As digital marketers, we ask ourselves this question a lot to help us think about how to complete the customer journey.
“How do you get customers to complete the desired action on a website, like purchasing a product or signing up for a newsletter?”
Surely, the first answer that comes to mind is - optimize all the various elements responsible for conversions.
But useful as quick tweaks to improve search visibility or paying mind to SEO basics might be, those tactics only focus on visitors who already are in the right place on the site. What about customers you need to guide there in the first place?
For that, you need to optimize the entire customer journey. In this post, I’ll discuss how to build a better customer journey to ensure that web visitors complete any action you want them to do on your site.
First, let's start with some basics.
A customer journey is exactly what it sounds like. This is the path that users take in following the buying cycle, a process varies from industry to industry, but contains three main stages in its framework:
We've detailed this process and provided the necessary tools to build a customer journey map with content on an earlier blog about content mapping. A content or customer journey map illustrate the different steps that your customers take in their relationship with you - from prospect to purchase and beyond.
As we've said before, "when you’ve mapped your content along the buyer’s journey, defining an SEO content strategy becomes ridiculously easy."
So, how do we do that? Follow the five steps below:
If there’s one thing we are confident about, the modern buying behavior is complicated. Just take a look at how the guys at AdEspresso have illustrated the process from identifying a problem to selecting a solution to buy:
And that’s exactly how we buy. For example, in their report, “The Changing Face of B2B Marketing,” Google states (note, the emphasis in bold is mine):
“On average, B2B researchers do 12 searches prior to engaging on a specific brand's site.”
And the search engine’s Customer Journey tool outlines the complexity of the online buyer’s journey (note, the below example pertains to SMEs in the Internet and Telecom space):
But here is the most important part: The only way to meet the modern customer’s expectations is by first thoroughly understanding them and their needs.
At a minimum, you should know:
As the next step, you must convert those into actionable insights, finding gaps and opportunities that would help you position your brand along every step of their journey towards purchase.
It’s safe to assume that everyone landing on your site is looking for something. It could be to find out more about you, get a product they desperately need or even learn more about their problem. Depending on what that need is, they’ll engage with different content on your site.
Recommended Reading: User Intent Uncovered: What You Need to Know to Scale
For instance, customers looking for information will most likely want to see some proof that any claims you make are true. However, to engage with people looking to buy, you’ll need to send them directly to a product page (or at least, make sure they get there in the fewest steps).
In other words, to improve the customer journey, you need to understand their intent for visiting the site. And then, ensure that they get to the right information as quickly as possible.
One way to establish that is by analyzing the keywords that have brought customers to various sections of the site. Simply split your keywords into commercial, informative, and local. Then, assess what pages people looking for those phrases have landed on to truly understand what they were looking for.
seoClarity helps you understand your audience's intent to make sure you're focused on the RIGHT target audience. Our Search Volume research tool uses Google Keyword Planner for search volume. However, this tool allows more advanced filter options, does not have any limitations, and uses a more graphical way to help you understand quickly users' intent based on your primary keywords that relate to your product or service. Here's a quick example using the primary keyword for this post, customer journey.
The two strategies I discussed so far focused on making educated and data-based guesses about your audience. I recommend learning more about your customers directly from them by conducting a customer research study. Or, in simpler terms, ask them questions that would help uncover your customers’ motivations for engaging with your brand.
There is a number of ways you can do this:
An experience map, a term I picked up from Adaptive Path (you can check out their guide to experience maps here), is a visual representation of the customer journey with the emphasis on the experience a person has at each touchpoint.
Here’s an example of a detailed experience map from Adaptive Path:
Of course, Adaptive Path’s process relates to more than just SEO (however, I strongly recommend you familiarize yourself with it). You could use the framework to create an SEO-experience map of the entire interaction a customer’s has at each entry point to your site. And then, define their experience at each stage. As a result, you’ll have a complete framework of the customer journey, along with their expectations and the path they need to take to complete the desired action.
As the final step, you need to use all this insight to create content that will deliver on your customer’s expectations at every stage of the journey.
That means more than just being relevant. You should:
seoClarity offers a content discovery tool that gives you an insight into what your audience is asking. This helps you to deliver highly-relevant information based on opportunities you discover in every search phrase. Here is another example using keyword, customer journey, to discover other content ideas to deliver on our users' expectations.
In conclusion, to get customers to complete the desired action on a website, you need to optimize more than the various elements on a page. You need to improve the customer journey and ensure visitors have a positive experience at every touch point with your site.