Search engine optimisation (also known as SEO) helps you understand and develop a strategy to improve your sites visibility rank for positioning in organic search results enhance the appearance of your web pages or website. Building an SEO content strategy that can support both you and your customer journey to develop and grow can create, harvest, and maintain a positive customer relationship, whilst strengthening your brand identity.

What is a customer journey?

A customer journey is the consumer decision and discovery journey that takes/converts them from lead to a buying customer. When you imagine the customers journey from interest to purchase, they go through certain ‘touchpoints’ to develop their knowledge of your services, product, and your brand. As a customer of many products ourselves, almost daily, we understand the natural journey you would take from interest, to discovery, to research, to purchase- that is called the customer journey. When selling a service or product you must understand what will lead them to you and how to keep them, preventing them to moving to your competitors.

There are many debates on the customer journey or buyers journey model. Classic models show the linear customer journey and most likely will include awareness, consideration, and an ultimate decision. There are a variety of funnels such as the basic 3-step model and 4-step model. However, some argue that there are other steps in the customer journey, and indeed varying touchpoints and proponents of a cyclical costumer journey.

At AEK, we use is the 5-step model as we find it is the most rounded and optimised hyper-targeted funnel that addresses all points in a customer journey. The advantage of a 5-step model is that it adds an extra layer to your customer relationship, as your relationship with your customer doesn’t end or stop at the one action, it also includes loyalty and advocacy. The goal, especially with an E-commerce store, is always to gain returning customers. A returning customer makes the initial purchase and returns through various tailored incentives such as loyalty points and email marketing. A 5-step funnel reaches even beyond your customer buying several or reoccurring item purchases, as a customer can then advocate your brand or business through loyalty schemes and friend referrals, building loyalty and furthering your brand awareness.

The 5-step funnel model stages are as followed:

Awareness

Consideration

Interest

Decision

Action

Conversion

Conversion

Advocacy

Awareness- The stage where your lead becomes aware of your product or service.

Marketing tips and tricks:  Introducing your brand with content rich narratives and engaging content such as 15-secs videos.

For example: 

You should create custom, high-intent video tailored for Facebook and Instagram advertising to attract new customers to start building your sales funnel.

For Kanvas Beauty, we produced and launched several tailored video commercials and ads for Facebook & Instagram to ensure we have a steady flow of new customers into our funnel whilst building brand awareness for Kanvas Beauty.

To further communicate the boutique range and experience Kanvas Beauty offers online, we thought it will be best to design and produce custom marketing material such as videos, images, emails, and website graphics.

For our Montagio’s multi-channel strategy to acquiring a brand-new customer

base of customers who matched our target demographics across the key platforms signed and produced a custom, high-intent video tailored for Facebook Advertising to new customers. We then designed and introduced custom landing pages with a focus on conversion rate optimisation and SEO with our specialist conversion rate optimisation techniques to complement our marketing efforts.

To take an integrated approach, you need to compliment your awareness across all channels, to create a consistent narrative. You must also tailor your content and match the tone to fit the channel you are presenting it on. Facebook requires visual content, that stands out, whereas, LinkedIn requires a more professional tone, to suit whom it is addressing and the platform your content is on. An article needs to be concise and informative with the appropriate information and research to show your expertise and what set you out from the crowd.

The length of your video should also match what point of the funnel your customer is, top of the funnel videos should be less than 15-secs, middle of the funnel can be greater than 15 seconds.

Consideration

Interest - The stage where your potential customer (lead) becomes interested in purchasing your product

Decision- The stage where further investigation and analysis for your customer is made to decide a suitable product just for your customers need.

Action- The best stage of all- your lead becoming a happy customer.

Conversion- becoming a loyal, brand ambassador and advocator. Turning satisfied customers into brand advocates, whilst lowering your acquisition costs.

Marketing tips and tricks:  Conversion- Use Yotpo for where your customer can build loyalty points from customised rewards and referral programs that engages existing customers whilst reaching new ones.

Advocacy- A customer advocates your brand by referring a friend with tool such as Yotpo.

You can truly create an optimised hyper-targeted funnel by adding steps between consideration and conversion, and other initiatives or further touchpoints between actions and conversion.

Whatever model you choose to employ, you must always ensure it is a perfect representation that truly signifies your customer journey, to help you hit all touchpoints and create a hyper-targeted funnel to reach your customer where it counts in their buying journey. SEO plays a major part in truly reaching and supporting the customers to create tailored content that they will encounter throughout their customer journey and ultimately work their way to the next part of the funnel.

How does SEO support the customer journey?

Although, with the uprise in TikTok SEO and social media changing the way consumers find, explore, and discover your products and services, research has shown that 71% of people still turn to popular search engines such as Google to research and discover services they need. In fact, 74% start here and convert to purchasing and Google Data has found 43% of consumers become inspired during their shopping journey by browsing goods on a search engine.

Further research from BrightEdge (2019) has found that an average of 44.6% of revenue derives from organic search channels, with B2B companies generating double the amount of revenue than any other channel they use.

The customer journey differs from industry to industry, but one thing remains the same and that is the process of converting a person’s interest to a paying customer.

There are many ways that SEO can support the customer journey and influence the stages they are in utilising a generic process of awareness, consideration to decision-making.

Awareness phase

Whilst searching online a potential customer must first become aware of your services, products- and in extension- aware of you and your brand. Ranking first or on page one of organic search result search engines such as Google or Bing is one sure way to get noticed and get those clicks.

Keyword Research

What is keyword research?

Keyword research is the foundation of a clever, efficient communications and content strategy. In relation to SEO, keyword research is how you develop an understanding of what your customer is searching, discover relevant and popular customers search queries and essentially find out what your customers wants and are looking for. Most importantly, keyword research determines what you should use on an organic search engine channel.

Competitor Research

How does SEO use competitor research?

SEO research targets keywords and helps you discover more keyword via your competitors. Using tools such as Ahrefs, you can find out more about your competitors and their webpage keyword ranking as well as discover what keywords they are ranking for.

Sizing up the competition is important, especially those on the ranking top 10 on a search engines search results. After all, they are who Google is finding is relevant by using relevant content and keywords. Leverage this knowledge to not just do what they are doing but do it better. Mastering. understanding and using competitor research can help you further understand where you lie within your market.

SERP Research

What does SERP stand for?

SERP stands for Search Engine Research Page and is the page that is returned by a search engine after a user submits an enquiry on their search bar. SERP research uses this data to ask the following questions:

1. What content is matched with the keywords or search enquiry? e.g. blogs, homepage, products, videos.

2. What type of content is shown with the blue organic links? e.g. videos, images.

Using SERP research, you can cater, create, and ensure you are using content relevant to each query, blue organic link and your keyword or search queries.

An Optimized Website

We all want to optimise our website, but what does an optimised website mean in terms of using SEO to optimise it? To have any chance of competing in search results your website/web pages must be optimised and provide a great user experience for visitors to browse, crawl and enjoy. It must also be optimised for search engines to crawl. If your content is not optimised, boring and/or irrelevant both users and the search engine will have a hard time looking through and ultimately ranking you. Therefore, they will go elsewhere towards websites that provide easy-to-read, informative, and easy-to-consume content. You will not be number 1 in anyone’s book, including on ranking No1 on Google.

Consideration phase

Whilst users are in their discovery, research page they are learning about your services, products, brand and who you are as a company or business. But do not be fooled, they are also learning about others- your competitors. Your job, always, from your Google Meta Descriptions to your content, videos and pictures is to pitch and generate ways to get them to choose you. Whilst offering the best product helps, you can also achieve this through various SEO strategies.

Optimized Search Listing

Your search result is your first impression, prior to even your webpages or website.

Anything that helps you stand out from the crowd you should do including using SEO. Scratch that, ESPECIALLY using SEO. There are many ways to optimise your search listing using SEO, including SEO keywords to optimise your meta titles, meta tags, and meta descriptions. Helping you stand out from the crowd.

Get content with writing good content

Any old content just won’t cut it, getting the content right is one of the most important ways to reach potential customers and sell what you are offering. You must have a great content strategy in place including mapping your content, researching your content, using SEO, and mapping the keywords that you must add to your content, whilst keeping your content concise, relevant, and engaging.

But most importantly, you must understand the intent behind everything you do –

1. Why are you doing it?

2. Who is it catered to?

3. What is the goal?

4. How is it answering your searchers queries?

Using relevant topics, relevant questions, planning the architecture of your website, and knowing what content will live within each navigation directory page and what can lie in the blogs etc can help keep your website concise whilst remaining knowledgeable.

You consume information with your eyes; therefore, it should be tempting, appeasing and look good. Your content must be high-quality, presented in the best way, telling captivating stories along the customer journey including adding videos, pictures, and downloadable guides.

Decision-making phase

After all is said, done and researched, your customer will be adding you to the list of businesses they are considering. The last impression counts as much as the first to seal the deal and further answer ‘why you?’. You last impression, during the decision-making stage includes previous customer reviews, your online reputation and how you, and all this, compares to your competitors.

Robust Decision-Making Tools

Your service pages, products and web pages must be as useful and complete as possible. Leave no stone unturned and then cement their decision by standing out above the rest. Your landing pages must be compelling and useful, adding in layers for context such as comparison charts, tools or interactive widgets, anything that further adds to the customer journey and creates a fun experience one they wish to return to experience again.

Customer Reviews

Customer reviews are always important when a lead is considering a product and still in two minds, therefore, you must have a way of noting, capturing, and viewing customer reviews on your website including quotes, star-ratings, client results and anything to shine light on previous work that makes you the place or business to go.

A lasting thought…

Understanding your customer journey can sometimes seem overwhelming but adding to your knowledge of your target audience with SEO can help you reach your customer in ways that traditional ways cannot. Leveraging SEO can help you deliver a personalised, fun, and unique customer journey and truly answer what questions and need your customer is demanding. SEO and Keyword research can help you truly get to know your customer, and in turn, for them to truly get to know you and your brand.

You can use SEO content to support your customer journey and leverage the power of SEO to track your performance as you go along with SEO tools and analytics.

And don’t forget…

Learn from your mistakes! After all, it is not just your customer going through a journey, but also your business growth journey, use this guide to help navigate you along the way.

For more advice, information, tip, or tricks visit our Integrated Marketing Agency website or contact us to help you capture a deep understanding of your customer’s journey. We’re a team of passionate and experienced minds, driven to understand your business and the customer journey. Chat with one of our specialists today to learn how we can take your business to the next level.