Your website is at the very core of your digital marketing efforts. It is where prospective customers go to learn more about your business, explore your product or service offering, and, hopefully, where they go to make conversions.
Ultimately, the goal is to craft a beautiful, functional website that makes a positive, lasting impression. But how exactly do you go about making sure that people find your website in the first place?
This is where search engine optimization (SEO) and a digital marketing agency like Local SEO Search comes in to help. Most business owners think of SEO as a technical process that has little to do with their customers themselves. However, as Google and customer demands have evolved over the years, so too have the best practice guidelines for SEO. Nowadays, SEO isn’t just about search engines. It is also about optimizing customer experience at every stage of the buyers’ journey. Here’s why…
How SEO and customer experience go hand in hand
About a decade ago, the science of SEO revolved heavily around keywords. Essentially, this meant that whichever website managed to stuff the most keywords onto its web pages would rank the highest. Google quickly came to realize, however, that this keyword stuffing approach led to the creation of content that was extremely unpleasant to read and that made it difficult for internet users to find the information they were looking for. Cue the birth of content marketing.
After rolling out numerous updates to change the way Google’s algorithms worked and how they indexed websites, it became obvious that the new focus was on providing internet users with quality content that educated and inspired. Keywords still had their part to play, but they were far less important than they had ever been.
As of 2020, Google has put a variety of new ranking factors into place that boil down to one thing: If you provide potential customers with a positive, enriching experience, your website will inevitably experience a boost in rankings over time. Along with ticking all the technical boxes, such as optimizing images and adding metadata, the main goal for SEO should be to maximize UX (user experience) by:
- Reducing page loading times
- Regularly uploading quality content that strives to answer your customers’ frequently asked questions
- Incorporating different types of content on your website (videos, blogs, infographics, etc.)
- Making it simple for visitors to navigate from page to page
- Making it easy for visitors to get in touch with you
Although slightly less technical than before, SEO is still a full-time job – hence the reason many business owners opt to hire SEO specialists, such as www.clickintelligence.co.uk to take care of it on their behalf. The secret to making a success of it is to keep up with the ever-changing SEO requirements based on changing internet user trends, demands, and behaviors. Make the decision to give your customers what they want, and you will be one step closer to ranking on that first page on Google!
It just goes to show that no matter what you do in the world of business, superior customer experience is always key to making it work.
