To ensure you’re giving your website the best chance of being seen — and even to reduce the amount of investment it takes for the customer to eventually get to your site — you need to prioritize your website’s SEO and technical health.\xa0
49% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. (Source: Oberlo)
These days, each stage of the buyer’s journey typically involves the customer taking at least some degree of online or digital action. And regardless of where that customer has originated from online – be it a Google search, a Slack community, or a Facebook ad – most of the time, you’ll want them to ultimately land on your website.\xa0
The customer (or buyer) journey is a term that marketers have become very familiar with over recent years. But how exactly do SEO and your website’s technical health play a part in this journey?
As your customer moves through the buyer’s journey into the consideration stage, you’ll want to keep them engaged with your offering and stay top-of-mind as they encounter other options for businesses to purchase from. That means getting them back to your website multiple times so you can reinforce your message with yet more great content!
The reality might be somewhat different from the ideal, though. Taking a look at shopping sites in particular, Think with Google states that the average load time is currently 15.3s for a mobile page.\xa0
Now compare that against the benchmark speed we’ve just quoted, and then think about how many more conversions you could make just by being quicker than your competitors!
\xa0At Lumar, we’ve written before about the SEO-Revenue Funnel, as you can see below. This framework helps illustrate how the different aspects of SEO can ultimately contribute to the end goal: conversions and revenue.\xa0
What stands out the most about this purchasing phenomenon is that a large percentage of the ‘customer journey’ takes place online.\xa0
There’s very little point in creating great content for your site if it doesn’t get seen by your customer. And with a huge number of online consumers turning to Google and other search engines for just about any question they may have, search engine optimization (SEO) is a key way for customers to find your business’s website.\xa0
Whilst this journey has traditionally been visualized in marketing as a linear journey, the challenging part for many marketing teams is that it’s not quite that simple.\xa0
2. Start researching in more detail the specific products or services available that fit with the solution they’re after. Here, consumers will be looking at which companies offer these products or services, how they’re rated by others, and potentially how the solution actually works in practice. This is what we refer to as the CONSIDERATION stage.
But while content and keywords are the go-to for marketers looking to improve their site’s rankings these days, their websites’ technical health is one aspect that can often go overlooked. It shouldn’t be. The technical health of a site (and related technical SEO improvements) can have a big impact when it comes to ranking highly on Google and other search engines —\xa0and for ensuring your brand is discoverable by potential customers. The overall ease of use and speed of your site can make a big difference on conversions to boot.\xa0
Nearly 70% of consumers said that page speed impacts their willingness to buy from an online retailer (Source: Unbounce)