What is Customer Experience (CX)?
First, let us briefly define Customer Experience (CX). Exact definitions will differ among marketers, but HubSpot’s tends to be widely accepted:
“Customer experience is the impression your customers have of your brand throughout all aspects of the buyer’s journey. It results in their view of your brand and impacts factors related to your bottom line, including revenue.”
This is a rather broad topic to handle in a single article. Still, it should be immediately apparent that CX depends on many factors. To paraphrase NNG’s Don Norman, from the first touchpoint to post-sale support, “CX is everything.” Starting with SEO and web design and ending with an incredible customer journey.
“It’s not just about getting people to your website – that’s only the first step. Next comes the buyer’s journey, where you must guide those site visitors from showing interest to converting into actual customers.”
For a broader look into just how vast these experiences can be, since User Experience (UX) and Customer Experience (CX) are practically interchangeable in this context, here we can also cite Don Norman directly:
“User experience” encompasses all aspects of the end-user’s interaction with the company, its services, and its products. True user experience goes far beyond giving customers what they say they want or providing checklist features[;] there must be a seamless merging of the services of multiple disciplines, including engineering, marketing, graphical and industrial design, and interface design.”
How SEO can improve your Customer Experience
Still, let’s take things one by one. To highlight how SEO can enhance your CX, here we can go through 5 fundamental, overlapping strategies. In order, consider the following.
Could you make sure to consider all the necessary factors when it comes to SEO?
#1 Making a stellar first impression
First, a great experience hinges strongly on first impressions. In the digital sense, your website will often be your first touchpoint, making SEO and CX optimizations vital. We’ve written about why you should care about page speed before, and Convert More dubs it “the halo effect.” In brief, your customers will judge your website before it loads.
To prove this, consider Google’s statistics on the correlation between loading times and bounce rates. They find that loading times over 1 second correlate with progressively higher bounce rates, as the average user expects 3 seconds or less loading times.
As such, SEO can ensure a customer journey can begin. On-page optimizations like image compression and heavy theme culling will ensure snappier loading times and a positive impression. General Landing Page Optimization (LPO) will also help tremendously, leveraging SEO’s traffic generation gains.
#2 Crafting an optimal customer journey
With a lead generation funnel in place, the next step to upgrade your business site should come with customer journeys. Specifically, you can do this by abiding by SEO and content marketing guidelines to structure your content in a logical, appealing way.
Discussing the subject and how SEO can improve your Customer Experience, PwC makes the following point:
“[Customers] want the design of websites and mobile apps to be elegant and user-friendly; they want automation to ease experience. But these advances don’t matter much if speed, convenience, and the right information are lacking.”
Nudging your customers along your sales funnel should come through proper internal linking, valuable information, and relevant prompts. SEO has much to offer to customer journey crafting. From matching their search intent to presenting helpful information, knowledge bases, and self-help portals, every step pleases them and search engines.
#3 Meeting the needs of eCommerce
Such SEO-friendly web designhas ample benefits for eCommerce specifically, too. With increasingly more businesses engaging in online sales and the eCommerce industry facing unique challenges, this point is worth mentioning.
For instance, cart abandonment is a common phenomenon. Rates vary across industries but remain consistently high. Baymard Institute finds that the primary reasons for this are long checkout processes, hidden fees, and account requirements.
Account requirements, lengthy checkout procedures, and hidden fees are problematic.
Of course, these don’t fall squarely on SEO to address, but they overlap somewhat. Several eCommerce marketing strategies that boost sales rely on these foundations. Indeed, there are many different methods you can try to address cart abandonment and boost sales at once, including:
- Simplifying your landing pages and checkout processes
- Boosting your email marketing strategies and expanding your subscriber lists
- Focusing on mobile users
- Leaning on social media shopping ads
- Fine-tuning your keyword research
If these sound familiar, it’s because they are. While the two are not identical, SEO offers many benefits to online stores and their CX.
#4 Proactively meeting your customers’ needs
Once you optimize your landing pages for SEO, there are still more ways SEO can improve your Customer Experience. You can learn to proactively lean on informational content to meet your customers’ needs.
Almost ten years ago, in 2013, SearchEngineLand wrote on the informational content advantage:
“It’s estimated that approximately 50-80% of search queries are informational. But usually, very little of that is informational content. The average website has a ratio of 80/20 navigational or transactional content to informational content — the opposite of how people are searching.”
Fast-forward to today, and this remains true. Audiences still primarily look for informational content, and customers mostly look for actionable advice. Yet few marketers follow SEO’s most logical tenet: matching the user’s search intent and customer phase.
SEO thrives on information-rich content. The kind of content that ranks highest boosts Domain Authority (DA) and produces engagement signals that fuel SEO.
In addition, its content genuinely drives customer retention—whose value LinkedIn’s Shaumik Saha has stressed manifold in the past. Among other notable perks, he finds that acquiring a new customer costs up to seven times more than converting an existing customer into a repeat customer.
Leaning on informational content is one of the ways SEO can improve your Customer Experience.
#5 Keeping your existing customers engaged
Finally, having touched on engagement signals, SEO and CX rely heavily on customer retention and engagement. After all, great customer journeys will ultimately reassure Google and drive revenue alike. With this in mind, there’s no better place for both to thrive than social media.
In this regard, social media can also offer a stepping stone for SEO to improve Customer Experience. According to SproutSocial, social marketers agree that community engagement should be prioritized beyond brand awareness.
HootSuite corroborates this, finding that social media activity can significantly enhance SEO. There is no concrete proof of a direct correlation yet, and Google’s John Mueller did deny one, but the two are symbiotic. Indeed, consider how social media engagement can drive engagement to pages, enhancing engagement signals. Or, more crucially for CX, how swift responses to queries and feedback can improve brand perceptions and foster loyalty. Those are the qualities customers seem to seek most, and social media-backed SEO is perfect for this role.
Summary
To summarize, CX and SEO are more interconnected than ever before. Tech-savvy audiences seek valuable content and relevant interactions, and so do search engines. With more complex customer journeys, SEO best practices can be invaluable. From simple on-page optimizations to tight website structures and information-rich content strategies, SEO can improve your Customer Experience in many ways. While brief, we hope this article helped show this connection and gave you some helpful inspiration.