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Customer retention is the bread and butter of every business. Since it is 5 to 25 times cheaper than acquiring new customers, it should be very high on the list of your brand’s goals all year round.
If you are already investing in SEO, you’ll be happy to hear that there are numerous SEO tactics that can help you improve customer retention. If you are executing your strategy right, you’re likely already implementing them.
Understand Their Needs
Every well-rounded SEO strategy starts with understanding search intent. Without it, you can’t optimize your pages well, and you can’t actually serve your visitors and customers what they need. If you expand on it just a bit, you can learn even more about your customers, allowing you to further improve your retention rates.
People turn to search engines to find what they need. If you take the time to analyze their queries and how they word them, you will know how to tailor your products and services to ensure they land on your pages — and stay with your brand for years to come.
Speak Their Language
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SEO also allows you to speak the language of your customers. While doing competitor, keyword, and content research, you will be reading dozens upon dozens of pages. Over time, you will get to know the language your customers (and competitors) speak and how you can adapt yours to better match it.
People like to work with brands they feel connected to. By researching your target audience, you can tweak the way you speak to them to match their preferences and level of experience with your product or service.
Use Familiar Terms
Keywords research is the cornerstone of a good SEO strategy. It will help you use the terms that people type into their search boxes, thus boosting your rankings. It will also help you retain customers, as you prove to them that you understand what they need and that you are able to solve their problems.
Extensive keyword research also lets you pinpoint blog topics that your audience is interested in. The more quality content you provide, the more likely they are to sign up to your newsletter, giving you direct access to their inbox, which you can then also use for promotional purposes.
Be Spotted by the Right People
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A winning SEO strategy will also encompass various link building tactics. And while certain links will help boost your rankings, others will also help you amass and retain your audience.
Getting featured in a prominent news outlet or magazine or being mentioned on a blog that your audience is already subscribed to can go a very long way in the digital world. When your customers spot you as a guest author on their favorite online outlet, they will come back to check out what you’ve been up to.
Note that you should only ever trust qualified link building agencies to run these types of campaigns for you. Unfortunately, most of the services you come across build sub-par links that will never get you the kind of exposure you are looking for.
Get Ahead of the Competition
Competitor research is another big part of SEO. And while it often focuses on backlinks, keywords, and article topics, you can’t help but discover a lot about the other brands that are vying for your audience’s attention.
This allows you to tailor every single aspect of your business to better appeal to your joint audience base. You can provide discounts at the right time and emphasize benefits others have failed to mention. Plus, you can cover better topics or cover popular topics better than your competitors have done.
Don’t get lost in chasing someone else, though. You still need to be true to yourself and not morph into a copycat of someone else’s strategies.
Answer Their Burning Questions
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SEO will also help you identify the topics your audience is interested in and give you all the tools you need to answer them. A simple Google search can often turn up a plethora of interesting blog post ideas, and the “people also ask” section can be used to come up with an outline.
Remember that you should only write about things people actually want to read about. No matter how interesting or well-written a post is, if no one is looking for it, you won’t be able to use it to retain customers.
Don’t forget to insert a CTA into your posts. Direct traffic in the most logical way, whether it’s promoting a product, another post, or a special offer.
Provide a Smooth Experience
When Google made page speed a ranking factor, a lot of webmasters hit hard and needed to spend a lot of time and effort speeding up their websites. However, this change has ensured that most modern websites are fast and provide a great user experience.
In order to rank well and comply with the latest Google guidelines, you will need to provide stellar UX. Your pages will need to be fast and uncluttered. Every change you make in order to pass Core Web Vitals will also help you retain your customers.
Learn From Your Mistakes and Successes
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Finally, SEO is all about tracking the right data and understanding how users are behaving and engaging with your website. With the data you have, you can easily adjust your campaigns, work on your CTAs, and ensure that your page layout matches how your users actually surf them.
The best data is always your own: no matter what the industry benchmarks are or what other brands are seeing, you should always work to improve your own numbers and KPIs.
Wrapping Up
SEO can do a lot to improve your customer retention efforts. As a general rule, when you make decisions based on the needs of your customers, you will see a rise in all of your important metrics. It’s certainly far more effective than making decisions based on what you feel is right or what you’ve heard might be a good business idea.
