With the emergence of the internet age, customer service has never played as important a role in business success as it does now. The transparency of the online world means that there is nowhere for businesses to hide. Any negative customer review or a poorly handled twitter comment can cause serious damage to any business and not only ruin their online reputation but also adversely effect Google ratings.
Live chat is generally associated with customer service, but what many people fail to recognize is that, it is also a great marketing and sales tool. Integrating live chat software can provide assistance to existing and potential customers and if leveraged appropriately, it can generate more sales through successful leads. When customers are trying to purchase a product online, live chat can help them address any problem that may exist before the customer navigates away from the sale. This method of communication is convenient and easy to use and thus a valuable business investment. This post focuses on how Live Chat can affect your website’s SEO health. But before getting into that, let’s explore what components influence Google’s algorithm and a website’s ranking.
What Influences a Website’s Ranking
Website ranking is subject to several factors such as keywords, backlinks, appearance, picture upload times, content etc., but the two most important components are keywords and backlinks. If you want to build an authoritative website in search engines, which will rank high for multiple pages, then you need to create authority for specific pages, optimizing each page for a specific set of keywords before that authority is lifted to the domain. A large number of high authority backlinks in a website will significantly increase its ranking so incorporate as many relevant and authoritative links as you can.
Moreover, keyword selection is also very significant. If you use the most relevant keywords, the website’s ranking will increase substantially. A lot of people are not aware of how hard it is to select keywords that won’t attract the wrong type of traffic. This is why it is important to be familiar with keyword selection and get some expert help to boost website ranking.
When customers visit your website, you will be able to identify the search terms that they use so you can in turn use those terms to define your Meta tags and select keywords that fit what customers look for when they browse the internet. Using these techniques will make your search engine marketing and optimization efforts far more effective and proficient. Integrating Live Chat software not only improves your customer retention and conversion rate, but it can also reduce your advertising expense by about 20 percent.
Let’s look at the best practices for companies trying to improve SEO health using live chat.
- Make sure any real-time visitor monitoring script is properly placed near the bottom of the web page so it loads after the main content.
- Use proactive chat rubrics based on organic keywords. Dynamic live chat software vendors offer the facility to determine the keywords that brought a visitor to your website. This information can be used to send a proactive customized chat invitation, which increases its chance of acceptance.
- Use an alt attribute in your chat button HTML image implementation, and have it contain strategic SEO-optimized keywords. Search engines can’t see these graphics, but they can index an alt tag. This has a dual effect: one, it presents organic keywords to the search engine spiders and, two, it helps vision-impaired users to know where to click to activate a live chat.
Here are a number of ways live chat can benefit a company’s ranking:
Enhances the Customer Experience
Live chat software can provide you with detailed reports, conversion summaries and full transcripts for every interaction that happens with a customer. These detailed reports and transcripts can be further used to learn and better serve your customers’ needs.
Also, this information can be used to create a Frequently Asked Questions page on your website or to include the most commonly asked information on your website. One of the most important benefits of Live Chat is that you can answer questions before customers even have to ask them. This delivers a good customer experience and saves time for both the customer and the customer support agent.
Drives More Leads
According to the experts, 71% of internet leads are wasted by companies. This statistic suggests that you can, and should, use every conversation and lead in order to build your business. When screening live chat conversations, there will always be important pieces of information such as customer contact information or product interest. Live chat will drive more leads through these bits of information, however small they may be and enable you to follow up with interested people, or to add contacts to your future promotion lists.
Increased Awareness of Additional Products and Services
During a conversation on Live Chat, a customer might make comments (both good and bad) about other products, services or brands. The customer support agent may not be able to address those comments at the time, if they are not related to the issue at hand. However, the benefit of Live Chat is that since the conversations are documented and saved, agents are able to read back over the conversation and focus on things they may have skipped or weren’t able to address during the conversation.
Strengthens Customer Relationships
Since Live Chat conversations are documented, you can use them to look back and find relevant details from the conversation to mention in your follow-up correspondence. This will allow you to write a more personalized and a detailed message. When a customer support agent can recall specific details from a conversation, it shows that the agent was attentive during the chat and makes the customer feel valued. Treating customers in a personalized way means you are treating them as individuals rather than one of the many that you talk to each day.
In short, Live Chat benefits your business by strengthening customer relationships through more personal interaction.
Boosts SEO
All the information gathered through live chat conversations often provides insight into what your customers’ current and future needs are. The frequently asked questions on live chat are expected to be frequently searched topics on search engines such as Google. When you use live chat conversation data to create a FAQ page on your website, you can certainly improve your search engine optimization (SEO). This will be of benefit when people type these queries into a search bar online and your website is more likely to show up in the top search results. The more relevant your information is to the search, the higher you will rank. Search engine optimization will put your business in a position to be found not just by more people, but by more people who have the ability to become future customers.
Live Chat plays an important role in determining the success of any business. Its benefits extend to your audience, your employees, your website and overall company sales. Although live chat increases your website ranking, it’s not a standalone solution. You must use live chat in a way that generates more traffic to your website. It is surely worth the effort and investment.
