Should Customer Support Be Part of Your SEO Program?

Your customer support team can be an essential part of your overall program for marketing, particularly in reference to SEO. Ensuring that there is always a distinct line of communication available between both departments can generate results such as better links, improved content, and greater amounts of customers.

Creating Content Ideas

One of the most significant challenges that businesses suffer from when they are in the process of improving their SEO strategy, is ensuring that their content provides the information that buyers need. If the information required isn’t there, then people aren’t going to stick around. According to data collected by the Web Usability report of 2014, 83% of people actually abandon a website if they can’t find the information that they need.

Here’s where customer support comes in. Between support communities, social media, live chat and call center data, you can get a great insight into what is lacking on your website. By talking to your customer support staff, you can learn about the questions people ask most often, what they’re looking for, and where additional information can be added.

This also gives you a useful insight into the usability of your web pages. For example, if your visitors are asking questions in regard to content that is already on your website, but difficult to find, you need to think of ways you can make it more accessible. Once you have the data you need, you can take the most frequently asked questions you find and turn them into assets for your website. When you are doing this, think carefully about where certain content should be on your website. For example, a question regarding a product is best to have on a product page or FAQ page for a certain product. On the other hand, a question that is more general could be developed into a useful blog post. These are just some of the content types that can be generated from user data:

• Blog posts
• FAQs
• Whitepapers
• Videos
• Tool Tips

Accessing Insights for Keywords

Alongside helping you to identify the areas of your website that need content, the data you obtain from customer support can give you information about how potential customers and current customers find and discuss your service or product. Learn how they describe your products, and whether they find wording on your website to be unclear in some way. Figure out the phrases that are used most regularly in describing a given feature, and utilize these phrases as keywords.

One of the more complicated parts of SEO is separating yourself from industry-relevant jargon and instead focusing on describing services and products the same way as your customers.

Conclusion

Your customer support team could be a truly valuable source of data for your website. If you can’t develop regular meetings with them to help your company progress, work out a way for information to be sent directly from them to your marketing team. You may be amazed by how useful it really is.