Understanding how your users interact with your brand is vital to delivering a great customer experience.
This is why you shouldn’t overlook the customer journey. It allows you to shape your website’s user experience (UX) and content strategies based on the people who matter: your customers.
Let’s explore how the customer journey can help guide your SEO program.
Customer journey and SEO
A well-mapped customer journey can greatly benefit SEO.
Because SEO is a broad discipline, it’s easy to scatter your efforts. Some people dive too deep into perfecting an aspect, whether technical, on-page, or external.
Streamlining the customer journey helps align your SEO program and focus your efforts on what’s valuable.
Whether you look at the customer journey as a linear or multi-touch path, a four-level funnel or a flyer, you need to implement a comprehensive strategy.
Within this strategy and even activities and tactical plans benefit from aligning with the customer journey.
Here are some areas where the customer journey can guide your SEO efforts.
1. Assignment of keywords and topics to the trip
Having trouble with a long keyword list? Want to optimize for all the terms you know are relevant but are finding it difficult?
By mapping your customer journey, you can get the content right overall and leverage clarity for SEO.
For example, the best time to educate prospects is when they are still in the research and exploration phase.
When someone is just becoming aware of your brand, you should try to become their trusted resource. Help them understand their problem and identify possible solutions. Avoid the urge to sell.
This strategy often works for B2B, but it can work even in e-commerce and B2C.
Let’s say you sell groomsmen gifts. You can plan to create a comprehensive guide to everything an engaged couple needs to know when planning their wedding.
Doing so will help you come across as a great resource, even before they realize they need specific gifts for groomsmen.
Building brand awareness and affinity early in the journey will help customers continue to engage with you until they’re ready to buy.
In this early stage of awareness, take the terms that you know aren’t likely to convert but are important. Then, strategically plan your content and optimization so you can be at this stage of the customer journey.
The same goes for terms where you know the intent is to convert. Terms that show purchase intent, such as searching for a specific product’s part number or action-oriented lead generation terms (eg, “dentist near me”) are beyond the customer journey.
The right keyword map for this stage is also critical. At this point, we want to bring them closer to a purchase, a contact form, or another way to engage with us.
Don’t bury the call to action. Avoid hitting them with thought leadership or general awareness content.
From your customer journey map, you’ll also find lots of queries and intermediate topics to link your content to. Use your understanding of the journey to categorize keywords and topics and map them to the right content on your site.
Hopefully, by ranking your keywords this way and analyzing your content needs through this lens, you can gain a refreshing focus and clarity for your content and investment plans.
2. Conversion rate optimization goals and objectives
So you’ve spent a lot of time mapping keywords and topics to the respective stages of the customer journey and developed content to fill any gaps. Unfortunately, there is no guarantee that everything will work perfectly as planned.
No matter how objective and specific you are, there will always be something to test, optimize, and build.
In some cases, you may learn new things about what the customer journey looks like.
In others, you’ll get the impressions and traffic you want, but you won’t see the user move to the next step in the journey you expect.
This is where conversion rate optimization (CRO) comes in.
Go back to your historical data and your projected data.
What percentage of users usually do what next? What do you expect them to do? Do they return to the site three days later on a more specific page? Do they tend to visit certain pages or take specific actions?
Dig deeper. See what other keywords you could be optimizing for.
Understand when they return to Google and how they can refine their searches. Leverage data from other channels.
Getting granular with Google Analytics, heat mapping and CRO tools, and your customer relationship management (CRM) platform will help.
Take advantage of them to know where the journey is accurate, while the UX or content needs improvement. Find areas to optimize your assumed or planned trip.
SEO elements should be incorporated here to include technical factors (site speed, Core Web Vitals, indexing), on-page, content strategy and calls to action.
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3. Measurement and attribution
I could have listed this first as it weaves through my look at how the customer journey and SEO converge.
I assume you have a well defined journey. However, as I noted earlier, using CRO and other ways to optimize the overall journey and website, you’ll need to measure what’s happening to make informed decisions.
Are the keywords you focus on at each stage driving traffic to the pages you want?
Are users doing what you want them to do and going deeper into the journey?
You’ll find weaknesses in your analytics setup and how you view SEO and general web analytics when you test it. That’s good.
Find new ways to view and measure the customer journey. Also, align your measurement of SEO factors and performance with this journey.
This will help you focus your efforts and not lump together global statistics such as rankings, impressions, traffic and conversions.
By going that deep, you can see what you’re leaving on the table. Maybe you’re focusing too much on high-profile keywords (and not getting conversions). Or maybe you focus only on action/“convert now” without encouraging “unknown” users along the journey.
Conclusion
Focus and objective orientation are essential for SEO. Any prioritization and alignment with web and broader strategies can help, whether you have vast resources to invest or can only take a narrow approach.
By leveraging a mapped customer journey, you can define needs, strategies, tactics and goals for content. At the same time, you can manage expectations and investments.
SEO should not be done in an island. It is better to implement it as part of the whole. Customer journey thinking brings you closer to your overall marketing plan and strategy. Take it as an opportunity.
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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About the author
Corey Morris is a qualified marketing professional with over 15 years of experience developing award-winning, ROI-generating digital strategies for local and national brands. He was recently honored as the winner of the 2019 KCDMA Marketing of the Year Award. Corey is the Director of Strategy for voltage – a marketing company based in Kansas City, MO. He previously founded the KC Search Marketing Conference to help build a local community for search marketers for professional growth. He was recognized for his involvement in the conference and invited to join the global board of SEMPO (now part of DAA) as Vice President of Cities.
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