Optimizing your website for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) along with driving organic search is crucial to ensuring your brand’s long-term visibility and success. After all, if your website shows up even on the second page of Google’s search results, it might as well be irrelevant. In fact, HubSpot’s research claims that around 75% of visitors don’t go beyond the first page of the search results.
Additionally, around 57% of B2B marketers attribute SEO to generating a greater number of leads than other marketing initiatives. Clearly, staying on top of your SEO game should be a priority. And one innovative and cost-effective strategy that’s working wonders is the use of live chat software. Let’s jump right in to understand how live chat can improve your SEO efforts.
Top 6 Ways in Which Live Chat Can Boost Your SEO
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1. Helps Generate More Quality Leads
Get this: According to research by Steve Olenski, around 71% of online leads go to waste! This is where live chat truly shines. This resourceful tool can be used to capture useful user data such as contact number, email ID, buyer preference, product interest, and so on:
Image Source: Quora.
Take a look at the following live chat example below, which motivates users to type in their email address in exchange for getting information about the product/service. You can also capture leads and collect user information round-the-clock, especially when your agents are offline. The team can contact the person as soon as they’re back online. This way, no leads are lost, and every person’s query is addressed:
Image Source: Quora.
By screening your live chat for all these important data points, your team can follow up with potential leads or add contacts into your CRM software to drive hyper-personalized marketing campaigns.
2. Makes Your Website More User-Friendly
Since a live chat conversation can be documented and saved, your agents always have the option of browsing through insightful customer reviews, complaints, and comments (that they otherwise might have missed) about your product/service at a later point in time. You can find answers to varying questions such as:
- What kind of data are your customers struggling to find on your website?
- Which products/features need an upgrade?
- What are the customer’s primary pain-points with respect to the website?
Image Source: TrustYou.
This unintended feedback-gathering process can offer huge benefits if the data is analyzed and executed properly.
Additionally, having access to real-time data at-hand is extremely useful when you’re following up with customers and need to include contextual interaction details done previously. This small effort allows your follow-up correspondence to be relevant as well as personalized and helps customers feel heard (quite literally) and valued by the brand. All in all, live chat can offer customized service to your website visitors at scale.
3. Allows Data-Driven Analytics on Key Metrics Such as Website Performance and User Behavior
The live chat software is a treasure trove of critical data and helps drive real-time analytics on various touch-points – from understanding the visitor’s browsing behavior in real-time to providing insights into your website’s overall performance. Moreover, businesses can use the live chat information captured to build relevant FAQs pages, sharable blogs, and viral video content that address user queries and provide the right answers to the most pressing topics:
Image Source: ProProfs.
This tactic certainly drives your website’s SEO. Confused? It’s simple. When people put their questions into Google’s search bar (or any other search bar), chances are that your website will show up in the top search (as a result of using accurate and keyword-centric content). In other words, the more your content matches the user search, the higher your website will rank.
Finally, live chat software can deliver in-depth reports, conversion updates, and contextual transcripts for every customer interaction. These invaluable assets can be used to analyze your user needs and iterate in real-time.
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4. Enables Visitors to Self-Serve by Offering A Rich Knowledge Base
Tying back to the previous point, the live chat software can empower your visitors to get instant access to their concerns (before they even ask them) in the form of quality, keyword-rich content, and engaging blog posts:
Image Source: Econsultancy.
This saves the customers time and helps take off some of the workloads of your already overwhelmed customer support team as they don’t have to answer the same repetitive questions time-and-time again. Here’s a handy tip you need to remember:
Integrate your live chat with the right keywords in a natural (not forceful) manner and make sure to save it. This can boost your website’s ranking in the present as well as the future as the probability of your website getting noticed by Google’s algorithm increases. By extension, so does your website’s search ranking.
You can either integrate the FAQs into the live chat or build a dedicated page all the same. As long as your content is authentic, keyword-rich, and updated, you’re good to go.
5. Enhances the Overall User Experience and Strengthens Customer Relationships
At a staggering 92%, live chat boasts of the highest customer satisfaction rate.
Truth be told, any kind of negative publicity for your website is not good for Google rankings. This is why your brand needs to laser-focus on the type of service it is providing at all times and factor in how well your website is optimized with respect to keywords, backlinks, visual appeal, page loading time, clear CTAs, instant and reliable support (specialties of the live chat software), and up-to-date content. We’ve spoken about keywords so let’s look at backlinks now.
Handy tip: Always place your live chat widget on the website bottom right-hand corner and make it easy-to-spot by using icons, images, bold colors, etc.
Embedding your website with high authority backlinks translates to a website with credible and trusted information. The idea is to avoid spam links and build rock-solid site authority. So, when integrating your live chat with any external source, make sure that it is trustworthy. Moreover, your live chat software offers insights into the keywords that brought visitors to your website. This valuable data can be used to send a proactive and personalized message to customers, enhancing the overall customer experience. In fact, according to data:
33% of proactive chats receive a response.
6. Boosts Conversion Rates and Reduces Bounce Rates
Customers today expect an answer to their questions within 10 minutes.
Engaging in conversion rate optimization (CRO) can drive sales, leads, as well as revenues. In other words, live chat can lower your website’s bounce rate and help increase the average session duration (or dwell time) by engaging your visitors on the website. Take a look at Modcloth’s live chat example, which offers accurate and timely answers to the customer’s questions and boosts the user experience:
Image Source: Econsultancy.
The higher your dwell time, the better it is for Google’s search rankings. And here, too, a robust live chat software can offer a helping hand. How so?
Basically, a flexible live chat tool paves the way for a convenient, quick, and mobile-optimized experience, making it a hit among today’s ‘always-on’ customers. Adding credibility to this claim, research indicates that more than 50% of all live chats stem from smartphones. That’s not all. Your website’s mobile responsiveness sits well with Google’s ranking factors. Additional benefits of using live chat include:
- Offers personalized, non-scripted responses that can address customer queries instantly and with effort on the customer’s end. Sephora’s live chat is an excellent example (check the below image).
- Eliminates the need for customers to repeat their questions to different agents and teams, making the query-resolution process quick, pleasing, and satisfactory.
- Provides a real-time and in-depth understanding of your visitors’ needs, preferences, etc.
Image Source: smbp.uwaterloo.ca.
As you can imagine, optimal and collective use of SEO, CRO, and live chat can contribute to a seamless, speedy, and satisfactory user experience, builds brand loyalty, encourage repeat purchases, and boost conversion rates.
You may also like: 5 Best Ways to Implement Chatbot for Your Business that Saves a Lot.
Wrapping Up: Live Chat Can Enhance Your Website’s SEO Health
For the longest time, live chat was considered to be a CX tool. But as we saw from above, this multi-tasking software can double up as a handy sale, lead generation, and marketing tool and provide a timely, personalized, and efficient user experience, thereby boosting your website’s SEO.
Long story short, every kind of business today – be it local or global, B2B or B2C, big or small – needs to have a website that is SEO-optimized and use live chat to augment their SEO best-practices. To wrap up, here are the top-6 ways in which your live chat software can improve your SEO and boost user happiness all at the same time:
- Helps generate more quality leads effortlessly.
- Makes your website more user-friendly.
- Allows data-driven analytics on key metrics such as website performance and user behavior.
- Enables visitors to self-serve by offering a rich knowledge base.
- Enhances the overall user experience and strengthens customer relationships.
- Boosts conversion rates.
Think we’ve missed out on any SEO-friendly live chat hacks and tips? Share your suggestions in the comment section below.
This article is written by Srushti Shah. Srushti is an ambitious, passionate and out of the box thinking woman having a vast exposure in Digital Marketing. She is working as a Digital Marketer and Content writer at Acquire. Her key focus is to serve her clients with the latest innovation in her field leading to fast and effective results. Working beyond expectations and delivering the best possible results are her professional motto. Other than work, she loves traveling, exploring new things, and spending quality time with family. Reach out to Srushti Shah on Twitter or LinkedIn.
This article is written by Srushti Shah. Srushti is an ambitious, passionate and out of the box thinking woman having a vast exposure in Digital Marketing. She is working as a Digital Marketer and Content writer at Acquire. Her key focus is to serve her clients with the latest innovation in her field leading to fast and effective results. Working beyond expectations and delivering the best possible results are her professional motto. Other than work, she loves traveling, exploring new things, and spending quality time with family. Reach out to Srushti Shah on
Web developer and SEO specialist with 20+ years of experience in open-source web development, digital marketing, and search engine optimization. He is also the moderator of this blog "RS Web Solutions (RSWEBSOLS)".
