Online shopping is a dynamic experience for customers, driven by awareness of a specific need or desire.
As explored in “Mapping the Customer Journey for SEO and Marketing Success,” understanding your customers’ purchase journey is vital.
This article explores the complex relationship between customer journey mapping and the role of SEO in optimizing e-commerce strategies.
From B2B to eCommerce: Navigating the Customer Journey
The customer purchase journey begins with recognizing a gap in the customer’s everyday experience, such as a missing item, a lifestyle upgrade, or a solution to a work challenge.
In my previous article, “ B2B SaaS SEO: Mapping Your Keywords to the Customer Journey ,” I discussed strategically influencing B2B SaaS customer journeys through keyword analysis and content tagging.
E-commerce may sound different, but it’s often quite similar, especially when shoppers are thinking about expensive items like furniture or home decor.
The e-commerce customer journey encompasses the complete end-to-end experience, starting from the first interaction with a brand’s online store and culminating in the final purchase.
Understanding the five stages (awareness, consideration, solution selection, conversion, service and loyalty) is crucial. It emphasizes that the customer journey goes beyond the purchase, with service and loyalty being essential components.
What is a Customer Journey Map for eCommerce?
An eCommerce customer journey map is a visual guide that shows a customer’s entire experience with an online store, from the first interaction to the final purchase and beyond. It helps businesses understand and improve the various touchpoints and interactions customers have during their purchase journey.
Creating this map provides insight into customer behavior, preferences, and challenges. This information allows companies to personalize their marketing, products and support to improve the customer experience.
SEO inside the 5 stages of the ecommerce funnel
In eCommerce, understanding the intricacies of the buyer’s journey is paramount and SEO plays a critical role at every stage of the conversion funnel.
Let’s dive deeper into how SEO strategically aligns with the five stages to improve the online shopping experience and increase sales.
1. Awareness of need
The conversion funnel starts with the awareness stage, where potential customers first encounter your brand or products. SEO practices can be used to captivate potential customers. These strategies increase visibility through search engines, social media and referrals, laying a solid foundation for a successful buyer’s journey.
2. Consideration
SEO comes into focus during consideration as consumers actively research and evaluate various products or services. Tactics include optimizing product pages and improving the overall user experience.
3. Conversion
The conversion stage, where a visitor takes the desired action, is crucial in the conversion funnel. User-friendly checkout processes and persuasive product descriptions contribute significantly to conversion success.
4. Selection of the solution
Users seeking validation from friends or significant others look for content that justifies their spend, with an emphasis on pricing and overall value. Some decide quickly, but high-priced items or unclear product pages can slow down the process. Your content here is like a supportive, reassurance-giving friend like when someone says “That dress looks great on you” while shopping. User reviews, reports or influencer videos replace the friend’s comments, helping them decide.
5. Retention
After purchase, the focus shifts to customer retention, an essential aspect of long-term success and brand loyalty. Consider maintaining communication, providing excellent customer service, and potentially offering repeat business incentives. These tactics strengthen the relationship between the customer and the brand, fostering loyalty and sustained engagement.
Bonus: Advocacy
In the defense stage, satisfied customers are transformed into brand advocates. You can leverage positive experiences through word-of-mouth reviews, testimonials, and referrals. SEO-based advocacy strategies contribute to new customer acquisition and fuel the overall growth of your eCommerce business.
Go deeper: Ecommerce SEO and UX: 4 simple tips to increase traffic and sales
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Tag keywords in the e-commerce customer journey
Understanding your customer journey is crucial as you embark on the process of tagging keywords for your eCommerce platform.
Following on from our step-by-step guide on tagging keywords for B2B, here’s how to tag your keywords for an e-commerce site that sells sneakers using Google Sheets.
Product keywords
Creation of a “Journey Stages” tab with data validation
Introduce a tab that describes the stages of the customer journey and use it as a data validation dropdown for easy selection. This facilitates collaboration with different teams, ensuring a shared understanding of the process and guidance for each stage.
Stages of the customer journey
Using the “Stages” tab for keyword tagging
Make the “Stages” tab a data validation dropdown in your spreadsheet for efficient keyword tagging. This ensures that each keyword is associated with a specific stage of the customer journey. In my example, I focus on the stages that lead to the purchase decision: Need Awareness Consideration Solution Selection Conversion
Keyword tagging
With the setup complete, it’s time to start tagging your ecommerce keywords. Despite the potentially overwhelming task, the process becomes smoother as you identify words or phrases that align with different stages.
For example, in an e-commerce scenario, offering various terms like “best” or “reviews” may belong to the “Consideration” stage, and keywords that include brand names with the product name indicate a purchase commitment .
Once you’ve gone through the first steps of tagging keywords, you should have a tab for “Stages” and the column next to “Volume” to start tagging.
This is where e-commerce keyword tagging can go faster than B2B tagging. You can simply create a formula to figure out your tagging.
Set up a “Filter” in your spreadsheet, sort by common words and label your keywords accordingly.
For example, I created a tag in my Google Sheet for a word count, since most searches with a word will be a broad or “need awareness” search. Using the formula:
=LEN(A2)-LEN(SUBSTITUTE((A2), ” “, “”))+1
(note: Replace “A2” with the keyword cell.)
For each word in a separate column, I can use an “IF” formula that says any one-word keyword equals “1 – Need Awareness” and any two-word keyword equals “2 – Consideration”.
But we still have these brand/product specific searches, which ultimately means the user is ready to buy.
So in my “IF” formula, I include that any mention of the brand list equals “4 – Conversion”, and the rest of the keywords are in the “3 – Solution Selection” stage.
So the formula should look like this:
=IF(ARRAY FORMULA (NEAR(IFNA(REGEX EXTRACT(LOWER(A4), LOWER(TEXT EXTRACT(“|”, 1, Marks))))))<>“”,Stage!$A$5,IF( D4=1, Stage!$A$2,IF(D4=2,Stage!$A$3,Stage!$A$4)))
You can access the Google Sheet I createdmake a copy (please do not request access) and play with the data as needed.
Once you have a handle on your keywords and their stage, you can use the data to start making smart marketing decisions and content that speaks to your audience.
Part of understanding your buyer’s journey for eCommerce as opposed to B2B goes beyond labeling and the stages themselves.
Users need more support from your website in an e-commerce environment. Meanwhile, B2B users get support from the sales team they interact with.
This means that much more consideration should be given to the content that is created for e-commerce than for B2B.
Helpful tips for every stage of the eCommerce customer journey
Mastering the e-commerce customer journey involves navigating the entire online purchase process. Touchpoints range from initial awareness to eventual retention, and include social media ads, website interactions, and product searches.
Since there is no direct interaction with a seller, your content must guide them in a compelling way, assuring them of an intelligent buying decision and the trustworthiness of your website.
Improve customer satisfaction
How it relates to SEO: Improving customer delight positively affects website engagement metrics, a crucial factor in SEO algorithms. Engaging content and positive user experiences contribute to higher rankings.
Offer unique rewards, events and surprises to create memorable experiences. Foster a sense of community around your brand.
Create FOMO
How it relates to SEO: Urgency created through “fear of missing out” (FOMO) tactics can increase click-through rates and time spent on your site, indicating relevance to search engines.
Highlight limited quantities of products and show customer activity. Use timers for sales and emphasize scarcity to drive urgency.
Conduct surveys
How it relates to SEO: Understanding user preferences through surveys helps tailor content, potentially increasing organic traffic as your site aligns more closely with user intent.
Collect feedback through online and in-person surveys for personalized improvements
Raise social proof
How it relates to SEO: Positive customer reviews and testimonials contribute to a positive online reputation, a factor that search engines consider in rankings.
Showcase customer testimonials and encourage user-generated content on social media.
Personalize every touchpoint
How it relates to SEO: Personalization improves the user experience, contributing to reduce bounce rates and increase the duration of sessions, positively influencing SEO.
Tailor offers based on customer data and deploy exit pop-ups for personalized interactions.
Dig deeper: How to make your eCommerce content more useful
The views expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
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