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Effective Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategies are often targeted towards increasing online visibility and ultimately increasing sales for an organization. Oftentimes, SEO strategies involve careful keyword analysis, trend discovery and an implementation plan that is aligned with the best practices to prevent penalization by search engines.
While SEO professionals are essentially tasked with a very critical role of connecting questions (queries) with relevant web pages that answer those questions. Customer relationship management tools on the other hand, capture information from potential customers once they decide to take the next step by asking for more information. Then, it goes along to serve as a central repository for tracking all customer interaction throughout the buying cycle.
Clearly, access to actual customer queries through a CRM system, provides an unmatched advantage that can improve top funnel marketing efforts such as SEO.
Here are Three Ways To Improve Your SEO results With Your CRM System.
1. Record the keywords and conversations.
Recording the keywords and conversations that you have with your potential and existing customers gives businesses the insight needed to shorten sales cycles, improve customer relationships, and repeat sales methodologies that work. Asking your contacts for information on how they found you on the web, specifically keywords queries used, can give you intelligence on how your leads are finding your business online, and the type of keywords you should be optimizing. For instance, if you sell email marketing software and naturally you were trying to rank for the keyword phrase “email marketing software.” While this is generally a good keyword to aim for, this keyword phrase might be competitive and might take you more time and effort to see significant results. Through your conversation with a lead, you may however discover that, he or she searched for “email marketing software for small businesses” instead of just “email marketing software.” So in this example, if you recorded this conversation in your CRM with information your new long-tail keyword opportunity, you could run a lead report later on, and use this information to help your SEO professional get better results.
2. Discover how your target audience describes their problems.
A key element of effective communication is for each party involved to feel like they are understood. Digital marketing strategies are no different. And since search engine optimization strategies are geared towards providing answers to end user problems or search queries, with access to conversations that describe customer problems, SEO professionals can create increased online visibility and relevant web pages centered on providing solutions to actual problems that your “real” customers have. Using this data provides your company with the ability to increase relevance and attract high quality leads. Be sure to write detailed general notes describing the problem areas for each potential customer during the discovery phone call. Then, continue to track activities using your CRM to help improve the knowledge as you unearth more information.
3. Analyze customer data to discover buying trends
Generally, one of the key advantages of having a central repository for all your customer interactions aka your CRM system, is to help you discover buying trends. For instance, you can easily run a report of all your sales for a particular year and the products associated to them, to discover when your customers tend to buy more of one product over the other. Knowing this information can also help you with planning your SEO marketing activities. For a business that has many products, you may have a plethora of target keywords that you are working with. Having the insight into customer buying trends can help you concentrate and plan your efforts better. If customers tend to buy one product around the holiday season, then you should plan to make sure that you have prepared relevant SEO strategies to help you gain the biggest online presence around that time.
SEO research tools such as Google Analytics, Google Keyword Planner, among others help SEO professionals to quickly gain information on how often certain keywords are searched for. However, you maybe missing valuable information if you are not taking the time to connect the dots between what people are generally searching for online, and how your customers are actually finding you. Using information from your CRM systems can help you close this loop as you strive to find high quality leads and increase sales.
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