Every page on your website is an opportunity to attract a first-time user who is eager to know more about your business. However, returning customers should not be overlooked when creating an SEO strategy as they are the main visitors to your website.
Customer retention is what really brings in the money – the probability of selling to an existing customer is 60-70% while the likelihood of selling to a prospective customer is only 5-20%. Moreover, returning customers are likely to spend 31% more.
The best tactic to acquire loyal customers is offering personalized customer service, which in return creates an excellent customer experience.
In this post, you will find some customer service tips that improve your SEO in the background and at the same time offer users a great experience turning them into loyal customers.
Providing excellent customer service
89% of customers are likely to make another purchase after having a great customer service experience. This is why it’s important to understand how to excel in customer service before we can move on to our customer service SEO strategies.
These are some of the key customer service skills to nurture for creating excellent experiences:
- Empathy. The ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and understand where they are coming from is one of the most crucial elements of customer service.
- Patience. It’s easy to get irritated if you are dealing with an angry customer or have to give an explanation to someone a thousand times. Staying patient and not lashing out on customers but instead assuring them you are trying to help them will definitely help to solve the case at hand.
- Time management. The ability to solve customers’ inquiries in a fast and effective way relies a lot on your time management skills. Knowing which tasks to prioritize helps to accomplish set tasks in less time.
- Positivity. In order to be able to show your positive vibe even via online correspondence, the most important thing is to truly remain positive. If your customer service agents do not enjoy their work, it will show.
SEO and customer experience
Providing customer service is not always about customers reaching out to your customer service agent. Being clever about how you use SEO will not only help you to promote your online store but also offer a “behind-the-scenes” customer service.
Here are some SEO best practices for customer experience that will make a lasting impression to your returning customers.
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Optimize Knowledge Base & Frequently Asked Questions
Your knowledge base that contains informative answers to frequently asked questions can do miracles in helping your agents deal with the huge number of incoming inquiries.
Moreover, self-service tools are often the preferred method of getting support. Over 60% of users want to solve the problem on their own before seeking help from a customer support agent.
Find out the most burning questions
- Talk to your customer service department. What are the most common reasons customers reach out to you?
- Understand how inquiries are worded. Often the questions start with “How to”, “Where can”, “What is” and so on. You will be able to find out these popular questions from your community forums and ticket history.
- Look into what customers are searching on your site. Google Analytics Site Search provides information on whether people are using the search function on your site, what they entered and if the result took them further in your site.
Include your findings into your knowledge base
Understanding what are the most common issues and what people would like to know, will help you categorise your knowledge base accordingly. Remember to provide elaborate answers that are of high quality.
This in return will help you to have a higher rating in Google Search. Therefore, remember to use relevant keywords and backlinks in your FAQ answers.
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Focus on the onboarding experience
Your marketing strategy should focus on every step of the customer journey and definitely not stop once someone has made a purchase. Once a visitor converts to a customer, start showing them some extra care.
Send them a guide on getting started, add relevant internal links and other similar what-to-do-next pages so they could easily browse your site and learn more about the products or services you offer. And at the same time, prospective customers have once again more options of finding out about your brand.
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Actively listen what people are saying about you
If you are solely relying on your incoming messages and your own website, some information will go missing as your customers are active everywhere on the internet.
What does this mean to you? Simply put, it means that you need to monitor and actively engage with what is written about you as 81% of users claim to do research on your brand before deciding if they wish to do business with you or not.
Some platforms where customers share insight are Quora, Twitter, Reddit and some review sites such as Google Review and Capterra.
But instead of just trying to browse through all the content on these pages, turn on your Google alerts for your main keywords, variations of your brand name as well as your competitors’ names.
This way you will be able to keep up to date with what’s happening online and be able to give a fast response where needed. Once again, you can use relevant keywords and links in your answers to rank up your visibility.
To sum up
SEO is a powerful tool. Make sure you get the most out of it by not only focusing on acquiring new customers, but also building long lasting relationships with returning customers.
Provide some extra care when providing support to stand out among your competitors, actively listen to your customers and learn from them to provide even better experiences to others.
