Using Voice-Of-Customer Insight to Strengthen Your SEO
The role of voice-of-customer programs is to help marketers and SEOs learn what is, and isn’t, working on their website. Information gained by implementing these ‘listening’ and information gathering techniques can subsequently then be utilized to inform optimisation and testing programs. So when should companies look into gaining voice of customer insights?
Bounce rates and rankings
Many brands often find that their webpage are ranking well for a primary, targeted key phrase -this often means that your site is receiving a good flow of traffic, but there is a problem: a high bounce rate. Bounce rates refer to people who click on your site after finding it in the search results and then basically leaving immediately. Because high bounce rates are associated with low quality or irrelevant websites, they will eventually start influencing your page rank. Search engines quickly identify sites with high bounce rates and then rank them lower accordingly. Analytics tools are usually extremely useful when it comes to indentifying issues and can show you in-depth stats on visits, bounce rate as well as time-on-site. But however, analytics cannot tell you why people are leaving your site. Enter voice-of-customer (VoC) programs.
Information direct from your customers to give context to the data
By implementing Voice of customer programs, your brand will be able to understand rather than simply being aware of why certain actions are o are not being taken by your consumers. These insights can then be fed back into your channels. Once you are aware of what needs to change, you can use the information to manage landing page optimisation projects to improve SEO landing pages and even help address issues with low engagement (high bounce rate, poor conversion, low per visit value etc).
Surveys and Polls
The most obvious and one of the best ways to get valuable information and feedback from your consumers are to ask them to take part in surveys and polls. Polls are useful for specific information needs as opposed to surveys which can ask users to answer broader and more subjective questions. The best way to communicate your brand’s surveys is to send them through your consumer email database. The majority of your brand’s opt-in database most likely consists of your most loyal and engaged customers, which is why it makes sense to invite their valued feedback. It’s up to you on whether you want to incentivise survey participation or not – while the prospect of winning a prize will certainly convince many more than usual to participate, it can be argued that people who do surveys for now possible gain could offer the most sincere response.
Pop-up exit survey
A ‘pop-up’ or ‘pop-under’ can be displayed to the visitor based on certain criteria like when a visitor visits at least 3 pages on the website, for example. These surveys can be qualitative or quantitative, multiple question or single question, but it would be sensible to keep them short -if someone is browsing your website they need to know that this survey will not take up too much time so that they can get back to browsing.
Permanent survey
Permanent surveys can be included on your brand website where users can fill them out whenever they want. These surveys can take the form of hanging side bars that can be expanded on click, or they can be added to the My Account section of the site for users who have already registered a profile on your site.