Ways to Increase Your Customer Base with Search Engine Optimization

Ways to Increase Your Customer Base with Search Engine Optimization

In order to survive, your business needs to grow. Most of that growth will come from attracting new customers. There are many strategies you can employ to expand your reach. But in the digital age, one of the most effective ones has to be SEO. If you learn how to increase your customer base with search engine optimization, you can grow your business effectively and affordably. But before you see the results, you need to do the legwork. So how can you use SEO to get more customers?

What is search engine optimization, and why is it important?

Search engine optimization or SEO is the collection of different tactics that make your website more visible in search engine results for select keywords. SEO can be done both on-page and off-page. Some of the on-page strategies include speeding up the website, using the right keywords in website content, and optimizing for mobile devices, while the most common and effective off-page strategy is backlinks. The combination of these tactics improves the ranking of the website in search engine results. This, in turn, increases the quantity and quality of traffic your website gets. Better traffic gives you a better chance of converting visitors into customers, which is exactly what you need to grow your business.

How can you increase your customer base with search engine optimization?

SEO targets unpaid, organic traffic coming from search engines (primarily Google). Therefore, the direct goal of an SEO strategy is not to increase sales or even retain existing customers. So how does SEO help increase your customer base?

Attract more customers

How did your existing customers find out about your business? Some will have seen your marketing; others may have walked by a physical location (if you have one) on the way to and from work. But a significant number of them probably just Googled something related to your business and found you online. Then, your website convinced them to become a customer. So it stands to reason that by attracting more visitors to your website, SEO helps you reach and potentially convert more people. Furthermore, because SEO is about attracting quality traffic, it’ll also improve your chances of conversion.

Build a brand

SEO will help you rank for your chosen keywords. This means that you can target the searches you want to be associated with. If you, for example, want to be known as a green, sustainable, and eco-friendly business, you should improve your ranking for keywords related to such practices. Over time, your business will become associated with the searches you rank for – that is what your brand will become.

Become more visible in local searches

If you’re running an online-only business whose products or services are available all over the world, you won’t care where your customers come from. But most businesses only have a limited geographic reach. You either have a physical location, or you serve a particular area. Either way, you want the people in your area to become your customers. You can achieve this by improving your local SEO. You’ll appear in searches related to or performed in your service area, which will attract customers to your physical location because it’s convenient for them to shop with you.

What to do when you’re trying to increase your customer base with search engine optimization

When done right, SEO is a very high return-on-investment marketing strategy. So if your goal is to increase your customer base, what is the right way to do SEO?

Produce good content

High-quality content is a must for a good SEO strategy. It’ll help you rank higher, become established as an expert in your niche, and attract more backlinks – all good things for your SEO. But perhaps more importantly, it’ll shape how potential customers think of you. If you have no content on your website, you’ll be suspicious. If you have bad content on your website, they won’t think your business is worth their money. But if you have content they like, they’ll trust you and be willing to spend on your products or services.

Use the right keywords

You will never be able to convert every single person into a customer – that’s why every business has a target demographic. To ensure that your SEO efforts are attracting this specific demographic, you need to carefully choose the keywords you rank for. Otherwise, you’ll get a lot of useless traffic that only harms you in the long run by increasing your bounce and abandonment rate. So ask yourself which searches give you the best chance of attracting and then converting the right person. Then, target those keywords specifically.

Focus on user experience

People who find your content boring, your website difficult to navigate, and your products irrelevant to their needs are unlikely to become customers. So you want to provide your users with the best possible experience; this increases your chance of converting them and then retaining them as a customer. So ask yourself what your customers want and then try to meet their needs. This question is not difficult to answer when you don’t have a lot of customers. But with an expanding customer base come some difficulties – you’ll have some very different people looking for some very different things. Luckily, CRM is a useful tool for dealing with this. Using CRM, you’ll be able to build customer profiles, keep track of each customer’s interaction with the business, and personalize their experience. This considerably improves user satisfaction.

Be patient

SEO is a very effective way to improve your visibility and increase your traffic. But that doesn’t happen overnight. You won’t go from being on page 20 of Google search results to being at the top of the first page in a few days. Instead, you’ll need to work for weeks, even months, to see serious results. So don’t be discouraged. Give your strategy some time to work. If you’re patient and persistent, you can significantly increase your customer base with search engine optimization. But you cannot give up if that doesn’t happen immediately!