internal linking strategy. In addition to all of the content in that guide, I would add that your internal links serve as your CX roadmap.
What I mean by that description is that it’s our jobs as brand or content marketers to identify when a particular on-page explanation has more depth. We need to recognize when we can add more teeth to a page or a particular piece of content that will help improve one’s CX with the site. If we have a source we can link to, that’s great. But it’s even better when we have an internal page to serve as the anchor link.
Keep an up-to-date content library to find quality internal links
A content library is a great way to keep track of all of your existing articles, landing pages, success stories, and any links associated with your brand. You can create your own library using Excel or Google Sheets. I’d recommend a platform like PathFactory, which I’ve used in the past to keep track of all company content. PathFactory refers to a content library as “content tracks,” which can actually impact your SEO in a very positive way.
When you have all of your content organized into hierarchical value tracks, you can easily pick and pluck links to relevant content and drop them onto your most valuable site pages. A little trick for those links is to always set them to open in a new tab. This way, if people close the window on that piece of content, they still have the tab open from where they first entered your site. You still have them, and they’re more likely to stay on-site for longer periods of time.
And that’s the key to a great CX. Theoretically, if people spend more time on your site, they’re enjoying the experience. According to Spinutech, the ideal time per website session is between 2 to 3 minutes. If you build a site experience that encourages people to spend a couple minutes on-site, they’re more likely to appreciate the content and remember the brand.
That experience will help create repeat visits, improve the potential for purchases, and cement consumer loyalty for the long-term. Those three takeaways are how you quantify the value of a great CX for your website visitors.
CX builds authority with people; SEO builds authority with search engines
When you boil it all down, a website is meant to build authority. It serves as the public face of a brand, the well of information on a subject and, in many cases, the location of digital transactions; all of which combine to boost brand authority.
A website designed with the proper CX increases authority among people who visit the domain. A website designed with quality SEO best practices increases authority among search engines like Google, which determine the search visibility of that website. If you build the on-site experience with both CX and SEO strategies on your development roadmap, you increase your chances of earning authority.
What’s good for Google is good for people
Search visibility is how we, as marketers, boost organic traffic to our websites. When we can rely on sustainable organic traffic to increase web visits, we can spend less on paid advertising campaigns. In any good business plan, that’s your ROI; higher organic traffic means less money required for paid traffic.
As a final thought on the CX-SEO relationship, keep this in mind. Easy to follow on-site experiences keep people engaged with your site. Clear and insightful on-site content provides detailed answers to consumers that should invite more time spent with the brand. Customer engagement will minimize bounce rates, increase pages per session, and improve the average time on site. All of these variables send signals to Google that your site deserves more search visibility and more organic traffic.
What’s good for your visitors is a telling sign to Google; and when you send quality signals to Google, you earn the right to attract even more visitors.
Interested in improving your on-site experience? Contact me for a strategic consult or creative content marketing and SEO services to boost your brand authority.
