Do You Know that Your Customer Support Team can Influence Your SEO Plans

Your customer support department, can make some valuable contributions to your online marketing team, and thereby executing a successful SEO campaign. Your customer support team can provide you insights into what customers were calling about, what queries they had, what issues they had, and what problems may be occurring on your website. Businesses, especially online retailers can get results beyond their expectations if there is an integration of their customer team and the marketing team.

You can conduct meetings each week with your marketing team and customer support section to discuss any new online marketing initiatives that were rolling out, any testing that was occurring, and anything else the support team required to be aware of. Your customer support department can be considered as a crucial aspect in both your overall marketing campaign and SEO campaign in particular. According to industry experts, keeping an open line of communication between these two departments can result in better website visibility, and thus more customers.

Content Requirements and Ideas

According to the 2014 B2B Web Usability report published by KoMarketing Associates, about 83 percent especially B2B buyers will leave a website if they cannot find the information they are looking for. Here the website does not contain relevant and useful content that website visitors have been searching for. Here your customer support team provides you data from call center, support communities, social media and live chat. With this data you can find solutions for these queries:

  • What kind of questions are customers asking?
  • Is the information on your website?
  • If it so, where is it? If not, where can it be included?
  • What exactly customers are searching for?

You can ask your support team to track customer queries, lie chat services such as Olark will store the conversations, giving you the ability to go back in and see what was asked. The customer data from social media and support communities can be easily analyzed as they both are publicly available. Some of the types of content that can be generated from customer data include blog posts, white papers, FAQs, videos and tool tips.

Keyword Insights

Other than identifying content requirements from the customer data, you can also get insights into how existing and potential customers are interacting with your product or brand. Some of the questions that arise from the customer data include “How do customers describe your service or product?” “Is any on-site wording unclear?” “What phrases are customers using to describe a product/service feature?”. One of the more difficult parts of an SEO campaign is getting away from using internal mumbo-jumbo and describing services or products the way your customers do. If you are looking for live customer data, then listen in on a few calls, do some social media monitoring, or take a look at the live chat logs. When you conduct keyword research based on the information you got from the customer data focus more on long-tail search queries as they are now more prominent in search results of Google and other search engines.

Link Building Campaign

Do you know that happy customers can indirectly influence in building good quality links for your website. People talk about their experience with brands and they take to their real life, social media and on websites with organic links. For instance, popular online retailer Zappos made all their employees, regardless of their official role in the company train on the phone for two weeks. And this resulted in a tremendous rise in traffic for the company as people talk about the brand online all the time. While your customer support department cannot do everything to generate quality links, the business enterprise need to think about how a good customer experience can lead to more sales, more referrals, and for the SEO team, more natural links.

From this you can realize that a customer support team of a business firm is an invaluable source of data and influence your future SEO plans. If you cannot set up monthly or weekly meetings with them, work on figuring out a way to get customer data from them to your SEO team.