3Cs that Rule SEO

Millions of users type more than 3 billion queries into Google each day. What if you could have all the relevant searches directed to your web properties? You can make it happen, by embracing a new way forward to SEO. Want your SEO strategy to work for a good time, despite changing algorithms? Want to open a dialogue with prospects? Want your strategy to improve ROI and make optimum use of existing digital assets? If you want to fulfill any of the above goals, it is important to get acquainted with our 3C’s that rule SEO. Most people believe it is only Content that drives SEO, but we will introduce two more vital components that we believe are crucial for SEO, in this blog.

Read along to know how to implement 3C’s to make most of your SEO.

#1. Content – The Ruling King!

In the world of Internet Marketing, Content has always been and shall always be the ‘King’ and the worthy one, if you ask. Want to know how to make content work for you? Here’s what you should be doing:

• Content Strategy – Quality content is a must-have for strong web presence, which makes it important to develop an effective content strategy. Here is what you need to consider in your content strategy:
• Target Audience – Consider needs of your target audiences, and track what kind of content they’d love. Sharing content that is received positively and shared by your audience is essential for your SEO strategy.
• Emotion –  It is essential to remember that you’re producing content for humans, and not bots! Include emotional content with personalization on the basis of pain points and emotions of your audiences. It will make your content easily marketable and shareable.
• Keywords – Conduct research on keywords used by your audiences to search you, and publish keyword-rich content across all your web properties.
• Competitive Advantage – Chalk out a strategy that highlights the core value and benefits of your business, which would shape up as unique value propositions in your content!
• Documentation – Make sure you’ve documented your resource allocation and key initiatives. Research shows that content marketers with a documented strategy perform better.
• Measure Progress – Once you’ve created a strong content strategy, benchmark your performance and measure progress. Regularly monitoring your progress would help you understand what works best with your audiences and where you’re going wrong.
• Editorial Calendar – Every business has its own cycle, which makes it important to have your own promotional calendar. Create an editorial calendar where you list all your content activities. This would also help you eliminate redundant content activities, and help you come up with fresher ideas every time.

Several success stories are built on effective content strategies and Buzzfeed is one such example that has come a long way from being a ‘viral lab’ to one of the most popular sites for investigative journalism. Its engaging content has caught the fancies of regular readers who connect to its relatable jargon and enjoy its humorous take on regular issues. You can make use of content to enhance user experience and make it a vehicle for interaction with your target audiences. Add unique value to your brand and enhance user experience by making the best use of Content. After all, using content as a vehicle for interaction could bring you proven SEO results.

#2. Conversations – The Secret to Strike Gold!

Having the right conversations is important so that you can:

• Influence Customer Emotions
• Win Trust of your Audiences
• Gain Actionable Insights
• Improve Customer Experience
• Gain Brand Visibility
• Engage Customers like never before

Did you know that 50% customers gave each brand just a week’s time to respond to a question before they stopped doing business with them? Sadly only 21% of these complaints received a response. 46% of the customers who had posted their complaint were pleased with the brand’s response…

This means brands haven’t begun to use conversations as a powerful SEO tool yet. There have been startling examples of brands that have achieved nearly 200% increase in conversions with conversations! Isn’t it an appealing reason to check out your social media profiles and respond to all those customer queries right away?

Here’s how to make Conversations work for you in the best possible manner:

• Follow-Up – Don’t let your customers forget your business by following up persistently. Ask your audiences for their feedback.
• Win Hearts With Courtesy – Don’t underestimate the power of expressing gratitude on the web. Your customers would love and laud you for your kind words of gratitude and concern.
• Adding Personal Touch – The best marketers understand the importance of adding a personal touch in their customer conversations. It is however, important to understand where to draw the line. Don’t take it too far, and refrain from talking about extremely sensitive topics on the web.
• Going Social – It is best to choose social sites for fostering conversations with customers and connecting with them on a deeper level. Here’s a brief lowdown on how to go about it.
  • Social Sharing: Social media is a marketing juggernaut that can be used to share your content and engage audiences in the best possible manner. Share content on your social sites to engage with audiences and start conversations with them.
  • Social Mentions – Bank on the power of Social Mentions, chatter and conversations around relevant topics, which can facilitate dialogues with your target audiences easily.
  • Social Signals – Make the best use of social signals to measure impact of your conversations and solidify the web presence on your social sites.
• #Hashtags – When starting conversations with your audiences, don’t forget to use relevant #Hashtags that can help other prospects to join in the conversation and be a part of your loyal community of followers.
• Handle Negativity – Dealing with unhappy customers can be dicey. Here’s how to handle negativity about your brand when conversing with customers online:
  • Act Urgently: Address issues of your customers urgently, so that you can relieve them of their discomfort at the earliest
  • Be Responsible: When handling difficult customers, act responsibly and take ownership of your mistakes.
  • Be Polite: Refrain from using harsh comments, even when the situation gets worsened. You can consider taking the conversation offline by requesting the customer.
  • View Opportunity: View these challenging situations as an opportunity to win trust of your customers and make them loyal towards your brand.
  • Honesty – Be honest and accept your mistakes when you’ve been at fault. A sincere apology goes a long way in bridging the gap between you and your customer.

SEO is not about being friendly with bots, but triggering conversations with humans. It is time to make use of conversations to augment your brand position.

#3. Conversions –Quick-Fix for Better SEO

We are living in exciting times of Digitization, where a few clicks can result in jaw-dropping number of sales. In the words of conversion scientist Brian Massey: “When you get a lot of bad traffic, your conversion rate drops, as would be expected. However, if you get traffic that is well qualified, you generate more sales, more leads for less effort.” If you’re looking to improve conversions from organic traffic, here are some primary factors you need to monitor like a hawk:

• Bounce Rate
• Exit Rate
• Time-on-Page
• Goal Completion

Enable Quicker Conversions

You can enable quicker conversions by incorporating the following as a part of your SEO Strategy:

• Mobile-Friendliness – With increase in smartphone usage, you need to ensure mobile friendliness. Read about how to improve results SEO with Accelerated Mobile Pages.
• Loading Time – Every 2-second delay in your website loading time results in abandonment rates of 87%! It is time to make your websites load faster, lest you deprive yourself of some enticing SEO benefits.
• A/B Testing – When looking at conversions, you cannot ignore the importance of A/B testing, which can help in the following ways:
  • Best Investments – With A/B testing, you can identify the right spots for investment to ensure effective engagement and wider reach. You can get a better understanding of which activities work best for your SEO, and invest on them further.
  • Avoid Disasters – A/B testing helps you refrain from making disastrous mistakes that make negative impact on performance of your pages. You can make amends on time and save yourself a lot of wasted time and efforts!
• User Generated Content – Seek feedback in the form of product reviews, and encourage people to leave comments which could build up user generated content that helps you in the following ways:
  • Increase brand engagement by 28%
  • Influence purchase decisions of nearly 84% millennials
  • Impact 25% search results of world’s biggest brands
• Quick Goal Completions – Get rid of long, complicated processes that direct audiences to download content formats from your website. Choose to simplify the process with a 1-step, quick format for conversions.

A notable example in this case is Guest Checkout, which was enabling shoppers to shop online without logging into an account or saving information. Pioneered by Amazon, it was implemented by most online stores to help customers suffering from new account fatigue. The able support of conversations and conversions to content could truly help you rule SEO. We hope this blog has helped you explore more facets of SEO that go beyond rankings and content. Search engine optimization is fast-evolving to become more targeted, to appease the tech-savvy customers.

While technology goes on to bridge the gap between you and your customers, it is time for you to make the right use of all the 3 Cs that rule SEO. Let us know what you think of these 3Cs and share your stories about how these helped you!