Optimize The Experience Of Your Organic Search Traffic

Pay per click, social and email marketing are the three marketing channels that most marketers feel they can have the most control with regards to the customer's experience. Creating branded messages carefully crafted calls to action and telling a compelling story that draws a customer in. Often we do not look at how we can improve visitors' experience when they're entering the site through an organic search for fear of impacting our organic search rankings. Our focus is oftentimes on on-page optimization to obtain and maintain great traffic-generating keyword rankings.

Most organizations have customers who have a multi-channel journey, touchpoints coming from paid search, organic search, email, social, etc. We work hard to remarket and retarget users, guiding them through a journey that leads them through the path to ultimately buy our products or services. We can follow that same cadence with our multichannel visitors when they visit through organic search.

There are various tools that can be used to optimize the experience including Adobe Experience Manager, Google Optimize 360 and Google Optimize which are powerful tools that allow us to complete A/B testing, multi-variant testing, redirects, and personalization. The key here is pairing an optimization tool that has a deep integration with your analytics, paid platforms and audience groups.

Customer Experience & SEO

Often the customer experience and SEO are not tightly tied together. The truth is that the SEO analyst is usually the person who completes the keyword research, the person who has to take those keywords and understand the users intent when they're making those searches, ensure that they identify existing pages or have new pages created that will offer solutions based on those users and their intents. It makes sense that SEO's and CX people work together to create the best possible experience for all visitors, including organic search visitors. This includes personalization of pages within the site that are a part of the search strategy.

The same can be said for content creation. SEO copy is no longer just about having a specific keyword density, synonymous words, and related phrases. It's about knowing the customers intent for given searches and delivering on that intent. Providing helpful information that answers the searcher's questions, anticipates what they want and delivers it.

Reap The Rewards Of Optimized Experiences For SEO Visitors

Google is the largest search engine and ultimately wants visitors who use their search engine to have the best possible experience when visiting sites they deemed worthy of top rankings. Sites that load fast, provide exactly what the searcher is looking for, offer helpful and insightful information and an engaging experience win. 

Google can understand your content but they can also understand a user's experience through signals such as bounce rates and time on site. If a site has a top ranking for a specific keyword phrase but users continually bounce and leave immediately or only stay for a few seconds compared to lower bounce rate and deeper exploration into competing sites, that site will likely lose that high ranking. In the same vein, by improving the experience, lowering the bounce rate and encouraging deeper exploration into a site we can aid in maintaining and potentially improving our rankings.

Google encourages customizing the visitor's experience as long as its purpose is to improve the experience. Making changes to improve the customer's experience will not hurt your rankings and optimization and personalization that is done in Google Optimize or tools that offer personalization are ignored by robots as those changes are injected into the page during the page loading, through code and is not actual changes to the content on the page that robots use for rankings.

Examples Of Ways To Improve The Experience For Organic Search Traffic

There are a lot of ways to begin improving the experience of your visitors using personalization, and many of these options can be used for visitors that come from any channel. The goal of this article is to get you to think creatively regarding your organic search visitors.

Mobile Visitors - Increase Calls

First, let's say you offer a service. Visitors to your site may be coming from desktop and mobile phones. Now let's say your analytics show that most often those who visit a specific page on your site then visit the contact us page. You could optimize that specific page for mobile users, to add the phone number at the top of the page, making it easier for users to call you. By doing this, you could significantly increase the number of phone calls and leads to your site by simply making sure that your phone number is easily found for mobile users.

Mobile users are working on smaller screens. They could be located anywhere - on the train, walking down the street, in an elevator. These situations do not always allow for viewing a large number of pages or sifting through your site to find what they're looking for. If its an answer to a question it may be easier for them to simply call and get the answer. If you want to know how often users are clicking on the phone number, be sure to set up event tracking on the number so the data flows into Google Analytics.

Location Targeting

Let’s stay the example of you offering a service. Customers look for signals that they are on the right page by looking at a site heading and navigation. We can inject the regions name into the heading, which sends the signal that your site offers the service in their area. So, for example, let's say that you offer computer repair services and you offer them in Pennsylvania, Californa, and Texas. Let’s say the heading of your top-ranking page is "Computer Repair". We can personalize the page to say Computer Repair Pennsylvania for any customer who is visiting the page from Pennsylvania.

We can do this for any visitor from any other targeted region. Otherwise, any visitor from an untargeted location would just see the heading that says Computer Repair. I would recommend taking that a step further and adding a few key cities in the copy, adding in the addresses, hours of operation and phone numbers of the locations to ensure that it matches what the customer is searching for. 

Returning Visitors

Visitors can visit the same page multiple times when comparison shopping or in the decision-making process. We can treat new and returning visitors differently, including offering discounts, promo codes or stronger calls to action based on knowing this information about our visitors.

Let’s say you are an e-commerce store selling shoes. When a new visitor visits the store we could show them a coupon code for $5 off their first purchase. We could then say that if the visitor is a returning visitor we could offer them a $10 coupon code. I like to do these using audiences so we can ensure we don’t show it to those who have already purchased but this is an example.

Another example could be if we offer a service and we show new visitors a call to action of “Learn More” while returning visitors we show a stronger call to action of “Shop Now”.

Using our analytics data and understanding our visitor is the best possible way to understand how we can best optimize the experience of our site visitors.

For example, if we look at our analytics and it says that 95% of visitors who visit our site for the first time through organic search, purchase on their first visit, then we’d want the stronger calls to action or bigger discount on the first visit. Or if we know they are likely to make that purchase on their first visit, we could choose not to show the coupon code to first-time visitors as they are likely to purchase and we would be more profitable, we could opt to only show the coupon code to returning visitors.

Referrer Is Google

Take a look at your traffic that comes from Google and determines key converting pages. Understand which pages have higher conversions when the traffic comes from Google. Review the keywords that drive traffic to those pages and try to understand the intent of those visitors. Optimize and personalize the content, the calls to action and offers on those pages to increase conversions when the visitor referrer is Google.

Using Analytics Audiences

Creating audiences based on your customer's journey can help you to create meaningful changes to the customer's experience that can make a significant impact on your conversions. It can also help you to develop more meaningful omnichannel experiences and to have a more cohesive strategy.

Branded Search After Seeing PPC Ad

Often a visitor may see a specific ad from a PPC campaign, they make a mental note and later do a search for your brand and the product or service they are interested in.

When they visit the page within your site, you can add in some of the elements, information and the same offer they may have seen from the paid search campaign. This will trigger the message that they are “in the right place” and it allows you to continue to add on to the original experience you were creating. This doesn’t only work for branded search after a PPC ad, this could easily be used after seeing a social media post/ad and doesn't have to be limited to branded search.

Visitors Who Have Already Purchased

Customers who have already made a purchase but return to your site are likely to have a higher conversion rate and spend more. Why? Because they already know you. They've done business with you. They're your customer.

This gives you the opportunity to carefully craft offers and deals that are more valuable to them (and you). Some examples would be offering them the opportunity to sign up for your loyalty program, offering a discount on larger purchases such as “Save 10% on orders over $50” or “Save 15% off your next purchase”.

Because we know that they’ve already made a purchase, we can feel more comfortable showing them more customized offers with an understanding that they are more likely to be there to transact with you.

High-Value Customers

With audiences, you can target your best customers when they return. Similar to the visitors who have already purchased an example, we can take advantage of upselling and cross-selling higher dollar items to our customers who already spend a certain amount.

Time On Site Or Specific Pages

If we know that a visitor has viewed key pages in our site and spent what is considered a high amount of time on those key pages, we may want to customize the calls to action on their next visit or develop a list of links to other resources they may find valuable on their next visit.

This is a great way to increase conversions as well as move the visitor through their journey by presenting helpful information that aids them in deciding on a company they will choose as their solution.

Optimization By Gender

When we know a customer's Gender we can ensure that the next time they visit our site through organic search that we serve up images that they can relate to. For example, if we know that the visitor is a female and we sell jewelry, their next visit we could show a photo of a woman wearing jewelry, rather than then the default image that may have been focused on the male gender.

Again, site visitors look at a page as soon as they enter and try to determine if they are “in the right place” that can include gender signals. If the visitor is a woman and all the photos they see when page loads are men, it may cause them to think it is not for them. 

In closing, I hope that these ideas help to inspire you to take advantage of optimizing experiences for your organic search traffic as it is likely one of your main traffic drivers. If your competitors are not doing it, it can give you a competitive advantage, delight your customers and increase conversions.

Author: Leona Griffin

Leona is a leader in Digital Transformation with 22 years of experience as an SEO. As the Director of Digital Strategy at HairDirect she was on the Leadership Team, participating in strategic planning, was responsible for creating the digital transformation roadmap, connecting data to create a 360 view of the customer, championing and evangelizing a digital-first mindset throughout the organization.