While trying to optimize your site’s pages for best SEO practices, it can be easy to lose yourself in all the rules and forget that ultimately, your site should be focused on your users, not search engines. Google’s number one basic principle is “Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines.” This is the primary connection between customer service and SEO. If you are focused on your user and providing them everything they need for a great experience, you’ll be on your way to designing pages with great SEO signals. In this article, we are going to highlight some of the key ways to think about SEO and customer service as a single issue in order to improve both.
Solve User’s Problems
If you aren’t helping users, your site won’t rank. In order to provide solutions to your users and potential customers, you must first be aware of their problems. What are the most common issues that customers in your industry experience? Lean on your value proposition for content generation. You should leverage your industry knowledge to produce content that will answer the user’s questions. Searchers ask specific, often long-form questions within search engines so make sure your page and blog content is optimized to answer those questions.
Be sure to focus your meta descriptions through this concept as well. While meta descriptions are not a ranking factor in themselves, click-through rates (CTR) are believed to have an impact. So, if your Meta Descriptions is clear, concise, and easy to understand for users, you can increase your click-through rates and ultimately your rankings!
Clear indicators like specific Page Titles and Meta Descriptions will also help decrease bounce rates as users will know exactly what to expect when clicking your page.
Increase Your Page Load Speeds
We know page load speeds are a ranking factor both for desktop and mobile as of 2018. Not only is page load taken into consideration for your ranking position, but it’s precisely because users will not linger on a page. Most people leave a web page if it isn’t loaded within two seconds and interactable within three. One of the best things you can do to vastly improve your customer experience, and boost your conversions, is to increase page load speed. Check out the graph below, Walmart saw a drastic drop in conversions as load speeds dropped from one to four seconds.
Make Information Easy to Find and Interact With
If you’re designing pages that are easy for your users to read and navigate, search engines should be able to crawl and understand those pages easier as well. Clear meta elements like H1 tags, clean URL structures, and structured data will not only help users and improve their experience, but Google and other search engines will understand the meaning of the page and rank it higher for its intended purpose.
It’s also incredibly important to make sure you are implementing “bread crumbs” within your site structure. Bread crumbs are easy to show Google and users their current location on a site and where they came from. They allow the authority to flow easily between pages as well. Bread crumbs are especially important for e-commerce sites. For car dealers this may look something like Toyota > Trucks > Tacoma.
Deploy Mobile-Friendly Design
Over 50 percent of Google’s index is not mobile-first. Once the total number of searches on mobile devices crossed the 50 percent mark back in 2018, Google has adjusted to the needs of its users and began serving results based on the capabilities of a site’s mobile site, not the desktop version.
If you want your site to rank well, your design on mobile must be clean and load quickly. Usability on mobile devices is incredibly important for your users as well. Just like on desktops, load speeds, bread crumbs, and clear content add to the customer experience and will increase both click-through rates and conversions.
Try to focus on SEO and your visitor’s CX as different projects to tackle. If you focus on creating the best experience for your users, you’ll be in line with Google’s principles and well on your way to implementing great SEO for your site as well!